by Ryan Schow
“More your scene than what we’ve been up to?” he asked, leaning down into her ear in return.
“Totally!”
She grabbed his hand and dragged him out into the mix of people. Turning to him, smiling in ways he hadn’t seen before, she completely let go and started to dance. Since he was trying to get a feel for the scene and he was in the middle of a bunch of dancing bodies, he had no choice but to move as well. Then the strangest thing happened. He found himself letting go. Within minutes he was fully removed from reality, lost in the music, hypnotized by the smell of bodies in motion, perfumes, and Cira’s scents in particular.
Up to this point, he hadn’t let her know he found her attractive. Tonight she was intoxicating. In a sea of tight pants and skirts, sexy shoes and bright blouses, all he saw was her. She seemed to sense this, almost like an awareness that took her by surprise. They broke off from the group, ordered drinks, and just looked at each other and the crowd.
“I’m kind of surprised by you,” she finally said.
He grinned. “How’s that?”
“I didn’t know you could loosen up, have a good time. Or dance for that matter.”
“I wasn’t always an angry stick-in-the-mud,” he said. “But there’s something about this place, the music, the people, this country.”
“What about it?”
“It’s not America. Back there, so many bad things happened. Here, even though bad things are happening, there are also good things. But all of them are unfamiliar things. Does that make sense?”
She nodded, smiled. And then she leveled him with that look. He felt it instantly, not sure how he should feel. Flattered? Confused? Aroused? A few girls walked by, catching first Cira’s attention and then his. The two blonds and a brunette were cute. He wasn’t sure if they were locals or not, but they looked like they were having fun.
“You two were so fun to watch,” the cutest blond said. She said this as she rolled off the table, flirtatious, with a big seductive grin. She was testing them for sure, but not overstepping their perceived boundaries.
“Thank you,” he said as the blond walked off with her friends. Cira glanced over her shoulder in time to see her blow Atlas a kiss.
“It’s true what they say about the women here,” she said. “They like the assholes best.”
“Whether they want to or not, girls might be like that everywhere.”
“Have you seen everything you want to see?” Cira asked.
“Enough to get a lay of the land.”
“You look good,” she said. “I shouldn’t tell you that, but I’m pretty sure you saw me thinking it all night.”
“I did.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Sleep it off, for sure.”
She narrowed her eyes, frowned, then said, “What about the blond? She looked like she wanted you to want her.”
“She did, but she doesn’t know better. You do.”
“Yeah,” she laughed, at her limits for drinks. “I do.” She ordered another drink, talked about staying to dance the night away.
“It’s not safe for you out here,” he said, knowing this, if anything, about Odessa at night.
“Then stay with me,” she said. She reached across the table intending to hold his hand. He just looked at her. She rolled her eyes at him, then: “I’m not asking for your hand in marriage.”
He frowned. “I know.”
That was when she did the unexpected. She reached back, took her hair out of a ponytail, then fluffed it. That alone damn near did him in.
He drew a shallow breath from high in his chest. He saw her seeing his eyes change; he felt it—a dead giveaway. Jade had always known when he was in the mood for sex because his eyes literally changed.
“You like?” she asked.
Just then, the same three girls came back, the sexy blond running her hand through the back of Cira’s hair.
“I just love your hair,” she told Cira. Cira had enough alcohol in her to appreciate the compliment without alarm.
“We were just saying how cute you were,” Atlas said.
“Cute is what you find at a dog show,” the hot blond said. “I look sexy, even if you don’t want to say it.”
“We’re not together,” Atlas said about him and Cira. “That means when I say you look cute, I mean you look cute.”
“Sexy is better.”
“Maybe to you, but to me, cute is right.”
“Where are you from?”
“America originally, but I’m relocating to Belarus. Odessa was her idea.”
The brunette moved with the other blond around Cira, making her a little nervous, more nervous than Atlas thought she should be. The women didn’t present any physical danger, but they did have that predatory look that women can sometimes get when they see something they want.
“I know a great place where they serve the best wine,” the brunette said.
“She’s had enough to drink for the night,” Atlas said, clearheaded.
“What about you?” the blond asked. She dragged a finger down the front of his shirt, then lit him with a smile he found irresistible.
“How old are you?” he asked. “Never mind. Don’t answer that. Let me just say, you are too old for me.”
She made a strange face, like she didn’t understand.
“A friend of mine said I should look up Vanko, or even Dasha while I’m here. Do you know either?”
The three girls looked back and forth between themselves, some of the merriment burning off quickly. The blond said, “I know of Vanko, but I don’t know Vanko.”
“What about Dasha?” he asked. Her smile now completely fell away. “By the look on your face, I know the answer to that. Tell me this, is he a good man?”
“You do not want to know about Dasha,” she said, leaning forward and speaking into his ear. Across the table, Cira bristled. Still, next to his ear, the sultry stranger pressed ever forward, gently pulling his earlobe into her mouth. She sucked it for a second, then let go and said, “Come buy me a nice bottle of wine, maybe fuck me, if that’s what I want, but then go to Belarus and don’t say that name again.”
Atlas sat up straight, turned, and looked right at her. She was not as pretty in this light, and at this close of a distance. It was almost as if she’d lost her veneer of innocence. That softness that had once made her cute.
“Dasha,” he said. “My friend says I should see him.”
She stood up straight, put her hands on her hips, looked down her nose in utter silence, or perhaps disappointment.
“I don’t really know either of those men,” she said. She flashed the two girls a look. Before leaving, she looked first at Atlas, then at Cira. To the girls, she said, “Let’s go.”
The three of them sauntered off, leaving him alone with Cira. She appraised him long and hard. “You have this charm I don’t understand. I think maybe I hate you for it.”
“Get in line,” he said. Standing up, he dropped a few bills on the table. “Time to go home. We have a big day tomorrow.”
“I want to dance.”
“Here we go,” he said as he took her hand and lifted her up.
“I can stand, and walk,” she said, pushing off him and almost falling. “My heel…”
He looked down and her heel was indeed lodged in a rut.
“And here I thought you were drunk.”
“Yeah, I did too.”
He got her fixed up, and when they were walking to meet the cab they’d called, she linked her arm in his. “Is there something about you that I don’t like?”
He gave a low chuckle and said, “Do you mean, is there something about you I don’t like?”
“That’s what I said.”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“There’s almost nothing about you I don’t like.”
“I don’t want to sleep alone tonight,” she said when their cab finally arrived. He helped her in the car, and when h
e didn’t respond, she looked up at him and said, “My hair is down, my emotions are out, and all of a sudden you’re being just like Kiera.”
“Don’t take it personally,” he said.
When they got to the hotel, she said, “Walk me up?”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“None of this is.”
He paid the cabbie, then said, “That’s for the ride here. If you wait a few minutes, I’ll be down and you can take me to my place. I just need to see her up.”
The driver nodded, then looked up when he realized Atlas had left a rather generous tip. Atlas hoped that if he overpaid him now, perhaps he’d be compliant in the hopes of being overpaid again.
“I left you the extra money on purpose,” he said just to make things clear. The driver nodded in understanding.
He walked Cira inside, into the elevator, and up to her room.
“This is me,” she said, fumbling with the key card. She handed it to him. “I guess I drank more than I thought.”
“When was the last time you went out?” he asked, opening the door and walking her inside.
“The last time I had fun,” she answered. “Maybe a year ago? Help me out of this dress, tuck me in, and then you can go, if that’s what you want.”
She lifted her hair off the back of her dress; he unzipped her.
Shrugging off the sleeveless dress, she rolled the fabric down to her hips, then all the way down to her thighs, where she let it drop. She was wearing underwear, but there wasn’t much to them.
Atlas froze, his cheeks ablaze. He hadn’t seen another woman like this since Jade.
“Um…”
She stepped out of her heels, then turned and said, “Tuck me in?”
Wearing only a thong, she made no attempt to hide her breasts. They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t ugly either. Actually, he liked them. Pushing past the stirring inside him, the unchecked need, he walked to the bed, took the pillows off, save for one, then pulled the blankets back.
“Let’s go before my cab leaves,” he said.
Pouting, she walked over, got into bed, and pulled the blankets to her chin. When she looked up at him, there was an odd mixture of both expectation and fear of rejection.
“I’ll call you in the morning.”
“So you’re leaving?”
He nodded.
“Night.”
And then he left. He hated himself for not taking advantage of the opportunity, but she was drunk and she didn’t like him much when she was sober. That meant something to him. Had she been different when she was sober, had he not still been in love with Jade, and brokenhearted by her betrayal, he definitely would have stayed.
When he got in the cab, he gave the driver Kofi’s address, then thought about that evening. The last thing he wanted to do was create a Tinder profile, let alone try to date or buy his way into Vanko’s or Dasha’s orbit. But he was in for the long haul, and he was thinking that if it took a while, then that meant Leopold’s detective would be on the hunt for Alabama longer.
At least he’d enjoyed his night. But perhaps he’d enjoyed it too much. He didn’t know how—after all this—he could go back to prison, back to his multiple life sentences, back to his tortured thoughts of Jade and Alabama. Conflicted, he leaned his head against the back of the seat, completely unaware that he was now being followed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
ATLAS HARGROVE
Atlas woke the next day feeling rusty, run over, and sore. And that was just from sleeping in such a small bed. Forget being at the club the night before. That was a different story altogether. That pain from the beatings sat deep in his bones, right down to the marrow.
The room itself was bright, a thin panel of drapes doing little to block the morning sunlight. He sat up, yawned, glanced over at Maxim, who was still asleep. The small apartment was quiet, save for the soft noise of activity next door, the light thump-thump-thumping on the ceilings of the renters upstairs getting the day started, the faint smells of someone’s breakfast cooking.
God, he was hungry.
He slid his legs over the side of the bed, pushed himself to his feet, stretched. Plodding into the bathroom, he shut and locked the door, and then he dropped a pound or two in the toilet bowl, feeling better already. His reflection wasn’t pretty. Admittedly, the light did nothing to save him from the truth of his face. He was a beaten man, a man who had beaten others back. He pulled at the dark circles under his eyes, worked to avoid the dead stare. From the small baggie from the store he had gone to yesterday, he fished out the dental floss, his toothbrush, and a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, then proceeded to clean his mouth thoroughly.
A knock on the door startled him. He opened it, saw Maxim. The kid was twelve years old at best, his straw-straight hair mussed up, his brown eyes half-open. With his face scrunched from a solid night’s sleep, the kid was rubbing his eyes with one hand while holding himself with the other.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.
Atlas nodded, rinsed out his mouth, then left the bathroom and said, “It’s all yours.”
In the living room, he plopped down on the couch, turned on his cell phone, and looked up the Tinder app. Shaking his head, he couldn’t believe he was doing this. He downloaded the app, installed it, then opened it.
“Good morning,” Katryna said, startling him.
He turned and looked up at her, surprised that she looked as good in the morning as she had last night. With a full face, brown eyes like Maxim’s, and straight brown hair that went halfway down her back, no one feature stood out, but they all seemed to work in concert to produce a woman who was plain-looking in one sense, but utterly perfect in another. Kofi was a good-looking guy, with superb taste in women, and it showed.
“Hello, Katryna.”
“What are you doing?” she asked in heavily accented English.
“Trying to set up a Tinder app.”
She smiled nervously, let a little laugh escape her. “You will have no problem with girls,” she said, eyeing him sideways. “But what kind of girls are you looking for?”
“Kofi told you what I was doing here, yes?”
“He said you were looking for a missing girl,” she said. “Is that true?”
He nodded, then said, “I’m not looking for a girl for the sake of finding a girl. I need to find the man who handles these girls.”
“So you don’t need a nice girl?”
“No,” he said.
“You will find plenty of girls who will like you for money,” she said, “but you don’t have any money.”
“They don’t know that,” he replied. Apparently, Kofi hadn’t told her he’d confiscated a significant amount of money—the equivalent of about thirty-five thousand US. At that moment, knowing how difficult life was for them, he decided to keep that detail to himself.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Old enough to be the pervert these monsters need me to be,” he said. She blanched. What exactly had Kofi told her? Rather, what had he left out? “You know what I’m trying to do, right? I mean, what I’m really trying to do?”
“I guess I don’t know,” she answered, embarrassed. “I thought you were like mystery detective from the United States.”
“I’m not like them at all.”
“Oh.”
“I need someone to try to take advantage of me. But what I need most is a girl who is connected to a pimp named Vanko, or Dasha.”
“I don’t know these names.”
“Unless you’re trafficking underage girls,” he said, “you wouldn’t.”
“Like for sex?”
“Sex, drug running, making snuff films, or bleeding them out to make an elixir called Vampire’s Kiss, or VK.”
“I’ve heard of VK,” she said. “But from a very rich friend. We don’t talk much anymore, not since Kofi and I have…fallen on hard times.”
“Looks like most of Ukraine has fallen on hard times.”
“Yes, but things are extra difficult,” she said, slipping back into her native tongue.
He knew about the death of their oldest son, but he also knew what having a missing or dead child felt like, the hell it brought down on a once-good marriage.
“There is much corruption in Ukraine, as there always has been,” she continued in Ukrainian. “But when Volodymyr Zelenskyy became president, he campaigned on ending the corruption, both in businesses and in government. Much of that corruption still exists. We see it on the streets, feel it in our jobs, suffer it in the cruelty of our creditors and the greed of our utilities providers. As I’m sure you know with your past presidents, sometimes one’s attempts to stifle corruption merely stirs the mess. Here it is so agitated, the dust of it now sits on everyone it has ever touched, and even those it never touched in the first place.”
Raising an eyebrow, the depth of her despair bypassing his defenses, he said, “I am very sorry, and though I understand a nation unbalanced, I cannot begin to appreciate the struggle you and your family are constantly under.”
She took a deep breath, fixed a halfhearted smile on her face, and said, “So you need what kind of a girl?”
He swallowed hard, mostly because he liked and respected Katryna. Telling her what he really needed from her would be painful, but he needed her help, so it was inevitable. On the bright side, if there was any gold in his arrangement here, it would be found in a woman’s touch.
“I need to find a girl who can take me to another girl. A younger one.”
“How young, exactly?”
“Young.”
“A girl can age gap ten, maybe twenty years, if you have money, some sort of fame, and good looks. Trying for one younger than that might be tough.”
“But it’s possible…”
“They will scam you if you look like you want too much for the way you look, or for your level of personal wealth.”
“That’s what I want. I need to draw out that type of girl.”
“You want to be scammed?”
He nodded.
She slowly nodded her head, thinking.
