Chapter Twenty-three
Alec sat on the love seat in Kate’s room and listened to the shower run for well over fifteen minutes. It reminded him of her first day here, when she was hiding from him. Was she hiding from him now?
He knew the bathroom door wasn’t locked and that she was, most likely, in the shower, naked and fully accessible to him. Her desire to sleep with him was clear and strong.
But it couldn’t be casual or meaningless, not now, not with Kate. She wanted inside his head, and, damn it, he wanted to let her there. The first time he ever wanted anyone to know his truth. And, like her, he didn’t want to roll around and…and…
Yeah, he did. He wanted to more than anything. But sometime in the last few days, his desires had gone way past simple, easy sex. He had to tell her. Everything. And then she wouldn’t want him anymore, and he wouldn’t blame her.
But he wasn’t going to tell her afterward. That wouldn’t be fair. She needed to know before they got in this bed. Which, by the way things were going, wasn’t going to be tonight. It would be soon. It would be now.
The shower water stopped, and he sat a little straighter, expecting her to step into the bedroom, but only hearing her humming. She sounded happy and free. Free from her worries, free to leave if she wanted to, but she didn’t want to. Which meant—
The door popped open, and she sucked in a quick breath at the sight of him, involuntarily tightening the white towel wrapped around her body. Soaking wet hair curled over her bare shoulders, and the flush on her face from the hot water deepened.
“I didn’t know you were there,” she said.
He gnawed on his lip, staring at her for a good twenty seconds. Good God, she was gorgeous. No doubt, the prettiest woman he’d ever—
“Do you think I made the wrong decision to stay?” she asked.
“You tell me…after I tell you.”
She frowned, sliding a lock of wet hair over her shoulder. “Tell me what?”
“Everything.”
A smile tipped the corners of her lips. “’Bout time, Petrov.”
He grimaced at her light tone, because she didn’t know. She really didn’t have any way of knowing, so he had to forgive her efforts to take the lid off this pressure cooker.
He stood and crossed the room, somehow needing to be closer to her when he made his confession. “You know I’m hiding from people. From one man in particular. A man who essentially owns me.”
A shadow darkened her eyes, the look of a person who got it. Of course, she’d been “owned,” too. Only in a different way. Hoping for sympathy he didn’t deserve, he took a breath.
“I was promised to him as a kid, bought and paid for. He technically owns me, at least in his world.”
She narrowed her eyes, confusion making them a deeper green than usual. “So this is a Russian mob thing?”
It was a Dmitri Vlitnik thing. “Yes.”
“Was your father in the mob?” she asked, more tentative than when she normally grilled him like a lawyer. Probably because she didn’t want to know the answer. But, oh, honey, it was so much worse than that.
“He was not,” he said, dropping onto the edge of the bed, but she stayed standing. That was good. She’d probably want to run after he finished. “But he paid into the system to protect his business and his family.”
She sat down next to him. “Why don’t you start at the very beginning, Alec?”
He puffed out a breath of raw resignation. After a second, he took her hand and closed it in his, her fingers lost in the mass of his. For a long time, he stared at their joined hands, his gaze locked on the letters were nothing but a constant reminder of what he was.
Okay, the beginning.
“When my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer, only he really understood the risk of leaving us alone,” he finally said. “My mother could run the business, and I was a decent enough butcher to help her. But she didn’t know about the payments and likely wouldn’t be able to afford them and stay in business. Plus, she was…defenseless.” He closed his eyes at the thought, just remembering how his father had worried. “I was a big kid, but I couldn’t protect her if someone wanted to…if he wanted to…”
“Who?”
He shouldn’t tell her the name. She shouldn’t know. “The man at the head of all this is…was…” He shook his head. “All of his guys were thugs who couldn’t be trusted, but he, in particular, seemed to be interested in my mother.” Just saying it made him sick. “So I guess my father was worried about more than just the business.”
Kate nodded, getting his drift. “What did your father do?” she asked, stroking his hand with her thumb, sliding over the letters like she could erase them. And she could. That was why he was doing this, because she could erase his pain. She probably wouldn’t; she’d probably run like hell. But she could be the one to heal him.
“Get it all out, Alec.”
With encouragement like that, she could heal him.
“This guy was in the process of building an empire in Brighton Beach,” he said. “And emperors need armies, and armies need foot soldiers. My dad promised him that if they left the business alone and, more important, left my mother alone, then they could have me as an enforcer once I was old enough.”
She blinked at him. “As a hit man?”
“Exactly. Using these.” He splayed his hands in front of himself, letting go of hers.
“He could just give you away like that?”
“I guess, because he did. There was probably a drink, a blood oath, and promises to Mother Russia.” He closed his eyes, not even close to forgiving his father for the decision, even though he understood why he’d made it.
“So how have you managed to avoid this life imprisonment?” she asked.
“What makes you think I have?”
She studied his face for a moment. “Besides gut instinct and my sense of people? You’re not running from them because you’re sick of the life. My guess is you’re running from them because you don’t want that life.”
“Yes, that’s right.” And the fact that she had that much faith in him was like balm on his wound. Didn’t take away all the pain, but it helped.
“Which makes you good,” she assured him. “Bone-deep and genuinely good.”
He couldn’t help looking hard at her crystalline green eyes, seeing his reflection in them, or at least seeing that she perceived him to be a different man than he’d spent most of his life believing he was. That was more intoxicating than her brain and body, more attractive than her personality and fire. That was magic to him.
“You are good,” she whispered, as if she read his mind and saw the lingering doubts that hung in every corner of his conscience.
He put his finger over her lips as if he could seal that thought there, forever. You are good. She looked at him for a long time, then kissed his finger lightly.
“What happened, Alec?”
He turned away, the lovely sight of her replaced with…a different girl. Barely seventeen. Pretty, innocent, scared out of her mind.
Oh, fuck. Now he was there. In that warehouse. On that night. With that girl.
Bile rose up and made his stomach turn.
“Alec?”
He’d never told the story. Not in its entirety, since the only person who’d ever discussed it with him was Gregg, who knew enough of the details that he didn’t have to pull them out of Alec.
“They tried to break me in early. Not a month after my dad died.” No surprise, his voice came out husky. “It didn’t go well.”
She sat silent, waiting. And he tried to dig for his inner calm, for the Zen he could muster before a fight, for the wall he put around his conscience and the world. None of his tricks would cooperate as he realized his hand was trembling.
“There was a girl, a teenage girl a couple of years older than I was.” He swallowed. Anna. He never knew her last name, but he remembered her name was Anna. “Her father wasn’t cooperating with the Mafiya, and they wanted to m
ake a point. Actually, they wanted me to make a point to prove my worth.” They being Vlitnik, the heartless bastard.
“Oh.” It was more a groan than a word, a syllable of fear about what she was going to hear.
He turned to her. “You asked, counselor.”
She nodded, her face pale.
He gave himself a second to get composure that wasn’t really there for the taking, but he tried anyway. “I didn’t want to…hurt her. I didn’t want to hit her.” But he’d watched one of Vlitnik’s enforcers rough her up so badly that Alec had peed his pants.
And Vlitnik had howled with laughter.
He closed his eyes. “But then they made me hurt her.”
“Alec, stop—”
“No,” he said, not caring that his voice cracked. “I won’t stop. You have to know what I am.”
“You were a kid, and they forced you—”
“Don’t make excuses for me! There are no fucking excuses. I did it. I hit her. With this.” He bunched his fist and turned it so the dark letters were in front of their faces.
бить
“How did they force you?”
His heart lurched when she asked the question. Her faith in him was strong. “They didn’t have a gun on me or a knife or anything. But if I didn’t do what they told me to do, Vlitnik said the deal with my dad was off and my mother was fair game.”
“That’s the guy’s name?”
Son of a bitch, he’d said it. No taking it back now. “Yes. And he always had a thing for my mother.” Revulsion rolled through him. “He made it perfectly clear what he’d do to her if I didn’t do what he said. He’d take her. Rape her. Own her.” He sobbed out the last words.
She swore softly, reaching for him, but he jerked out of her touch, shame burning.
“So I thought it was better that he owned me,” he said. “And as his slave, I had to do what I was told. And I was told to…beat that girl.”
He could still hear her high-pitched screams. Then her pleas. Then helpless, pitiful sobs. It all came back to him. The jolt of his fist slamming her tender stomach. The blood and snot and tears on her face.
He looked straight ahead, seeing that young girl’s disgust and knowing that, right then, Kate was no doubt looking at him the same way. As she should.
He was the worst scum of a human being.
After a moment, he continued. “That night, after they…took her away…Vlitnik had me branded. Tattooed my hand right there in that warehouse with these letters that sit on my knuckles as a daily reminder of my worth and my purpose. To kill.”
“Did she die?” she gasped.
He shook his head. “No.” He wiped his eye, the tear stinging. “And I was so careful not to hit her somewhere that would scar.” He had to swallow a sob on the last word, her pretty face still clear in his head. He’d never forget it. Or how he’d vomited when they dragged her away, and again when they jabbed his hand with needles full of ink and marked him as one of them.
“And he got away with this?” Kate’s question was cold and surprisingly unemotional, and then he remembered she was studying to be a lawyer.
“He didn’t do anything, Kate.” He finally looked at her. “That’s how he works. That’s how he manages to avoid the law. He never gets his hands dirty.”
“He’s still guilty.”
“No shit.”
“Was there an investigation? Did her family press charges? Did she identify you?”
He snorted a laugh at the naïve questions. “You don’t understand the power of the Mafiya. No, there wasn’t an investigation. Her father coughed up the cash and sent her somewhere to heal up. But I did get a visit from Grigori Nyekovic, and that changed my life.”
“Who is he?”
A guardian angel. “Gregg’s a Russian businessman who’s always, always on the good side. He was a fixture in Brighton, a guy who’d swoop in and give money instead of taking it, or build something that the community needed but couldn’t afford, and sometimes, he’d take kids under his wing to get them out of trouble and away from the mob.” He didn’t tell her that Gregg worked as one of the FBI’s top informants, using his insiders to get anything they could to bring as many members of the Russian mob to justice as possible.
“He helped you?”
That was an understatement. “He had someone convince Vlitnik I was too much of a wimp to do the job at that age and that I needed to toughen up. And I did, but not so I could help the mob. Gregg paid for me to take martial arts classes, and I almost immediately found my purpose. Jiu-jitsu in particular, but all martial arts in general, gave me the grounding I didn’t have.”
He took another chance at looking at her, bracing for her to be backing away, planning her escape, but her eyes looked soft and sweet and, oh, God, sympathetic.
“Jiu-jitsu isn’t really about fighting,” he told her. “It’s about balance and power and control.”
She gave a shaky smile. “I’d probably love it.”
“You would,” he agreed.
She inched closer, clearly not done with his confession. “So how did he treat your mom? And you?” she asked.
“He left us alone after that. I took my martial arts classes. I worked in the butcher shop. I kept my nose clean and graduated from high school, all the while thinking it was over. I wasn’t made of what they wanted, so I was safe.” And then, tragedy. “Until my mom died when I was in my first year at Queens College.”
“They got her,” Kate said on a gasp.
“No, she contracted a freakishly rare disease you can get from handling raw animal meat, called brucellosis. She had no idea she had it, an infection got too far, and she died in a couple of days.”
“Oh, God. I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes and nodded. “She was a good lady,” he said. “And when she died, Vlitnik came calling.”
“So he wasn’t done with you.”
“On the contrary. By then I was big, strong, and could kill anyone I wanted to. Except, obviously, I didn’t want to.”
“What did you do?”
Turned to Gregg, of course. “I dropped out of school, enlisted in the Marines, and got my ass over to Iraq as fast as possible, because it was clear to me I’d rather be on the receiving end of an insurgent’s bullet than do anything for that lunatic.”
He took a minute to rub the original tattoo. He’d gotten many more since then, but had never covered the first one. It reminded him of what he didn’t want to be.
“The war in Iraq was really heating up back then with a second surge, so I kept re-upping for more tours and ended up doing three until I got injured and had to come home.”
She let out a sigh, because it was pretty obvious Alec Petrov couldn’t catch a break.
“And wait till you hear what happened,” he said with a dry laugh. “Nothing heroic like I saved lives by picking up an IED. No, I fucking got hit in the head by a cement brick on patrol.” He tapped his skull. “I had a concussion, obviously, and actually couldn’t remember a lot of shit for a long time. They sent me back home, and Gregg put me up in Philly with a friend of his. He helped me get on my feet, literally, and lent me the capital to start a training studio, where I could use my skills but not really fight.” He turned to her. “I had a few years and really had my shit together, until Vlitnik found me, and that’s why I’m here. End of The Alec Petrov Story.”
She reached for his hand, and this time, he let her hold it. “But the beginning of someone else’s story.”
“If Gabe Rossi can really do what he says, yeah.”
“How do you feel about that? About starting over as someone new?”
He gave a sharp laugh. “The past never goes away, regardless of the name on my passport or where I live or what I do. I still wake up and see her face. I still avoid anything that remotely stinks of a relationship. I still—”
“Why?” Her question cut into his speech, silencing him. “Don’t you think a healthy relationship with a woman would help you?�
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He considered all the ways to answer that, but settled on the one she deserved to hear: the truth. “I’m not worthy of a relationship with a woman, Kate. I gave up the right the first time I took a swing at that girl. I wasn’t exaggerating when I say I hate my hands and, sometimes, the man they’re connected to. I don’t deserve the kind of…of affection you’re talking about. The kind you were offering before.”
She made a slow circle with her fingertip over the letters, the knuckles, the bumps and bruises and scars. For a long, long time, she said nothing, sitting silently next to him on the bed, staring at the skin he’d spent the better part of his life trying to hide. Finally, she lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed the knuckles, looking up at him with eyes so deep and sincere, he could actually feel himself falling into her.
Very slowly, barely breathing, she placed that hand over her beating heart and lay back on the bed, the invitation, the certainty, and the forgiveness in her eyes the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Chapter Twenty-four
Kate pulled Alec into a kiss, squeezing her eyes shut as if she could squeeze out everything but the pleasure of his hard and heavy body on hers. She’d gotten what she’d wanted…mostly. She’d wanted to see inside his soul and understand all that darkness, and he’d shown her.
And now she wanted to take it away.
His mouth trailed fiery kisses over her throat and chest, her towel falling open to give him complete access to her naked body.
“Kate,” he murmured in between frantic, anxious kisses on her breasts, cupping them both and lifting them to his mouth. Slowly, he lifted his head, the pain on his face so real and raw. “Are you sure?”
She stroked his cheek. “Never been more sure of anything, Alec.”
“I don’t deserve you.”
“I’m doing my damnedest to prove you’re wrong about that.” She pulled him against her, intensifying every kiss and touch. Heat pooled inside her, driving her to slide her hand into his pants, hungry and desperate to touch him the way he was touching her.
He hissed noisily when her fist closed around his thick erection, his kiss on her shoulder turning into a gentle bite.
Barefoot With a Bodyguard (Barefoot Bay Undercover) (Volume 1) Page 21
