by Selena Scott
And when duty called, Danil answered. It was in his genes. He came from a very long line of ridiculously hardworking men. His father had worked the wheat fields in Belarus for ten hours every day of Danil’s young life. Until they’d come to America a decade ago.
Danil pulled his car into the parking lot of the northwest precinct. He hoped he could wrap this up quickly. He was starving and he knew for a fact that his mother was making babka. His barbaric brothers wouldn’t save him a single bite if he wasn’t there when it was first put on the table.
Danil strode into the precinct, straightening his tie and putting all thoughts of potato pie out of his mind. He had a job to do. And he never did anything half assed.
He came up to the front desk so that Freddie could tell him which room his client was in. He checked the folder in his hand. Harry Rourke. No priors. Good. This shouldn’t take too long at all.
“But on the other hand, if you think about it, the first wasn’t a warning. It was more of a passing of information from one person to another. So this isn’t technically a second warning. It’s a first,” said a woman in a silky, flirtatious voice.
Danil glanced up to see who the smooth talker was. His eyes landed on quite possibly the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen. She leaned up against the front desk in a pair of tight, cuffed jeans and a black leather jacket. Her curves were soft and generous. Her foxy face was sharp in the features and highlighted by a short, stylish cap of dark, glossy hair. She slanted her eyes up through a fringe of dark lashes at Officer Rickford, a personal friend of Danil’s.
Rickford was looking a little pink around the ears, Danil noted. And he could see why. This woman was a stone cold ten and she wasn’t pumping any sort of brakes.
Danil smirked as she reached up and gently readjusted Rickford’s tie, brushed something imaginary off his shoulder.
“So, seeing as I’m new in town and didn’t know the rules, I think everyone would understand if instead of any more police action, I just took this warning very seriously, and promised never to do it again.” She pouted perfect, plump lips and put a very sorry look on her face.
“Be that as it may, Ms. Katsaros,” Rickford said, turning even pinker and clearing his throat. “This is the second time in as many days that you’ve been brought into the station for trespassing on federally protected land.”
“I was lost!” she insisted. “Is that a crime?”
“Yes, actually. It is,” Danil said in his slight Slavic accent, deciding to throw Rickford a bone here. The man was a little out of his depth. Danil leaned across the two of them to hand his file to Freddie at the front desk. Freddie took it and flipped it open, started processing it right away.
Danil leaned back, ignoring the quick tightening of his gut when he realized that this woman smelled like citrus. Light and clean and female.
Frustration flickered momentarily across the woman’s face at Danil’s intrusion before she smoothed her exceptional features back into a flirtatious smile. “Well, in that case, I genuinely accept the warning, Officer Rickford. I’ve taken it right to heart. And you won’t have to worry about me for another second. I swear.”
“Is this your client, Dan?” Rickford asked Danil hopefully. The officer already knew he was sunk. He needed reinforcements.
Danil put his hands in his pockets and surveyed the woman from head to toe. He was lazy in his perusal of her, fully enjoying the opportunity. When his eyes landed on her exquisite face, he noted that she had one eyebrow raised sardonically.
“Well, she doesn’t look like a Harry Rourke,” Danil said.
“Dora Katsaros,” the woman introduced herself drily. “I’m new in town. Though some of us don’t seem to think that matters.” She flicked her eyes toward Rickford, who sweated and scratched at the back of his neck.
“Now, Ms. Katsaros, you know it isn’t anything personal,” Rickford muttered, practically scuffing the toe of his boot on the ground.
“Your defendant’s in room B, Dan,” Freddie said, looking up from his computer and handing the file back across the group to Danil.
“Thanks, Freddie,” Danil said, taking the folder. He nodded solemnly, just the hint of a smirk on his face. “Ms. Katsaros.” He winked at Rickford. “Officer Rickford, good luck,” he muttered under his breath.
And then he was closing the door of the interrogation room behind him, and his entire world was Harry Rourke.
Thirty minutes later, Danil dashed out of the precinct, his world zooming out into a wide lens again. He’d always possessed incredible focus. Even as a young boy in Belarus, running the streets with his brothers. He’d see men playing dice on the corner and stop stock still. Immovable, until he’d learned the rules, the theory, the strategy.
Rules were how he lived his life. He trusted them, understood them. It was how he’d gotten his family American citizenship so quickly when they’d come to America. Even though he was the youngest of the four boys in his family, he’d been the one to learn English first. To seek out an immigration lawyer. To help his brothers find work. He knew the system could chew you up and spit you out if you didn’t understand it. So he’d pledged to understand it. From the moment he set foot on American soil. And now, here he was, a decade later. A public defender, using his knowledge of the system to defend the innocent. And occasionally the guilty.
His thoughts passed back to Dora Katsaros as he slid into the front seat of his car. She’d so obviously been playing Rickford. He wondered if she was currently sitting back in one of those interrogation rooms, or if Rickford had folded and she was wandering free on the streets of Spokane again. He supposed he didn’t have the time to think of any perps except for the ones he was personally charged with defending. His plate was full enough without pretty, little, dark-haired sex bombs.
Except, of course, socially.
He wouldn’t have minded meeting Dora Katsaros in a bar. Or a Starbucks. Or the public library. He had no doubt that a little spitfire like her could keep him very entertained. For a week or two.
As intense as Danil’s focus was for the law, his focus on women was admittedly a bit wandering. What could he say? He liked every flavor of ice cream. What was that Americanism? Variety was the salt of life? No, he corrected himself; he hated it when he messed up stuff like that. Variety was the spice of life. Spice.
He pulled his car into his parents’ driveway and bounded out of the car, sniffing at the air as he pulled open the front door. His mouth watered. His mother was a phenomenal cook.
“There better be some fucking babka left!” Danil hollered as he kicked off his shoes and tossed his briefcase into the closet. He untucked his shirt as he walked into the crowded dining room. His three brothers and mother and father were all around the table, eating and laughing.
“When you snooze is when you lose,” Emin, the second oldest of the Malashovik boys said in his thick Slavic accent. He hadn’t bothered with English for a long time after they’d immigrated from Belarus, so in many ways, he was still learning. Luckily for him, he was an artist, and his clients thought the limited English thing gave him an exotic flair.
“It’s ‘you snooze, you lose,’ Emin,” Danil corrected. His brothers all rolled their eyes, very used to Danil correcting their English at this point.
Danil inched around the table that filled the room almost to the walls, toward his mother and father. Both of them kissed their son square on the lips. Katya Malashovik, dark-haired and short, eyes like a quarter past midnight, slid a slice of babka off her own plate for her son.
“I saved that for you, Danishka,” she told him in Belarusian. His parents understood English, but didn’t often use it in the house, no matter how much Danil insisted they needed to practice.
“Ah, Maciaryszki,” Danil said, using the pet name for his mother. “My favorite parent.”
“Hey!” Ilya Malashovik, Danil’s father, barked, his shock of white hair falling messily into his eyes, his wiry frame puffing up with indignation. “Who
birthed you and carried you for nine months before that?” He pounded his chest pridefully. “Oh, wait. That was your mother as well.”
The boys all laughed, as they were intended to do. It was impossible not to have a soft spot for the unstoppable swagger and silliness of Ilya Malashovik. They may not have been able to vocalize it, but all the Malashovik boys were striving to be half the man that their hard-working, soft-hearted father was.
Danil took the slice of babka and took his place in between Maxim, his jovial, oldest brother and Anton, the second youngest, closest in age to Danil. Maxim leaned over to kiss his brother heartily on the cheek, as he had since they were children. Anton, much more sullen and serious, merely smacked Danil on the back.
“Maxim, how is work?” Katya asked. And all her boys found another place to look. It wasn’t any secret that Katya hated that her oldest son was a firefighter.
“Ah, Maciaryszki,” Maxim said smoothly in that easy way of his. “You know I choose to spare you details. Much the way I spare you details of my women. There are some things mothers do not need to know.”
Her sons grinned into their dinners as she raised a skeptical eye.
“All these alleged women,” Katya said. “Yet no grandchildren.”
Four smirks slid from four faces all at once. Ilya hooted from one end of the table. “Not so smart now, are you, boys! You see, I’ve done my part. I’ve made your mother a very happy woman. First I made her very happy. And then I gave her four strapping boys.” Ilya waggled his eyebrows suggestively and had his sons groaning and grinning.
Emin swatted Danil’s hand away from the last roll of fresh bread with the arrogance of an older brother who’d been doing it for years. “After dinner,” he told his brothers, “we go running. I am too stuffy in this skin tonight.”
His brothers all grunted their agreement, knowing exactly what Emin was referring to. Particularly Anton, who scratched at the collar of his t-shirt as if it were a prison uniform. He loved his mother’s house, with its vases of flowers and little glass figurines. Her afghans and Emin’s artwork on every wall. But even here, too long inside and Anton felt as if he could burst through the walls with a hammer. He needed the air. The fresh night sky opening up into forever. Any wall felt like a cage to him. And he’d had enough of cages to last him a lifetime.
Katya looked around at her four boys. So handsome with their light brown hair of varying lengths and their deep brown eyes. All of them so strong, so large. She sighed. She knew that it strained them, to sit still, indoors for so long. But they did it. To please their mother. They were good boys.
“Go,” she told them when the last bite had been eaten. “Go run.”
“We’ll help wash, Maciaryszki,” Maxim insisted.
“There’s nothing to wash!” Katya laughed. “You’ve licked your plates clean again. Go. Before you all come out of your skins. Go and give me some peace and quiet.”
Her boys were about to accept her offer when the doorbell rang. Ilya was out of his seat and racing to answer it as fast as he could. Having grown up in a smaller town in Belarus, Ilya was used to knowing all of his neighbors very well. Answering the door, even for solicitors, and ‘talking small’ as he called it, was one of Ilya’s favorite things to do in the world.
Danil glanced at the gaudy, gilded clock on his mother’s wall. 8:45 on a Sunday night. It was a little late to be selling Girl Scout cookies.
“Look,” Maxim said, slinging an arm around Anton’s shoulders. “Danil is suspicious of our visitor. He thinks Sunday nights are not good time for ringing doorbells.”
Anton gave his characteristic quick-flash smile, here for one brilliant second and completely gone the next, absorbed into his dark, somber face.
“Well,” Anton replied as a woman’s voice floated through the house to them. “Danil does fear strange women.”
Danil lunged for his brother, but froze mid-scowl as the voice he was hearing rang a very specific bell. It was a silky voice, sweet and unassuming. And it was tightening a fist inside his chest that had been tightened only earlier that evening.
Danil ignored his teasing brothers and followed the sound into the living room, where his father sat in his armchair across from a cap of shiny dark hair, a battered leather jacket and eyelashes for days. Jesus Christ, it was that Dora woman.
“Well, I’m new in town. I live just over the way,” she gestured vaguely as she spoke to Ilya, obviously holding him, gleefully, in her thrall. “And I was just wondering if you’d had any encounters with bears. I live alone and I’m a little nervous about them.”
Ilya’s face broke out like a sunrise. He had the secret joy of a private joke written all over him. He connected eyes with Danil in the doorway as he answered the woman’s question. “Da. I know about bears. Quite a bit.”
His father spoke in careful English, but his face spoke of no hesitation. Danil’s stomach turned. His father was not a discreet man and he loved a good story. Danil thanked his lucky stars that he was here to intercept this woman before she got his father’s entire life story.
“Oh,” Dora Katsaros cocked her head to one side, noting Ilya’s accent. “Are you Russian?”
“Belarusian,” Danil answered as he stepped into the room, hands in his pockets.
Dora’s eyes snapped up to his and Danil had the feeling that every single detail about him was being absorbed in the matter of a second. Her eyes lingered for a moment over his untucked shirt, his loosened tie. Her discerning look quickly melted into a winning smile that might have worked, had Danil not seen her use that same look on Rickford not two hours ago.
“Twice in one night,” she purred. “Must be my lucky day. Dan, was it?”
“Sure,” he nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. He could feel his father’s disapproval of the icy way he was treating this guest but more than one alarm was blinking in Danil’s head right now. She’d been arrested for trespassing twice in two days and now here she was at his father’s house, asking questions about bears? Nuh uh.
“You know this woman?” Ilya asked Danil in Belarusian.
“Da,” Danil answered curtly. He could explain everything in a moment, once he’d gotten her the hell out of his house and away from his family.
Dora looked back and forth between them. “Your father was just filling me in about the bears in the area, Dan. I have a little phobia, you see. And I just want to make sure I’m safe.”
“You have fear of bears?” Maxim asked from behind Danil, moving into the room with a grace that belied his large stature of 6’ 4”.
Danil watched Dora’s eyes take in his brother, much the same way they’d taken him in just a moment before. But for some reason it annoyed the shit out of Danil. Was that interest he detected in her little smile? It wasn’t unheard of. Women fell all over themselves for Maxim. And it had never bothered Danil. He had no trouble with ladies. But right now, that look on her face was making Danil want to shove his brother through the plate glass window in the front of the living room.
Maxim went to sit next to her on the couch, crossing his legs and stretching one large arm across the back of the cushions. Dora grinned at the move, rearranging herself so she faced him.
Danil gritted his teeth from the doorway.
“There is no reason to fear bear,” Maxim said, leaning forward to flick an imaginary speck off of Dora’s coat. Her eyes followed his hand with a little, private smile. Danil remembered seeing her pull the same move with Rickford earlier that afternoon. “A bear does not bother you if you do not bother the bear.”
“Brothers?” Dora guessed, asking Danil.
He nodded. “My older brothers, Maxim, and Emin,” he pointed behind him. “And Anton.”
“You’re the baby?” Dora asked, lightly fluttering her eyes.
He heard Anton’s smirking laugh from behind him and ruthlessly ignored it.
“Da,” Danil answered.
Maxim narrowed his eyes at Danil. It was unusual for his lawyerly brother t
o answer anyone in Belarusian, not when he’d worked so hard to have nearly effortless English. It meant that his brother did not trust this woman. Maxim turned his eyes back to the fragrant little bird sitting next to him on the couch. He cocked his head to one side. She didn’t look suspicious. She looked beautiful. And stylish.
“You are from New York?” Maxim asked Dora, not realizing that he’d interrupted the flow of conversation.
“How’d you guess?” she asked, fluttering her eyes at Maxim in a way he was sure she’d practiced, but he didn’t care. It was working.
Maxim plucked at her coat. “You are stylish and good-looking. Like model. From New York.”
An appreciative smile danced over Dora’s face. Danil noted that she didn’t seem at all flustered by the brazenness of his brother’s compliment. Which must mean that she was used to it. “It’s the haircut,” she replied to Maxim.
Danil watched as Dora turned back to Ilya. She was obviously here for some specific piece of information and she’d realized who she was going to get that information from. Not from scowling Danil, or flirtatious Maxim. She was going to get it from wrinkled, grinning Ilya, thrilled to be speaking to a woman with a model’s haircut.
“Do the bears ever come into people’s backyards?” she asked Ilya. “I’m not normally this scared, it’s just that I heard some rumors from people in the neighborhood.”
“What rumors?” Ilya asked in a soothing voice, obviously wanting to quell the worries of a sweet young woman.
A victorious look swept quickly over Dora’s face. Danil was certain that no one else had noticed it. She knew she’d hit pay dirt in Ilya. Sweet young woman, his ass.
“I’ve heard that there is one bear in particular that’s been spotted in the woods behind the neighborhood. It has scars, and a shock of white hair.”
If Dora noticed the change of tension in the room, she didn’t mention it, her eyes flicking from one brother to the next.
But Danil felt it like a fishing wire pulled tight between the hearts of him and all his brothers. He felt, rather than heard, Anton slip away back down the hall. A moment later the back door slammed and he knew his brother had disappeared into the night. Moments later, Emin wordlessly followed. Even after all these years, they didn’t like for Anton to be alone in moments like this.
