The days were starting to blend into each other.
Just another reason time was meaningless.
Jumping in the shower, he washed away the smell of stale vodka and cigarette smoke. Ten minutes later, he was back out again and getting dressed, hunting for anything remotely clean on the floor.
Too many drunken nights and not enough days sober had left a pile of dirty clothes that reeked of spirits.
Fuck, he needed to do laundry.
His day was already falling to shit.
Shoving as many of the clothes as he could into a garbage bag, he dropped it next to the door. Though he might have picked up the majority of it, enough empty bottles and trash existed to make it seem like he had done nothing at all, but he barely spared it another glance.
Not his problem.
In the never-ending sea of time he spent in this place, he had only made it this long without driving himself crazy with compartmentalization.
He focused on one task at a time and left the rest until he was ready to deal with it.
He might have lived like a slob, and a knife was on the floor he was pretty sure might give him tetanus if he stepped on it, but it didn’t matter.
He didn’t care.
All he was doing now was existing.
And Aidra … she would have hated to see him like this.
“Is that truly living?” she would have asked, shaking her head in that disappointed way. “You’re more than this. You deserve better than this.”
“Yeah?” he answered back now. “What do you expect? You’re not here to help me keep my shit together.”
It didn’t matter that he was speaking to an empty room, raking his fingers through his hair in annoyance—hair in desperate need of a cut.
He wanted an answer.
He wanted to hear her lay into him for having his shit everywhere as she would have done at the loft.
But no one answered.
Not the God Invictus—the youngest of his brothers—believed in and not his Aidra.
Only silence, his old friend.
Before he could venture too far down that black hole, Christophe grabbed his phone and finally turned it on for the first time in three days, preparing himself for the number of messages he knew were coming in.
The first was from his handler, a man he hadn’t spoken to in months.
NIX: CALL ME.
He’d last seen him the morning of the funeral—the day he’d walked away from everything. More banks and high-security facilities were left to hit, and he or his brothers would rarely turn down a job if the price was right, but that day, as he’d watched the woman he loved get buried, the idea of working had nauseated him.
Only that first day did anyone try to stop him, but once they saw he wasn’t turning back, they left him be until they felt the need to check in.
Nix’s message came every two weeks like clockwork, but despite his never answering, Nix’s words never changed.
It was clear and to the point.
Nix wouldn’t interfere until he was sure it was necessary and not a moment before.
Until he had a reason to step in, he would let Christophe stay away until he was ready.
At the rate he was going now, who the fuck knew when that would happen.
The next message was from Calavera—Nix’s wife.
CALAVERA: IF YOU EVER WANT TO TALK, I’M ALWAYS AROUND.
What happened to Aidra wasn’t her fault—he knew that—but he still couldn’t bring himself to respond to any of her messages. Before, he wouldn’t have hesitated to call her. He used to whenever he’d been in the doghouse with Aidra and needed to find a way out.
But Calavera was a reminder of what he was trying to escape.
The night Aidra died, Calavera had been taken too, and it was only by sheer luck she had managed to escape her capture unscathed, yet he only saw it as his failure to get to Aidra.
Besides, even if he were to reach out to them, what the hell would he say? What was left?
Nix would only accept whatever he said before investigating the truth for himself, and Calavera, who felt guilt of her own, would want to know how he was coping—if he was coping.
How exactly did one cope with the death of the woman they planned to spend the rest of their life with?
How exactly was he supposed to move one like he hadn’t watched her die right in front of him?
Too much.
Shoving that question into his box of shit not to think about, he scrolled through the rest of his messages—these from his brothers.
One from Thanatos and Invictus, two opposite sides of the same coin. For as long as he could remember, it was the pair of them or neither at all.
Their message was the standard one they’d been sending him daily since he’d left.
THAN AND VIC: DON’T DRINK YOURSELF TO DEATH.
They, in particular, knew grief better than anyone he knew, and despite them wanting him to come back, they didn’t push either.
As long as they were flush with cash, they didn’t mind taking time off.
Christophe took the time to read the last message instead of skimming. And it was the only one he planned to answer.
If he didn’t, the man on the other end would hunt him down without question and force an answer out of him.
Tăcut, despite being the quietest of their lot, or rather because of it, was the most protective. For as long as he could remember, Tăcut had been saving him from himself.
TĂCUT: FLOWERS WERE DELIVERED LIKE YOU ASKED. AND THE ANGEL WAS DELIVERED LIKE YOU ASKED. LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU’RE BACK.
A picture was attached—visual confirmation—one of the marble statues Christophe had spent over three grand to have made.
Invictus had suggested it in place of a regular headstone, though Christophe hadn’t understood the significance at the time.
Aidra was dead—she wouldn’t give a shit whether it was an angel or a rock.
But the small sentimental part of him inside his jaded heart thought of it as her guardian angel, watching over her where he couldn’t.
Besides the angel, Tăcut made sure fresh flowers were there for her, another gesture Christophe appreciated more than he said. That day at the gravesite, just seeing her name inscribed on the marker and knowing she was six feet in the ground, had him nearly drinking himself into a coma that night, and he hadn’t been able to force himself back since.
Tăcut didn’t ask if he needed him to go in his place; he just did it.
Brothers did that. Even though they weren’t brothers in blood, they might as well have been.
They had survived the harshest winters and the worst abuse in Constanța; no bond was stronger than that.
Another message came in as Christophe was lost in his thoughts, this one a little more pointed.
TĂCUT: CHANGE YOUR MIND YET?
Change his mind about coming back to The Wild Bunch—the name he and his brothers called themselves—he meant.
Despite the loyalty they all had for Nix—and they owed the man far more than they could ever repay—they gave each other the highest priority. So because Christophe had walked away, they hadn’t taken any new jobs.
In their work, it was all of them or none. They each had their own set of skills, skills that made them deadly, but they were only strong as a unit—it worked for them.
Christophe didn’t acknowledge the second message at all when he texted back.
THANKS, he wrote, I’LL CHECK IN.
When he would check in was questionable, but it would be enough to keep Tăcut off his back for a while.
He would be back. He already missed the rush of adrenaline when they cracked the code for vaults. The feel of the security boxes popping open and raiding everything inside.
He missed all of it.
But he wasn’t ready, and they were only as strong as their weakest link, so he wouldn’t be the reason they fucked up.
Pocketing his phone, he grabbed his garbage bag full o
f clothes and tossed it over his shoulder. He had barely stepped out the door before it all came rushing in—the yelling couple who were still fucking going at it about the man’s need to stick his dick in anything that had a pair of breasts, and the blaring television coming from the opened door of the tenant downstairs because, as he’d put it, he needed to keep an eye on things.
Yeah, this was better than silence.
No one paid attention to him as he ventured down the creaking stairs and out the door, bypassing the two boys selling weed on the stoop.
Sweat was already gathering at the small of his back by the time he reached the laundromat and headed inside.
Thankfully, it was empty, and he didn’t have trouble finding a machine to toss his clothes in.
He grabbed his wallet from his pocket and pulled out a few singles, going over to the coin machine in the corner to get change.
As he fed the first dollar in, it came right back out.
Sighing, he tried again.
And again.
And again.
It was like the universe was fucking with him.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, Christophe tried one last time, waiting for his change to drop out the bottom, but for the fifth time since he’d been standing there, the damn thing spit the bill back out again.
“Fuck off,” he muttered to the machine, snatching his money and turning away.
He was contemplating heading back to his apartment when he decided he had nothing to lose by asking the girl in the back if she had change.
At the very least, it would save him from having to come back if he got it out of the way now.
She looked familiar, a memory tugging at him, but he couldn’t place her until he got close.
The girl from last night.
She faced away from him; tousled brown hair lightened at the ends falling over her shoulder.
“Yo.”
She startled as he spoke but settled quickly once she was looking at him. In fact, she actually smiled as she tucked strands of hair behind her ear, flashing a hint of the tattoo on her pale wrist.
When was the last time someone smiled at him like this, he wondered. She looked at him like he was normal—most people wore a look of distaste when they saw him, especially when they saw the metal in his mouth.
Or they looked at him as nothing more than one of Nix’s prized assets.
It could have been the tattoos, the way he dressed, or maybe that regular people thought he did bad shit for worse people.
Either way, most gave him a wide berth.
But she didn’t.
“Fang.”
Shit.
He remembered seeing her the night before, sure, but just a vague impression in the back of his mind. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t place her name.
Once she realized this, her cheeks flushed pink. “Mariya—your neighbor.”
“Yeah, I knew that.”
“Just not my name,” she responded dryly, though her lips twitched with a smile.
“I’m shit with names.”
He really wasn’t.
Christophe could remember the name of every man whose life he took—except the one who’d taken Aidra’s life, but that was only because he didn’t want to know it. He even remembered the names of every owner of the safety-deposit boxes they hit.
Yet he’d drawn a blank with her name.
She didn’t have to know that, though.
“Did you need help with something?” she asked, and he finally caught onto the subtleties of her accent.
Russian.
Holding up a few dollars, he asked, “Do you have change?”
“Never try to use those,” she said with a slight tilt of her head in the direction of the machine he’d been trying to use. “They only work half the time.”
She offered him three dollars. “It’s all I have left.”
“Thanks.”
Her gaze flickered up to his as she smiled, her brown eyes framed with long lashes. They might have looked innocent, but the rest of her didn’t in faded denim and a loose olive colored shirt that stopped above her navel.
But why was he noticing that?
Not waiting for a response from her, he went back over to his own clothes and tossed them all in, dumped in the detergent, and shut the door.
Time passed quickly as he waited for the clothes to finish, but in that time, his gaze was immediately drawn to the girl across from him.
She didn’t speak to anyone else, and when she wasn’t tending to her own clothes, she was on her phone, a curious look crossing her face as she read over whatever it was.
Just watching the emotions flit across her face held his attention until he realized he was staring like a fucking creep.
By the time his clothes were finishing in the dryer, he was ready to get out of there and go back to his place to waste away.
As he bagged the clothes, Christophe glanced up, the flicker of something at the edge of his vision catching his attention.
Light hair.
Full lips turned up at the corners in amusement.
Aidra?
It wasn’t fucking possible, but that didn’t stop him from grabbing his bag, not bothering to check if he left anything behind as he raced outside, heart thundering in his chest.
He was running, not even sure what he was running toward, but whatever glimpse he’d had of her was only a figment of his imagination because the woman walking by looked nothing like her.
Great, now she was haunting him.
God, he needed a fucking drink.
He was running, not even sure what he was running toward, but whatever glimpse he’d had of her was only a figment of his imagination because the woman walking by looked nothing like her.
Great, now she was haunting him.
God, he needed a fucking drink.
Acknowledgments
I feel like I’m always forgetting someone when I’m writing these, but I’m going to try and remember everyone.
First and foremost, I want to thank my readers—you guys are the absolute best! I can’t ever say thank you enough for supporting my books and loving them the way you do. This author couldn’t be more grateful.
Jenny, aka the best editor in the world, I don’t remember how I found you, but I’m so glad I did! You’re always there when I need you and do such an amazing job!
Becca, as amazing as you are, I still don’t believe you’re real and not my fairy godmother. Thank you for putting up with me and my many meltdowns while writing this book. I love your face.
xx LM
About the Author
London Miller is the author of the Volkov Bratva series, as well as Red., the first book in the Den of Mercenaries series. After graduating college, she turned pen to paper, creating riveting fictional worlds where the bad guys are sometimes the good guys.
Currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and two puppies, she spends her nights drinking far too much mountain dew while writing.
For more information …
www.londonmillerauthor.com
[email protected]
Shadows & Silence: A Wild Bunch Novel Page 24
