GIFT FROM THE HITMAN: The Petrov Mafia

by Zoey Parker

  His bike was chugging behind him, still resting on its kickstand. He didn’t look at me as he swung a leg over and heeled the stand up, straightening the handlebars like he was about to leave.

  “Are you coming?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I don’t know,” I shot back. I felt suddenly furious. Jeez, my emotions were wildly out of control. One minute I was angry, the next I felt like I wanted to sit in a dark room and cry until there was no water left in my body.

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He eased out on the clutch and started to roll forward.

  “Wait!” I exclaimed. “Are you just going to leave me here?”

  He turned to look at me for the first time since the bizarre non-kiss a minute earlier. His face was blank but strained, like he was working as hard as he could to prevent himself from showing me a single sign of normal human emotion. Or maybe I was just imagining that. Maybe he was actually just incapable of feelings at all. “If you don’t want to come with me, then go back with your dad.” He jerked his head towards the church behind us.

  I shuddered at the thought. I had buried thoughts of my father as far below the surface as possible. I wasn’t even close to ready to opening that can of worms. Just the word dad made me feel dizzy and nauseous. “No,” I said stubbornly. “I’m not going with him.”

  “It doesn’t seem to me like you have a lot of choices,” he drawled. “You go with me or you go with him. Your call.”

  I looked behind me. The church rose tall and blank behind us. I remembered coming here with my mother every now and then when I was little. Daddy had never joined us, so it was just my mom and me, wearing our cute dresses and coming here to sit in the back and clap and sing. I actually liked it. In my memories, I associated this building with singing and my mom’s warm hand holding mine. She was never religious or anything; she just liked to hear the music. I hadn’t been back here since she’d died.

  What kind of life was ahead of me? I felt like getting on the back of the bike was the real vow, like everything we’d just said on the altar had been a big build-up to this moment. If I got on there with Ben, that was it, no turning back. We’d peel out and my life would officially be taking a sudden and extremely unexpected turn, one that was going to take me into territory I was completely unprepared to enter.

  But did I have a choice? Ben was right. I had him or my father. And Daddy had closed all doors that led back to him. It wasn’t a choice at all. There was only one way to go. I bit my lip, then hiked up my skirts and walked over to the bike. Swinging one leg across the seat, I clambered up. Ben nodded once I had settled on and we took off, headed for God only knew what.

  # # #

  The smell of fresh paint overwhelmed me as Ben opened the door to the apartment. I followed him inside. The place was practically bare, with just a few pieces of furniture scattered across the wood floors. Nothing hung on the walls. It looked like a monk’s cell, though I did notice that there were big windows along one wall that let the sunlight stream in.

  Ben threw the keys onto the kitchen counter. He strode to the couch, then eased himself onto it with a groan as he ripped off the jacket and tossed it aside, followed by the bowtie. He rolled up the sleeves of the shirt, revealing brawny forearms rippling with veins. Then he leaned his head back against the cushions and closed his eyes.

  “Does anyone actually live here?” I demanded. I was bristling with irritation for reasons I couldn’t explain. How could he just sit there and look so freaking comfortable? Did he give a damn about what was happening to me? About what he was doing to me? What he was making me do? It sure as hell didn’t look like it. He looked like the most content man in the world, leaning back on that couch with his eyes closed like he was about to take a nice little catnap.

  He didn’t open his eyes when he spoke. “New place,” he murmured. “Just got it.”

  “Do you own anything? Furniture, kitchen supplies…?”

  “Nope. What you see is what you get.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “It’d be a pretty bad joke.”

  I crossed my arms and huffed. I knew I was coming off as petty, but for the moment I didn’t care. I wanted him to react, to do something or say something so I knew he wasn’t just some tattooed robot. He had to be feeling something. I had emotions enough for the two of us, but that wasn’t good enough. I needed to get behind that pretty face of his and figure out just what he planned to do now.

  “Why did you agree to all of this?” I asked.

  “Eh?” he grunted.

  I waved my hands around. “This! All of this! Marrying me, for crying out loud!” Could he really be so dense?

  “Dunno.”

  “What?”

  “I said, dunno.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. I wanted to slap him. This wasn’t the smooth, charming biker who’d more or less swept me off my feet at a party. The man sitting on the couch a few feet away from me was a mute Neanderthal with the emotional capacity of a rock. I wanted to wake him up, jolt him to life, shake him until he admitted that he actually gave a damn about what happened next.

  Then again, maybe he didn’t. More likely than not, I’d been another forgettable notch in his belt, just some innocent girl he’d taken advantage of and then tossed into the night like a used condom. Maybe there were more girls like me, stashed in empty apartments like this across the city, waiting desperately for him to come home and feed them miniscule scraps of his attention. I wouldn’t be like that. I would never beg him for anything. Not now, not ever.

  “You don’t know,” I said flatly.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Is this something you do frequently? Get girls pregnant and marry them just to keep their daddies happy?”

  “I’d have to say this is a first for me.”

  “You seem awfully casual about it.”

  “It is what it is.”

  I felt like tearing my hair out in frustration. Or maybe I’d tear his out instead. “‘It is what it is?’ You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “I do.”

  I stammered wordlessly. There were no words for how angry he was making me. How could one man get under my skin with such little effort? My face felt hot again, but this time it was with a blank, fiery rage, directed at one man—Ben Killmore. “You…I…You have to…I mean…” I babbled. Finally, I managed to spit out, “You have to feel something.”

  He cracked an eye open for the first time. “Nah.”

  All I could was echo him. “Nah?” I screeched.

  “Can you do anything besides repeat what I say?”

  Before I could stop myself, I took one long stride and slapped him across the face. Served the bastard right. How dare he mock me. Didn’t he know that my life was crumbling around me? Didn’t he know he’d caused it?

  His reaction was lightning quick. He rose, unfurling himself to his full height, which towered over me. Grabbing my wrists in each hand, he spun me around. At the same time, he hooked one foot around my ankles and swept my feet out from under me. I fell backwards onto the couch. He followed, pinning me down. I was surrounded by his bulk, his smell. His face flared with intensity. I shivered. My rage shriveled immediately. Something about the way he was looking at me screamed danger, heat, violence. It screamed, Listen.

  “I didn’t want this any more than you did, princess. But like I said, I didn’t have a choice. I’m stuck in this hellhole of a situation just like you. We’re mired in the same shit, you and I. I’m gonna try to make the best of it, by which I mean stay as far out of your way as possible. You do the same, and we’ll be just fine.”

  He let the last few words linger in the air. Then he slowly released my wrists and stood up. Without a backwards glance, he paced into the adjacent bedroom and shut the door.

  I sat on the couch for a long time after he had gone. Silence settled back over the room, so deep and complete that I could hear my heart beating in my ears. I rubbed my wrists back to lif
e where he had squeezed them. I knew I looked ridiculous. I was sitting on this squeaky new couch in this sparse new apartment, wearing a pristine white wedding dress and staring at the floor with the world’s blankest expression. I could think only one thought, and I thought it over and over again for the longest time.

  I’m married to a madman. And I’m pregnant with his kid.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ben

  I was lying in bed for hours with my eyes wide open. I couldn’t have slept even if someone was paying me to do it. A weird brand of adrenaline was coursing through my system. I felt too tired to get up and too awake to drift off. I wasn’t even thinking. I was just staring dumbly at the ceiling.

  “Aw, shit,” I grumbled to myself after a while. I forced myself to climb out of bed and stand up. The apartment was dead quiet. I glanced at the clock on the bedside table and saw it was close to midnight. I wondered where Carmen had gone. She wasn’t in here. She must have still been in the living room.

  I padded quietly to the door and eased it open, wincing as the hinges squeaked. Slipping through the crack, I walked out and looked around. There she was—asleep on the couch. Her dress was splayed across the cushions and drooped to the floor. She was curled up, deep in the middle of a dream, judging by the way her face twitched and frowned.

  I felt all the tension I’d been carrying melt as I looked at her. She seemed so troubled. Shadows flitted across her face as a low murmur escaped her lips. It didn’t look to be a happy dream. Hell, none of this was happy for her. She’d been yanked out of her life and dropped without warning into mine. I couldn’t even imagine the kind of shit that must be racing through her head. Dreams were the least of her worries. Real life was the actual nightmare.

  I wondered if I’d scared her too badly with my deaf and dumb routine earlier. She’d seemed like she was about to explode, she’d been so hopping mad. It was like rubbing salt in a wound to be so cold towards her, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I’d made a promise to myself to keep this girl the way she was. I knew damn well this life was capable of breaking a person. If I had any decency at all, I was going to shield her from that. And that meant shielding her from me. If I had to be rude to accomplish that goal, so be it.

  Carmen’s head was kinked at a weird angle where it rested on the arm of the couch. I frowned. Sighing, I walked over to her and scooped her up in my arms. She was even lighter than I remembered. She barely weighed a thing. Nestled against my chest, she felt every bit as fragile as she looked. I was careful not to wake her as I turned to bring her to the bedroom.

  I kicked open the door to the bedroom and crossed the threshold. The hinges squeaked again and a deep growl of annoyance ripped through my chest. Carmen stirred and turned to look at me with bleary eyes. I saw she was still mostly asleep.

  “S’happening?” she asked.

  “Shh,” I replied. “It’s okay. Go to sleep.”

  She nodded and curled up again, her head against my chest. I didn’t know what this emotion I was feeling was, but it wasn’t familiar and I hated that. My life was simple before this: bikes, broads, and booze. Now, there was all this intangible shit mucking everything up. Goddamn James.

  I laid Carmen down gently in the bed, then tugged the blankets up around her. I thought about easing her out of the wedding dress, but I decided against it. Let her sleep. She’d had a hell of a day. We both had.

  The exhaustion hit me like a brick. Suddenly, I could barely keep my own eyes open. I slipped off my boots, wriggled out of the silly shirt I’d had on since the ceremony, and walked around to the other side of the bed. I crawled in beside her.

  The heat of another person next to me was strange. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d let a woman spend the night, but suddenly this girl was two for two. Two nights together, two nights spent with skin against skin. I felt her hand brush mine and wrap softly around one of my fingers. I paused for a moment, but I didn’t move away.

  For some reason, it felt right. Either way, it only took a moment before I was asleep, too.

  # # #

  When I woke up, the sun was piercing through the curtains and hitting me square in the face. I covered my eyes with one hand and groaned as I sat up straight in bed. It was already mid-morning. I couldn’t believe I’d slept so late. I didn’t even remember the last time I’d slept for this long straight through. Normally, I was lucky just to string a few hours together without the assistance of copious amounts of alcohol.

  I felt movement next to me and looked over. I almost jumped out of bed. I’d completely forgotten about everything that had happened yesterday. Carmen was fast asleep next to me, still wearing her wedding dress. She looked less troubled than the night before, though. Her forehead had smoothed out and her mouth had relaxed.

  I figured I’d let her sleep as much as she wanted. But I had to go to the clubhouse. There was work to be done. Finding a pen and scrap of an old receipt in the drawer of the bedside table, I scribbled a quick note and left it next to the alarm clock. Then I swapped out the suit pants for my black jeans and pulled a t-shirt over my head. I grabbed my leather jacket and my keys and swept out the door.

  The ride to the clubhouse was quick. I’d picked an apartment just a few blocks away since I knew I’d be shuttling back and forth a lot. I hadn’t wanted to give up my room at the Dark Knights’ headquarters, but it wasn’t a good idea to have an old lady hanging around while I was trying to conduct business. Better to have her stashed away nearby. Close enough to keep an eye on but far enough away to keep her removed from some of the nastier things that on occasion happened under this roof.

  Jay was smoking out front as I approached. I parked my bike just inside the gate and walked up to him.

  “Morning, Jay. How’s it hangin’?”

  “Low and to the left,” he replied without smiling.

  “You should take that comedy act of yours on the road. People pay big money to see a light-hearted guy like you.”

  “That’s what they tell me, boss.” He took a drag and hooked a thumb behind him. “Someone’s waiting for you inside,” he said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “Who?”

  “Wouldn’t say. He’s Russian, though.”

  “Hmm. Guess I’d better go see what the commie bastard wants.”

  “Vodka and a rifle, just like the rest of ’em.”

  “Politically correct as always, Jay,” I said. He grunted in response as I walked inside.

  The transition from the bright outdoors to the dark interior of the clubhouse took me a second to adjust to. When my eyes refocused, I saw the broad back and bald head of the man Jay had mentioned. It was only ten in the morning, and yet he had a murderer’s row of drained shot glasses in front of him. I saw Slick behind the bar give me a shoulder shrug as I took the seat next to the man.

  “I’m Ben,” I said as I settled down in the stool.

  “I know who you are,” the man replied in a light Eastern European accent.

  “My men said you were looking for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Ivan sent me.”

  “What for?”

  “He tells me to say to you that he was very sorry that he could not help you with your problems. Truly. He considers you a friend and ally.”

  “Nice to know.”

  “Ivan has many friends.”

  “He’s a real social butterfly, that one, ain’t he?”

  The man did not laugh. “Many friends,” he repeated. “He likes to help his friends.”

  “Get to the point, buddy.”

  He ignored me. “Ivan especially liked your man Olaf. He did not like to hear about what happened to him.”

  “None of us liked what happened to him.”

  “It is the kind of thing for which there should be revenge, no?”

  My fists tightened on the bar top. “There would be. But we don’t know a damn thing about who did it or why. Don’t you think I’d like to g
et back at the bastard who killed one of my men?”

  He nodded soberly, then continued, “That is the right thing, yes. And that is why I am here.”

  “You know something? Tell me,” I demanded. “Tell me what you know.”

  As I glowered at him, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a slip of paper. “Here,” he said. “Go find this man. He knows something about Olaf.”

  I took the paper from him and looked at it. It was a photograph of a thin white man, balding, with a wispy mustache. He had on a checkered, open-necked shirt and khakis. The photo looked like it had been taken without the man’s knowledge. Scrawled in messy handwriting across the bottom was a name: John Robinson.