In Fair Brighton

by Elena Kincaid

  And then she felt all the blood drain from her body and her insides withered when her gaze landed upon his name. Roman Valeri Valentin, it said, with a Brooklyn address underneath. She had heard that name many times before, and it was too much of a coincidence for Rome to turn out to be simply someone with the same name.

  She felt like such a fucking fool.

  “You coming, sweetness?”

  Sasha jumped, startled by his voice. She took a deep breath to try and hold it together. “Be right there,” she lied, hoping to buy herself some time.

  Her vision blurred with unshed tears as she quickly scrambled to put her sundress on. She grabbed her shoes and bag and was almost to the door when she made a last-minute decision. When they had had their first dinner date, Rome admitted he had only skimmed through Romeo and Juliet in high school, though he had seen several movie adaptations. In college, however, he had gained an appreciation for Shakespeare and always meant to actually read about the star-crossed lovers. When she saw a copy of the book in an exquisite leather-bound edition with gold lettering on the cover yesterday at the bookstore, she just knew she had to buy it for him. She retrieved the book she had bought for Rome yesterday out of her bag and left it on the little table by the door, quickly making her exit right after.

  There wasn’t much time before he’d come to her hotel to look for her, but Sasha had plenty of experience with quick getaways and she knew how to disappear. A million thoughts filtered through her head as she ran down the stairs, and then she slowed to a brisk walk through the lobby of his hotel so as not to draw attention to herself. She shoved those thoughts aside right now. There would be plenty of time to dwell on them later.

  Once outside, she didn’t care about drawing attention. She made a run for it. Six blocks later, and she was by her hotel, though she didn’t dare go inside. Instead, she walked around the block to her rental car. She thought back to the conversations she had with Rome, and was positive she never mentioned that her next stop would be Sienna, so that’s where she decided to go. She had her trusty tote. Everything else in the hotel was just clothes and toiletries, easily replaceable, though she could send for her things later when she was sure it was safe. He hadn’t known the name she stayed under, after all.

  She called the hotel from the road. “Buon giorno,” she began in Italian. “My name is Francesca Rossi in room 613. I’ve had a family emergency…” She explained she had to leave town unexpectedly to the young woman on the phone and that she would send for her things if they didn’t mind storing it. Of course, she also told her to charge her credit card on file for the remaining days and left a generous bonus for the staff.

  An hour into her drive, and it all came crashing down on her, and Sasha’s tears began to compete with the sudden torrential downpour. She pulled over and let her grief consume her. She wondered if Rome knew who she was the whole time. The thought of that being remotely true, made her taste bile. The way he had kissed her, held her, made love to her, that couldn’t have all been an act. Why go through all that if he came to Verona to kill her? Why save her life in the first place? If she was indeed the business he came to Italy for, it would have been far less cruel of him if he had just killed her.

  Sasha looked down at her right hand, the ring he had bought her yesterday still on her finger. Images of his smile assaulted her, his laugh rang in her ears, and his touch, his taste, his scent, all of him, left a permanent brand on her body.

  The truth was, though, it didn’t even matter if he was in fact ignorant of her identity, if fate simply decided to throw two people together whose paths would be better left uncrossed. The families they were born into could only mean one thing.

  They could never be together.

  Chapter Five

  In Fair Brighton

  5:45 AM. “Da, Babushka?” Sasha’s grandmother was ninety years old, and though lucid most of the time, she was starting to get confused. The days and hours sometimes jumbled in her mind, and now, at an ungodly hour, she decided to call Sasha, waking her to talk about what she needed to buy when they went food shopping later. She humored her grandmother for a few minutes before telling her to go back to sleep.

  Unfortunately, for Sasha, sleep would no longer come for her this morning. She grabbed her robe off the foot of the bed and put it on as she walked out of the bedroom. Quietly, she opened the French doors that led out onto the spacious balcony, the crisp, early fall air kissing her skin, and the light breeze ruffling her hair. As she stood on the balcony of her father’s million-dollar penthouse, gazing out at the serene view of the ocean and the quiet, nearly deserted boardwalk below—save for the random jogger—something in the pit of her gut told her that this was the calm before the storm.

  Her father had been pacing last night, something he did only when he was nervous. Before her mother died, ten years ago to the day, she’d yell at him to stop though to no avail. Sasha had learned to just let him be. There was no point in asking him what the matter was since he never talked about his business, and his worries were almost always about his business.

  Her father, Andrei Poriskova, was in the Russian mob, as was his father and his father’s father. It was a life sentence. “Только когда внизу, будешь ты летать,” her father used to say. Only when underneath, will you fly.

  Though her family’s blood ran deep within her, she was no longer Aleksandra Poriskova. Thanks to a few masterfully falsified documents that would pass even the most scrutinizing inspections, she was Sasha Palmer now, travel writer extraordinaire, residing nowhere, and everywhere, and as much as she loved her family, she couldn’t stick around to watch them die, or to get caught in the crossfire herself. Women and children were supposedly off-limits, but that didn’t stop them from dying. Not according to her dead mother anyway, she bitterly thought. Her death had sparked new life into a war that had been, prior to that, resolved in a shaky truce two decades ago, and the Valentins paid dearly for her mother’s death.

  Roman “Rome” Valentin—she did not want to think of him, but it was like he was in her blood now as well. It had been three months since she’d run out of his hotel room, and her heart still bled and ached for him. Every touch, every kiss had set her body on fire, igniting a passion she had never felt for anyone before. She wondered not for the first time what must he have thought coming out of the shower to an empty hotel room. For the first few weeks, she half expected him to find her, to capture and use her to get to her father, but deep down, the more she had time to think on their short time together, she truly began to believe him ignorant of her real identity, as she had been of his, and that their meeting had in fact been one of chance.

  God, how she still longed for him.

  Another day or two and she’d be gone from here. Maybe after visiting her mother’s grave, she’d let another ten years go by before ever setting foot in Brooklyn, if ever.

  In truth, she loved this place. Brighton Beach, Brooklyn was full of life and culture, always bustling even in the dead of winter. She had envied every single person living here who got to go about their day in complete oblivion of the four families, dying out by each other’s hand, particularly hers and Rome’s since the Poriskovas and the Valentins were the largest and most powerful.

  Sasha pushed off the railing and turned around to head back inside. She faltered in her step when she thought she saw movement in the living room. “Papa?” she called out. Before she got a chance to cross the threshold back into the apartment, her forehead met the end of a silencer.

  It wasn’t the first time she had had a gun pointed at her, but perhaps never this close up. Oddly, she remained calm. A bullet to the head would at least be an instant death. She held her breath and waited. A few seconds more, and her surroundings mentally came back into focus, and that’s when she noticed that the gun held to her head was trembling, its owner’s hand unsteady.

  Sasha hadn’t even remembered closing her eyes, but she opened them now. Her heart, previously
calm, began to pound thunderously as she dared to look up at her assailant. Though he was masked and partially cast in shadow from the darkened apartment and the state between light and dark outside, she could tell his eyes were opened wide as if in surprise.

  “Coward,” she whispered, having absolutely no idea where her boldness came from, given the fact that this towering presence held her life in his hands at the moment.

  “What?” the deep shaky voice asked her.

  “You hide your face like a coward,” she replied. “Don’t you people get off on letting your targets—”

  Sasha never finished her sentence. The masked man harshly pulled off his mask with his free hand while simultaneously lowering his gun with the other.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Rome demanded angrily, his chest heaving, his face flushed, and his hair in messy disarray.

  Sasha gasped and took a step back. She and Rome simply stared at one another for a moment. She took in the sight of his gorgeous face, the same one that haunted her dreams every night.

  “Rome,” she breathed.

  His face softened for a brief second, before his anger returned. “I asked you a question, Sasha.”

  It was her turn to get angry. “You break into my father’s house, hold a gun to my head, and you have the nerve to ask me what I’m doing here?”

  His brows shot up. “Your father’s house? Your last name is Palmer.”

  Her lip began to quiver. “Sasha Palmer is the name I go by now.”

  “You’re Aleksandra Poriskova,” he whispered, realization finally dawning.

  Being connected to the mob had its perks. Rome must have understood that. Though Sasha hardly lived lavishly, she used what money and connections she had to in order to achieve a small semblance of peace in her life, and that included having an alias and the ability to move around.

  Rome extended his hand toward her face, but Sasha jerked her head away from his touch. “I won’t let you kill my father. You’ll have to kill me first.”

  He closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “I don’t want to kill you.” Letting out a long harsh breath, he opened his eyes again and what she saw written across his face made her gut twist. Agony. “I was so frantic that morning. God, you have no idea.” His voice broke on the last word. “I thought someone took you to get to me. And then I found out there was no one by the name of Sasha Palmer registered at your hotel.” Again, he shook his head.

  “You really didn’t know?” she whispered.

  He made a face like the answer should have been obvious. “The last time I laid eyes on you, you were barely out of diapers and I was just a kid myself. There had been barely any photos of you circulating as you got older, and none that I would have ever needed to see.”

  She understood his meaning perfectly. He’d only needed to see the photos of his targets. And he was also right about the lack of photos of her. Her father’s bodyguards had always done a good job of shielding her and her mother. They had seldom even traveled in the same vehicle as her father.

  “And if you had known who I was?”

  “Sasha…” He ran a hand through his hair. “Couldn’t you tell? It wouldn’t have mattered. One look at you and I was a goner.”

  At least her fear that he’d purposely targeted her was finally and completely assuaged. They had really just been two people in Verona, drawn to each other in a way she had never been drawn to anyone before. Perhaps, it would have been easier to let him go if he had gone after her on purpose. This, however … this was torture.

  She meant it when she told him that she wouldn’t let him kill her father, but she also knew that if her father found him here, Rome would die. She couldn’t let that happen either. It would destroy her. “You’d better get out of here before my father finds you here and kills you.”

  He invaded her space then, backing her up with his mere presence until her butt hit the balcony table. With his face inches from hers, he asked, “I need to know why you ran from me in Italy. Did you know who I was?”

  Sasha nodded. “I saw your driver’s license that morning. I figured we were a conflict of interest.” She shrugged.

  Her head jerked in the direction of the living room when she heard a noise, and suddenly, she had her hand around Rome’s wrist in a vise grip to keep him from using his gun. She knew she wasn’t strong enough to hold him, but she’d beg if she had to. She’d beg her father to spare Rome, too. Fortunately, the noise turned out to be her father’s cat.

  They both let out an audible sigh of relief. He gently removed her hand from his wrist and held it in his. That’s when he spotted the ring he had bought her still sitting on her right hand. She had thought about getting rid of it, but it was all she had left of him. Parting with it would have been like letting go of him all over again.

  “This isn’t over,” he said.

  “It never is, is it?”

  He let go of her hand and brought their foreheads together, and placed his hand on the nape of her neck. “I mean you and me.”

  “This isn’t going to end well,” she said right before he kissed her, hard, passionately. She wrapped her arms around his neck and poured three month’s worth of grief into their kiss. It felt as natural as breathing to have their lips and tongues reunite. It had been their separation that felt unnatural.

  Sasha had heard about the great Valentin assassin. Boris Valentin’s greatest treasure was his son, a son who ghosted in and out before the target even had a chance to know that he was coming for him. If Sasha hadn’t been there, her father would have already been dead. And the moment Rome released her, he disappeared, just as quietly and easily as he had arrived … like a ghost.

  A glimmer of hope pierced her heart, though. Maybe the two of them could end this feud between their families once and for all, she thought. Sasha would find a way to protect her father now that she knew Boris had put a hit out on him. And now she understood why her father had been pacing. He must have known, too. Something must have happened to make things escalate into a full-on war, but despite all that, even knowing that most likely she and Rome were doomed to end badly before they had really started, she couldn’t bring herself to stay away from him.

  She was way too far gone for that now.

  Chapter Six

  Rome banged on the steering wheel when he got back into his car. Then he gripped the wheel with both hands and yelled, “Fuck!” He suddenly hated the skin he was born into. He hated his family, he fucking hated hers, and it was the second time he let his target go because of Sasha.

  In Italy, Rome had foregone going after one of the Kosikovas in order to go out with Sasha on a date. That family was barely even worth the effort anymore, most of them having been killed off, and the guy his father had sent him after, merely broke into one of their warehouses, an empty one at that. He didn’t agree with his father’s version of sending a message to the family, but his father had insisted. Rome, however, decided that Sasha would be worth taking the heat over.

  He wasn’t kidding when he had told her nepotism had its perks. As the sole heir to his father’s throne—his two younger sisters didn’t count since they were forbidden from having any part of the business—he literally got away with everything. A great shot at an early age, he was his father’s best and deadliest weapon. His job was simple: get in, eliminate the mark, and get out. He wore a mask as a mercy, allowing the target to die with a memory of anyone’s face but his.

  Ever since his first kill, he convinced himself that the men he took out were killers themselves. They knew what they had signed up for, and therefore made their proverbial beds, and though he had always been on point with his targets, others, including in his own family, had not been. Innocents had been caught in the crossfire way too many times, including Sasha’s mother.

  He had been nineteen at the time and only heard what had happened secondhand. His cousins, Arthur and Vitaly, both of whom had also been in their late teens, and were both punks trying to prove themsel
ves to their equally worthless father, had seen Andrei Poriskova and his wife and daughter eating at an outdoor part of a Russian restaurant on the Boardwalk one night and thought they could take him out, never mind the fact that things had calmed a little between their two families.

  They had missed Andrei. One bullet hit Sasha’s mother in the chest—she died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital—the other bullet had barely missed Sasha, and hit a waiter right in the center of his forehead, killing him instantly.

  Sasha’s father had retaliated, having Arthur and Rome’s uncle killed, and the war began again. Vitaly, the coward that he was, had gone into hiding. Rome hated his viciously cruel asshole of a cousin, and now the bastard was back wreaking all kinds of trouble, becoming a sort of pet to his father and escalating tensions among all four families. Despite the fact that it was Vitaly and his brother who were responsible for an unsanctioned death, his cousin demanded Poriskova blood in the name of vengeance. Sasha’s father had put a hit out on Vitaly last week when he returned to town, and now Rome’s father wanted Andrei dead to prevent him from killing his nephew.

  Sasha’s words about them being a conflict of interest came back to him and slapped him in the face. Truer words had never been spoken. Somehow, he’d have to fix this. He wouldn’t take her father from her. Neither he, nor his family would ever take another damn thing from her again. He’d see to it.

  His cell phone buzzed in his pocket. “Is it done?” his father asked in Russian on the other end of the line.

  “Nyet,” he answered matter-of-factly.

  “Vhat’s wrong wiz you, Roma?” his father asked in his thickly accented English. “You nevar uze to be like zis.” He heard his father sigh. “Ya znayu, Sinok,” he continued—I know, son—switching back to Russian, “this life can weigh you down sometimes. Want me to send Vitaly for this job?”