Year of the Scorpio: Part Two

by Stacy Gail

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to exist any longer. The sharp and jagged ache to just lie down and die from the sheer weight of grief had dug such a deep wound inside of me it had, in essence, buried itself. I could still feel it there, and the soul-altering pain of it. But it no longer lurked behind every thought to the point where it almost worried me. It had faded along with everything else of importance in my world, and I had fallen into an automaton’s routine.

  Get up.

  Go to work.

  Go back to bed.

  Rinse and repeat.

  For ad infinitum.

  I was just slipping into my jacket when a brisk knock sounded on the front door. Moments later it swung open and Shona strolled in, not waiting to for me to answer. This was the routine we’d fallen into ever since I’d moved into the apartment across the hall from where Shona and her husband, Whittaker, lived. There was no point in trying to lock the door against her, though naturally I kept the door secured at all times. From the second I’d moved in last month, Shona had let me know in no uncertain terms that since her husband owned the luxurious high rise, she had a key to my new place and wasn’t afraid to use it.

  I probably wouldn’t have put up with that if I could have found it in me to care.

  But I didn’t.

  So I just let it happen without a word of protest.

  “Morning, sunshine.” Relentlessly chipper, Shona came into the open plan kitchen, her skin perfection, her makeup flawless and her ebony hair parted severely down the middle to fall in straight sheets past her shoulders without even a hint of frizz. Shona Rawlins was the most beautiful woman I knew, inside and out, and for the past two months she’d been more than my best friend. She’d been my emergency parachute as I free-fell through whatever was left of my life.

  I made my mouth move into a smile, though these days even smiles hurt. “Morning, Shona.”

  “You’re looking at one happy woman, babe. Whit took Arabella to drop her off at my mom’s, so that’s one less stop on our way to work. That means we’ve got enough time to stop off at Sugar Rush’s and pick up what they call breakfast muffins, but what we both know are actually cupcakes made acceptable for morning consumption. Doesn’t that sound good?”

  “Sure.” To be honest, it sounded terrible. I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t even remember what it felt like to be hungry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt anything.

  Without warning, the image of Polo flying backward abruptly filled my mind, like it had half a dozen times already just that morning alone.

  Aha.

  Right.

  That was that last time I felt anything. Polo’s murder happening right in front of my eyes.

  Thanks for the reminder, brain, you fucking little sadist.

  Shona’s gaze followed me as I moved to unplug my phone and charger. “You actually going to eat something this time around? I know the saying is that you can never be too thin, but damn, girl, you’re giving it the old college try.”

  “You’re just jealous I can fit into the jeans I wore in high school.” I kept my tone light and pretended I hadn’t noticed the delicate shadows in my cheeks had become unlovely craters. “It’s okay, you don’t have to admit it. A woman just knows these things.”

  “Why would I be jealous of someone whose ass has all but disappeared? We’ve got to get some junk back in that trunk, like, yesterday. And we’ve got to get some color into this apartment,” she added thoughtfully, clearly on a roll as she looked around the sparsely furnished area with a critical eye. “Your brother kicked you out of your old place last month, but it still looks like you moved in an hour ago. Ooh,” she said suddenly, clapping her hands together in a sudden surge of excitement. “Why don’t we get a designer in? This is a blank slate that could be truly inspiring.”

  “Rome wasn’t built in a day, Shona. It takes time to build up the character of a place.”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t take a month to buy a damn couch.”

  Slinging my purse over my shoulder, I glanced around the empty space with new eyes. Shona was right; my new apartment redefined the term spartan. A month earlier, my brother Knives—head of the notorious Vitaliev Bratva—had resurfaced in my life. This hadn’t pleased me, to say the least, since I held him as responsible for Polo’s death as I did the sniper who pulled the trigger. If it hadn’t been for Knives parading us all over a fucking rooftop terrace like a moron, Polo never would have been out there to catch a sniper’s bullet.

  It was Knives who’d taken the Vitaliev organization off the path of lawful legitimacy in the first place, steering it back into the blood-red waters of ultra-violent organized crime. For all I knew, that bullet had been meant for Knives, not Polo. My brother had chosen to embrace the underworld, whereas Polo had turned his back on it the moment he’d been able to get himself free of it. My beautiful, determined Polo had worked so hard to live clean since he’d been freed from the Bratva.

  And what had that clean life earned him?

  A bullet in the chest.

  But the hardest thing to live with, even more than hating my brother for bringing violence into Polo’s world, was that Polo’s death was really my fault. Maybe if I had done what Shona had once advised me—cut all sources of danger out of my life—Polo might still be alive. I didn’t know if that was true, or if that was survivor’s guilt twisting me inside-out, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about what I could have done differently.

  If only I’d cut my brother out of my life earlier, if only I had refused to go out on that terrace with him, if only I’d taken the danger more seriously…

  If only.

  Those two words strung together were the saddest words in any language on earth.

  When Knives had approached me at Polo’s funeral, I saw what I had to do as clearly as if I’d suddenly had blinders ripped from my eyes. Knives was my big brother, the only family I had left in the world, but it didn’t matter. His straight-up gangster lifestyle had robbed me of Polo, and that was something I could never forgive. Maybe it was shutting the proverbial barn door after all the horses had escaped, but I was done with Knives.

  Just.

  Fucking.

  Done.

  Sadly, Knives wasn’t done with me.

  A month after Polo’s funeral, my brother again tried to connect with me, this time waiting by my car in order to persuade me to return to the family estate where he could keep me “safe.” Obviously he hadn’t known that in the event of his death, Polo had arranged for his associates Alex and Yuri Rodin, Andrew the Giant and Rudy Panuzzi—a professional bodyguard who’d been friends with Polo—to look after me.

  In less than five seconds, Knives had found out just how well-protected I was. Rudy had him spread-eagled on the hood of my car while Yuri, Alex and Andrew easily held off my brother’s inept goon squad. I remembered staring at my brother and feeling nothing. No connection, no sense of family.

  Nothing.

  After that, things had gone downhill.

  Knives, an older, masculine version of me with thick dark hair and onyx-dark eyes, hadn’t been thrilled to hear that I never wanted to see him again. When he mentioned I might sing a different tune should any of his enemies decide to get at him through me, Rudy nearly choked him out, making it quite clear that it would take all of Knives’s so-called “army” of crazy-eyed thugs to get through just one of him.

  I had thought that would be the end of it.

  Silly me. I should have known better.

  I must admit, I was flabbergasted when an eviction notice showed up the next day. Too late, I remembered the apartment that had been my home since I was fresh out of college was a Vitaliev family holding. My brother was now in control of it, which meant he had control of me, at least in that one respect. So he played that card, no doubt believing I’d either run to him to undo the eviction, or come back home like he wanted.

  Or maybe he’d just wanted to make my misery complete.

  When it cam
e to my brother’s motives lately, I had no clue what was in his head. I didn’t want to know.

  All I wanted was to be rid of him.

  I was prepared to live on the street if that was what it took, but Shona had a better idea. Her husband Whittaker owned what seemed like half of Chicago, so when they offered up the place across the hall from where they lived with their little daughter Arabella, I snapped up the place, sight unseen.

  Apart from Shona waltzing in whenever the mood hit, my new living arrangements had worked out perfectly.

  My old apartment had been my last tie to anything associated with my late father, Borysko Vitaliev, so while I was sorry to see the last of it, I sure as hell wasn’t sorry to have it gone. Nothing could have dragged me back to the Vitaliev Bratva way of life. It had taken too much from me. Now I had nothing but bad memories that smothered the good, and a bottomless hole where my heart used to be.

  “A designer, huh?” Turning my back on the virtually empty space, I headed for the door with that determined, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other gait I’d been making myself use for months now. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t believe I have good enough taste to deck this apartment out right?”

  “It’s my way of making sure the job gets done. So what do you say? It’ll be fun.”

  Fun.

  The word hit my ears like an off-key note. Poor Shona. She had no idea that fun didn’t exist in my world anymore. But since she was trying so hard to reach me, the least I could do was play along and pretend it had worked.

  “Sure, Shona. It’ll be…it’ll be fun.”

  As I walked out the door, I heard her sigh.

  Chicago’s Future, a charitable food pantry and used clothing donation site that served Chicago’s underprivileged, was my baby. Shona and I worked from morning to night to help lower-income families make ends meet, which meant knocking on doors and kissing ass whenever possible to eke out funds to keep it going.

  Unfortunately, since the last fundraiser ended with Polo’s murder and the notorious Vitaliev name getting splashed all over the media, donations to Chicago’s Future had slowed to a trickle. To her credit, Shona had taken over the never-ending search for charitable contributions, while I kept to myself. Not only was I grieving, but as a Vitaliev, laying low until my last name was forgotten seemed the best way to go.

  This wasn’t an ideal situation, to say the least. Shona wasn’t great shakes at fundraising. Her natural response to any potential contributor who didn’t think it was worth their money to improve a child’s future was to smack them. Continuously stifling this urge was giving her migraines and, according to Whit, ruining their sex life. This meant only one thing. I had to get back up on the horse, for the sake of the children, and for the sake of Whit getting lucky on the regular.

  Eventually I would get back up on that damned horse and get on with life. But not yet. I wasn’t ready.

  The hell of it was, I didn’t have any idea when I would be.

  “I’m so sorry to clean your pantry out of noodles.” A small Indian woman whom I knew only as Bharat, glanced shyly at me from under a brilliant purple embroidered scarf covering her hair. “I have such a picky eater in my daughter, you have no idea. Asha will only eat what I cook if it’s served on a bed of noodles. Rice would be so much simpler and I have a ton of it at home. But for some reason, it has to be noodles.”

  “Kids are supposed to keep you guessing—that’s their job. It’s your job to always be ready with an answer. That’s where we come in, so I’m glad we could help you and Asha today.” I walked her out of the small warehouse area we called the pantry and into the front office, where Shona was busy sorting out school uniforms that had been donated by the city to various charities around town. Discreetly I swept the rest of the room and found only Rudy Panuzzi standing guard, and heaved a sigh of relief. For the past week, Rudy had been appearing for guard duty along with another muscle-for-hire man from their private security agency. I was definitely not a fan of the new guy. He seemed more interested in watching me than he was in looking for possible threats, and I wasn’t a fan of that. When I was at a poker table, my ability to read people had always been bang-on target, and it was just as good when I was anywhere else. What I’d picked up on Rudy’s pal, Luke, was a profound lack of interest in anything but me.

  Considering the man knew I’d just lost the love of my life, his interest made my fingers itch to grab up the nearest sharp object, and show him what Vitalievs did to people who stared for too long.

  Bharat chuckled as she tucked the bags of noodles into a cloth shopping bag. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about. Do you have children?”

  The memory of talking about making a baby with Polo stabbed through me, an unexpected dagger right to the heart. “No, I… no.”

  “Ah. Well, I can tell you’re going to make an excellent mother one day.” With a cheery wave, she swung through the glass door and headed out into the heat of the late summer sun.

  I stood there, absorbing the pain her words brought, while remembering how careful Polo and I had been to make sure I didn’t get pregnant. How stupid we were. Tomorrow was never a guarantee, but I hadn’t known that until it was too late. Idiot that I was, I’d assumed there would be time to settle down and make a family.

  But I’d been wrong.

  There hadn’t been time.

  Worse, I couldn’t make myself imagine settling down with another man someday; the thought made me physically ill. I wanted Polo’s child and only Polo’s child. But that was lost to me because I’d so arrogantly believed I would always have him. That arrogance had ensured I wouldn’t even have a part of him to give my life meaning. That dream was gone now, because…

  Polo was dead.

  Before I could block it, the image of Polo flying backward swam before my eyes, making me jolt and my breath catch.

  How am I supposed to get through this? How?

  “Dash?”

  From far off, I heard Shona’s voice, and I grabbed onto it like it was a life preserver and I was drowning in a sea of darkness.

  “Yeah.” By degrees I realized my breathing was audible. Grimly I struggled to get it under control before turning my attention to my friend, who looked at me with concern stamped all over her face. “So. School uniforms. Um…how many did we get?”

  “Fifty—twenty-five apiece for boys and girls. Dash—”

  “I’ve been thinking about the school supply lists that have started to pop up, even though it’s only the first week in August. We’re going to have to make sure we keep our shelves stocked until the kids are back in school since any extra money in a family budget’s going to be tied up in getting school supplies. The least we can do is try to keep their cupboards from going bare.”

  “Right.” Looking as though she had a lot to say but didn’t know how to say it, Shona turned back to sorting the uniforms.

  I headed to my desk, relieved I had dodged explaining why I’d been standing there, gasping like a landed fish. How could I explain that time and again I relived Polo’s murder like it had just happened? How could I find the words to express how utterly devastated I was—how devastated the rest of my life was—to the point that I had gone numb?

  Except for those moments of stabbing loss. Those living-nightmare moments made me wish I could be numb all the time, or worse.

  Sometimes, when the agony of grief was at its most intense, I even found myself on the verge of wishing I’d never allowed myself to love Polo at all.

  To distract myself, I dived into a mountain of paperwork to make sure Chicago’s Future stayed a legal non-profit for another year. I was just getting ready to tear my hair out when a paper bag from my favorite deli appeared in front of me. I blinked, then looked up to find Rudy Panuzzi’s guard-duty partner looking down at me.

  Ugh.

  Luke Keyes had returned.

  “Eat up,” he said, watching me without blinking. Like always. “It’s just soup and a small smoothie, not
hing heavy. The paperwork can wait.”

  Geez. This guy.

  When Rudy had introduced Luke a week ago, I hadn’t been happy with the new addition and the way he stared. He made me so uneasy I even attempted to dismiss him for monetary reasons, but Rudy insisted that Polo had left enough money with their company, Private Security International, to keep me safe until Polo’s killer was captured and the situation was resolved.

  Apparently that meant I had to have two freaking bodyguards.

  I frowned at the bag and wondered how it was possible Polo had managed to leave a seemingly endless pile of cash with a private security company to protect me when he hadn’t known he was living his last days on earth. “Thank you, Luke, but I’m afraid I’m not hungry. You can have it, if you like.”

  “I’m sure you’re not hungry,” came the surprising reply. Then my surprise doubled when he calmly reached over and unpacked the bag, placing a lidded, heavy cardboard container of soup in front of me, followed by crackers, a spoon and napkin, and a latte-colored drink in a clear plastic cup with a straw in front of me. “In fact, I doubt you can remember what the feeling of hunger is actually like.”

  That was shockingly accurate, but way too personal to discuss, especially with Shona and Rudy not even bothering to pretend that that weren’t listening. “My point is that I’m not in the mood to eat right now, but thank you anyway.”

  “Your body’s no longer used to receiving consistent nourishment. That explains why hunger pangs aren’t making themselves known to you anymore.” Balling up the now-empty bag, he made two points by tossing it into the waste basket by the copy machine behind my desk. “You’ve heard about people grieving themselves to death, right?”

  Damn it, I did not want to talk about this. “Look—”

  “Sounds dramatic, but there’s some very basic science behind it. Stress and upset make it impossible to eat, right? You know that better than anyone. The thing is, by the time the worst of the initial grief and shock taper off, the body’s gone into food-deprivation mode. The metabolism slows down to preserve whatever stores are left in the body, and the chemicals in the brain are slower to pick up hunger signals from the stomach. If food deprivation goes on long enough, it becomes a downward spiral until permanent damage to the internal organs is done. Before you know it,” he snapped his fingers, “it’s lights out, all because someone didn’t come along and break the anorexic cycle by putting a peanut butter and banana smoothie in that person’s hand. Which is what that is, by the way,” he added, nodding at the smoothie. “Protein and potassium. Your body’s dying for it. Literally.”