As Vladislav kept talking, Alex kept looking around that lobby. And finally, he saw her again. He caught a quick glimpse of somebody who looked just like her as they walked out of the public exit, on the other side of the lobby.
Alex quickly turned to Kari, interrupting Vladislav. “Honey, I want you to go upstairs to our room. I’ll be back.”
Kari saw the urgency in his eyes, although she didn’t understand what would be so urgent. But she never disputed Alex in public. “Okay,” she said, and Alex took off.
The guards already knew the drill. Tino had already told them that if the couple went separate ways, who would go with whom. Therefore, Tino and four other guards quickly broke away, too, leaving four guards in place with Kari, as they hurried to keep up with Alex.
Vladislav was stunned by the sudden turn of events. But Kari knew her man well enough to know that he often had business that went beyond his legitimate enterprises. Tough, nasty business. Business the man beside her had no business being concerned with. She smiled at Vladislav. “Perhaps you can show me to the suite,” she said.
Vladislav was still taken aback by what he perceived was Drakos’s rudely abrupt departure, but he smiled. Drakos had introduced this woman as his fiancée, which, in Vladislav’s eyes, gave her instant elevation. “With pleasure, madam,” he said, and escorted Kari, along with the remaining security detail and the aides, toward the elevators.
Alex, with his security detail following closely behind, ran out of the hotel just as the woman he was following got into a cab and the cab took off.
One of the SUVs that belonged to Alex’s party drove up from the VIP side of the hotel when the driver saw Alex and security run out of the lobby. Alex, pleased, jumped in, along with Tino and the four other guards. “Follow that cab!” Alex ordered the driver, and once everybody was in, the SUV took off.
Alex was rubbing his hands. Tino, who sat next to him in the middle row, had never seen him so undone. “Is everything alright, sir?” Tino asked.
But Alex said nothing. He was staring at that cab some three cars in front of them, making sure he did not lose sight of that vehicle not for a second.
But Tino was too concerned to just wait and see. “Sir?” he asked. “Is everything alright, sir?”
Alex finally exhaled, as if he was ready to speak. And he did, but not in answer to Tino’s question. “Go faster, man!” he ordered his driver. “Don’t you dare lose that cab!”
“Yes, sir,” said the nervous driver. “And no, sir, I won’t.”
Tino decided to change course. “Who’s in that cab, sir?” he asked.
Alex shook his head. He still couldn’t believe it himself. “Ninochka,” he said.
Tino was stunned. “Ninoch . . . Narnia, sir?” he asked. “Narnia is in that cab?”
Alex nodded. “Yes.”
Everybody in that SUV looked at Alex. Even the driver glanced away from that cab, if only for a moment, and looked at Alex through his rearview mirror.
But nobody was more floored than Tino. “But sir, it can’t be,” he said. “She’s . . . Sir, she’s dead.”
“I know that,” Alex said. “But I also know what I saw.” He looked Tino dead in his eyes. “She’s in that cab. I tell you she’s in that cab!”
Tino nodded, although it felt like pure crazy talk. Narnia alive, and in some cab in Moscow? It made no sense! Tino was elevated to Alex’s security chief because of his courage, his judgement, and his ability to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Although it went against everything he knew to be true and right, he adapted. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I understand.”
Alex knew he didn’t understand shit, and he didn’t care. He leaned back in his seat and watched as his driver maneuvered through the heavy Moscow traffic to keep pace with that cab. But when the cab pulled over to the hectic marketplace, and it pulled over into an area not seen from where they were, Alex panicked. “Gotdammit!” he yelled.
“I can’t see the cab, sir!” his driver said anxiously. “But they just pulled over!”
Alex knew he had no choice but to jump out of the SUV and make a run for it. “Stop right here!” Alex ordered. When the SUV stopped, Alex jumped out. Tino and the four bodyguards jumped out, too, and ran behind their boss.
But they were no match for Alex. He left them in the dust. He was going to settle this if it was the last thing he did!
The cab had pulled off and was leaving the marketplace by the time Alex arrived on scene. And he ran into the heart of the hub, where townspeople set up their vegetables and tech equipment and whatever else they were trying to sell. Alex ran around booth after booth, table after table, and around every nook and cranny in that place, but he did not see that old so familiar, beautiful face again. She was gone!
With his guards finally catching up, Alex ran out of the marketplace, along the backside of the tents, and searched around every corner back there. But he still did not see Ninochka. He did not see the woman they all, except for Alex, called Narnia. Like the ghost Tino would declare she was, she was gone in thin air. She was nowhere to be found.
Alex stood there, breathing heavily, still looking around. But there was no use. If he saw her, and, for Tino, that was a big if, she had completely evaded him.
“We can’t find her either, sir,” Tino said to his boss.
Alex knew they thought him a fool, but he knew what he had seen. “Stay here anyway,” he said, “in case she’s hiding out.”
“Yes, sir,” Tino said.
“And get any surveillance camera footage you can get from any merchant out here, and you check every frame.”
“Yes, sir. We will, sir,” Tino said, and then Alex, satisfied that he would do as he was ordered, turned and headed back to their waiting SUV. But Tino also ordered two of the men to go with the boss for his protection, whether he felt he needed it or not.
When Alex and the two guards were gone, one of the men left with Tino moved closer to him. “Narnia?” he asked. “He’s kidding, right?”
But Tino looked at his subordinate angrily. “Did he look like he was kidding?” he asked.
“But,” the man said, trying to make sense of what was, to him, senseless.
But Tino looked at him again with a look that caused him to get a grip. “Answer my question,” he said. “Do you think he was running through this market like a fucking madman because he was kidding?”
“No, sir,” the guard said, “he didn’t look like he was kidding.”
“Then let’s get on with it,” Tino said, and they began searching for what they all believed had to be a ghost.
But the order came directly from Alex Drakos himself, a man who every one of them knew didn’t fuck around.
They searched for that ghost as if their lives depended on it.
CHAPTER TEN
By the time Alex made it back to the hotel, he went to the bar to get him a stiff one. He knew he couldn’t face Kari until he settled his ass back down. Because he had been shaken. Ninochka was alive? She wasn’t dead? It still brought chills to Alex’s spine. How in hell was he going to explain her to Karena? He sat at that bar and drank the whole glass down. But even after that, he was still rattled.
But he knew Kari would be worried, and he didn’t want to leave her hanging any longer. He paid his bar tab and made his way onto the VIP elevator that led to the hotel’s penthouse suite, where Alex and Kari were being housed. When he entered the suite, Kari was sipping wine and reclining in the tub.
He leaned against the doorframe, crossed his legs at the ankles, and looked at her for several minutes. Her eyes were closed, her head was leaned back, and her entire small and gorgeously smooth, brown body seemed to relax under the weight of the water alone. Most men didn’t view Kari Grant as gorgeous the way Alex viewed her. To them, she was just barely passable in the looks department. And if they showed any interest in her at all, Alex knew, it wasn’t because they found her interesting per se, but because she had a nice body they wanted to fuck
.
But Alex didn’t see what they saw. When he looked at Kari, as he was looking then and there, not only did he see her beauty, but he couldn’t imagine anybody more beautiful. To him, her inner beauty eclipsed what outer beauty she might have had, and both combined to create a remarkable human being. Strong. Smart. Loving. Kind. Those were traits he never gave a shit about seeing in other women. He just wanted to fuck those women.
But for some reason, when he saw Kari for the first time, in Lucinda’s diner that late night when he first arrived in Apple Valley, he saw those traits in her instantaneously. He wasn’t looking for love. He wasn’t even looking for sex that night! But he found more than he could have ever thought was possible to find.
But as he stared at Kari in that tub, he knew he also loved her moral core. Her integrity. He loved her independence. He loved that she wasn’t still downstairs angry with him for leaving her, without explanation, so unceremoniously. He loved that she didn’t whine or opine about why he would do such a ungentlemanlike thing, and how he embarrassed her, or anything his other ladies used to complain constantly to him about. But that wasn’t Kari. Kari knew if he left abruptly, it was because he felt he had to, and she just kept it moving. She came upstairs, poured herself a bathe, and let Calgon take her away!
He smiled, pushed away from the doorjamb, and entered the bathroom.
Kari opened her eyes when she heard his footsteps, and then she smiled when she saw that he was not only okay, was undressing to undoubtedly join her in the tub. “Welcome back,” she said.
He smiled as best he could. “Thanks.”
She wanted desperately to know what happened and why he left so hurriedly, but she wanted him to tell her without being asked to do so. And when he undressed, and got in the tub behind her, with her small body between his legs and her back leaned against his chest, he did tell her. But only, she knew, to a point.
“I thought I saw somebody I knew,” he said.
That sounded too simple an explanation for the way he suddenly took off. “Did you catch up with them? You seemed to be very anxious.”
“I was, and no. I didn’t catch up.”
Kari waited for more, but Alex was in no position to tell her more. He didn’t know shit himself. Not yet.
He, instead, slouched further down in the water, taking Kari down with him, and relaxed his aching muscles.
Kari moved on too. The one thing she learned about Alex: he would tell her all she needed to know in due course, as her longsuffering mother used to love to say to her drug-dealing father. “Those cops gonna catch your slimy-ass in due course,” her mother used to yell at her father. “Mark my words, you bastard!”
Kari didn’t want Alex to mark her words about anything, because she didn’t want any negative predictions to come true about him. She, instead, decided to ask him when his meeting with the negotiators were scheduled to be held so that she could remind him to not be late, but he was already snoring. He had already fallen asleep.
When Kari woke up, she was in the bed, was wearing one of Alex’s shirts, and Alex was already gone. The negotiations he came to town to oversee had begun, and she didn’t remember anything after waking Alex up after he fell asleep in the tub, and both of them went to bed. They didn’t even make love, which was unusual for them, because Alex was so tired. And it was a tiredness as emotional as it was physical, but Kari didn’t press him on it. She allowed him to get some much-needed rest.
Now he was gone to work once again and Kari was stretching in bed alone. She was sleeping way too much, she thought! And no way was she going to sit up in a hotel waiting for Alex to return. She decided to have a little fun on her own and go see Moscow for herself.
But by the time she brushed her teeth, put on clothes, and headed for the suite’s exit, the guard who stood at their suite’s door deflated her ballooning happiness with a simple pin.
“I phoned Mr. Drakos,” he said, “when you made me aware of your plans.”
“Okay,” Kari said.
“And he said no.”
At first Kari hesitated. Then she frowned. “No about what?” she asked.
“About you going outside right now, ma’am.”
Kari smiled. “About me going outside? You’re joking!”
“No ma’am. He said he does not want you outside right now.”
“But why?”
“He did not say, ma’am. He said that you’re to stay inside, and he’ll see you this evening.”
But what in the world did Alex expect her to do in the meantime? She was astonished by such an order!
But she didn’t argue about it with some guard just doing his job. She closed the door and remained inside the suite. Alex had his reasons, she knew. She didn’t like it, but when it came to matters of security, which she assumed that order involved, she knew she had to obey it.
Being attached to Alex wasn’t going to be easy.
Man, was she learning that!
But she knew she had to make the best of it right now. She flopped onto the bed, pulled out her cell phone, and decided to live-chat with Jordan.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Alex and Jake Susskind, his chief negotiator, sat across the table from three of the toughest negotiators Moscow had to offer. Including Vagner, their best. But as they talked on and on about how terrible the deal would be for Russia, and how one man owning that many hotels across the entire swarth of the country would be unprecedented in modern times and would require special approval from the Kremlin, Alex and Jake were leaned against each other, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the interpreter repeat what the negotiators were saying, but mainly talking amongst themselves.
“Which one in your estimation, sir?” Jake asked.
Alex didn’t immediately respond, mainly because he was on the fence between two of the three, but then he made a decision. “Middle one,” he said.
The man in the middle wasn’t Vagner, the lead negotiator, but his number two. And Jake had pegged him as the man really in charge. This deal was going to require some strongarm tactics. Which was directly up Alex’s alley. But they needed to know who they were dealing with.
But as the Russian negotiators kept going back and forth with Jake, Alex’s thoughts began to wander. He remembered that day as if it happened yesterday. But it didn’t happen yesterday. It happened six years ago.
He was in a club in New York at a VIP table in a somber mood. Felix Petropoulous and Misho Dukakis came in and asked permission to see him. Alex motioned for them to come over.
“Why are you disturbing me?” Alex asked them over the loud, pounding music.
“We were not sure if you’d heard, sir,” said Misho.
Alex looked at him. “I do not wish to hear bad news tonight. I do not want to hear any more bad news.”
“Yes, sir, but I’m afraid it is not news we should keep from you if you have not heard.”
Alex looked at Misho. And he exhaled. “What is it?” he asked.
“You heard about that plane crash earlier today? The one that took off from LaGuardia?”
Alex wondered what that had to do with them. “Yes. What about it?”
“She was on it, sir.”
Alex frowned. Felix and Misho were hired by Alex to protect Ninochka while she was in America. They saw her off earlier as she was going back to Russia where her father lived. But they couldn’t mean her! “Who was on it?” he asked.
“Narnia, sir,” said Felix. “She was on it.”
Alex stared at those men as if they had suddenly grown antlers. “What do you mean she was on it? On what?”
“The plane that crashed, sir. Narnia was on it.”
Alex’s heart fell through his shoe. “That can’t be accurate. Priska reserved her a seat on a Boeing 747 out of LaGuardia. You were to see her off! How did she get on some twin-engine private plane?”
“She knew the man who owned the plane. He was a friend of her father’s and was headed back to Russia too. So instead of catching
the flight you had reserved for her, she caught a ride with him. We didn’t see it as a problem, sir. We were hired to see her off. We saw her off.”
Alex’s heart was hammering. She was on that plane? That plane that crashed? “But they said everybody on board were presumed dead,” Alex said.
“Yes, sir,” said Misho. “It was an awful crash. But that’s why we had to tell you. Narnia was on that plane. Narnia has been presumed dead.”
Alex could hardly believe it. He looked as if he had just been given a death sentence. He rose to his feet and, to their shock, began leaving the club.
“Boss?” Misho called after him. “Boss?”
But Alex kept on walking. He remembered feeling as if he was going to pass out. Ninochka was on that plane? The plane that crashed? She was on that plane???
He kept on walking that night, and he didn’t look back. She was trying to make it to Russia, after all they had gone through that prior week, and it would be the plane ride that did her in? Alex was astounded.
Now he was in Russia again, at the negotiating table with men he wouldn’t trust as far as he could throw, and earlier that same day he had seen what everybody around him was certain could not be her. But it was her. He had seen Ninochka alive. His eyes never lied to him.
“You heard me?” Jake whispered to his boss.
And it was Jake’s voice that woke Alex out of his walk down memory lane. “Say it again?” he asked.
“We have a dossier on him especially,” Jake said, “which will get his attention. Then I’m sure you’ll do the rest.”
But what Jake didn’t know was that Alex had a dossier on all of them. And, he felt, it was time to show his hand.
Alex moved away from Jake’s shoulder, leaned forward, and put his cards on the table. “You either agree to all fifty hotels,” he said, “or I walk and will build none. Which means my money will walk with me.” Then Alex leaned back. “Your choice, gentlemen.”
The Russian interpreter interpreted their words, and then Vagner, the lead negotiator, jumped in quickly. “Bud' razumnym, Aleksandr,” he said. “My zdes', chtoby pomoch' sdelat' eto. No yest' drugiye, namnogo vyshe nas, kotoryye govoryat net. My dolzhny zastavit' ikh skazat' da.” (Be reasonable, Alexander. We are here to help get this done. But there are others, far above us, who say no. We must get them to say yes).
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