No Dreams Allowed: A Billionaire Romance

by Sonora Seldon

  “This food, though, it should perhaps be arrested for disturbing the peace of my stomach.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t want a to-go box for that?”

  He chuckled like someone amused by seeing a dog run over in the road. “Well, it may be an acquired taste, yes? I think that perhaps I will – ah, my young friend, there you are. Now we will talk.”

  He looked past me. A hand descended onto my shoulder, I twisted around, and guess who?

  Shana, damn her eyes, had not called the sheriff – she went and got Dave instead.

  Dave stared at the sleazebag of the hour. He didn’t look at me, and he didn’t look around as he called out.

  “Shana, skip the cleanup and just head home now.”

  My most popular bartender was only too glad to get the hell out of Dodge, throwing on her jacket and bolting for the door without so much as glancing at me, her boss. She even flipped the sign on the door from “Open” to “Closed” as she hurried outside, and seconds later I heard the squeal of tires and the spray of gravel as she pulled out of the parking lot like someone screaming away from the starting line at the Daytona 500. Maybe she’d find time to call the sheriff on my behalf while she was hurtling down the road, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

  Dave’s fingers tightened on my shoulder. “Sergei, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Please, David, this is how you talk to your old friend? Indeed, after all that we have shared over the years, I feel that I am like an uncle to you, yes?”

  I looked between the two of them, and … something clicked.

  “Dave, this is your choke-hold instructor, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  Sergei Somebody sat back in his narrow chair, folded his hands in his lap, and fixed a smile on his face that looked almost human. “The bruises on the man Pinky’s neck say that you learned that lesson well – and I was right, was I not, about the beast within? As for your question, I am here because I have a message for you – a message from your father. Will you listen?”

  “No. Get out of here, do it now, and don’t look back.”

  Sergei chose not to do any of those things. Instead, he turned to look at me.

  “Your young man is so passionate, so full of idealism and belief in what is right, and a great certainty about what is wrong – I was much like him once, long ago, in another world and another life. But now we both serve a master who does not believe in such things, and David must learn to listen to his father’s words. Will you help him to understand this?”

  “Why? I mean, considering that I have no idea who you are, who Dave’s father is, or what any of this is about?”

  “Ah, David, I should have known – you have told this woman nothing of who and what you are, have you?”

  “She deserves better than to be dirtied by all that – and if you’re anything remotely like my friend, you’ll go back and tell my father you couldn’t find me, and then head home on the next plane.”

  “My home is wherever my business takes me – here, Chicago, London, Zagreb, Kabul, it matters little. Human nature is the same in all of these places, and no matter where you run, you can be no more and no less than human, David.”

  He flicked his cold eyes to me, back to Dave, and then he angled his head to one side and watched us both. Time ticked past, and then a pale sort of recognition filled those ice-colored eyes.

  “Ah, I see we are dealing with the deepest and most unreasonable part of human nature – you truly care for this woman, yes?”

  The man sighed, shaking his head as he looked down at his abandoned plate of nachos. “I had hoped to persuade with words only, but love does not listen to reason.”

  He pushed his plate away, dismissed his beer as being unworthy of further notice, and stood up. “I have not survived for so long by being unprepared, however, and so I am ready for this sad circumstance – though if matters were different, David, please believe that I would be happy for you.”

  “Sure, I can hear the violins playing, whatever. Tell my father that I –”

  “Please, we will talk outside now. After all, I believe your fierce young woman wants very much for me to leave, yes?”

  I was sick of being left out of this conversation. “You called it – I know it seems weird and picky and all, but I don’t react well to strangers threatening me under my own roof. So how about you –”

  Sergei’s smile cut me off like an absolute zero knife. “I do not threaten. Cowards threaten, men act.”

  Then he took himself and his death’s-head smile toward the door, and never looked back once to see if we were following him.

  Sergei marched across the gravel parking lot, past my truck sagging on its springs, and all the way out to the county road. He turned right, he walked down the shoulder of the road, and he did not seem inclined to stop.

  Dave hustled me along in his maybe-friend’s shadow. He ignored my questions and he refused to look at me – but why did he keep glancing back at the bar, as it faded away behind us in the darkness?

  A few hundred feet from the Jayhawk Tavern’s front door, Sergei cut across the deserted road and led us to where a dark grey Toyota Corolla with a barcode sticker waited in the drought-starved brown grass on the far side.

  I stopped in the middle of the road, because fuck this.

  Pulling out of Dave’s grip, I kicked him in the shins. Then I yelled at Sergei, who was having a fun time ignoring me while he stood by his rental car’s front bumper and peered at the glowing screen of a smartphone he’d retrieved from an inside pocket of his jacket.

  “I’ve had enough of your dog and pony show, asshole – I am not, repeat, NOT going to move one more step until you explain who you are, why you’re screwing over my night, and what we’re doing standing out here!”

  Sergei tapped and swiped at his phone, and did not look up as he observed, “I am thinking you will move one step and more if a car comes.”

  I flipped him off, he did that dead-thing chuckle, and I snapped my head around to glare at Dave. “And you’re going to do a little show and tell presentation about who YOU really are – is your dad a mob kingpin or something? Is this one of his hit men? Having fun out here, pretending to be a college boy who’s pretending to be a cook?”

  “I’m not pretending, Cassie. I study architectural engineering at the University of Chicago, I’ve done my best to be a good cook for you, and when …” He glanced over at Sergei, and then he leaned in close, his voice a low whisper in my ear.

  “… and when you’re in my arms, I am so not pretending. Whatever this is we have together, it’s real. As for what’s going to happen, I’ll try to make it up to you – and I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me, but I hope you’ll try. Please?”

  “What’s going to happen?”

  A mockingbird sang in the prairie night, and Dave said nothing.

  “Who’s your dad?”

  Silence.

  “Who’s this Sergei asshole?”

  A cricket trilled in the distance.

  “Dave, who are you?”

  No words. Just his eyes holding mine, as he begged me to understand.

  Seconds echoed past in the darkness, and then my boyfriend – still? – found his voice. “My father is the man who owns us all, body and soul. There’s no escape – I thought there could be, I thought I could try, but …”

  He looked up, over my head, at where the bar sat waiting in the distance. “We’re all screwed, Cassie – you, me, even Sergei. Everybody. We’re puppets, and my father holds our strings.”

  Sergei shook his head. “Always so melodramatic, my David – even as a boy, he was this way.”

  He turned to face us, as Dave and I stood together on the center line of the road. His shaved scalp gleamed faintly in the moonlight, and his face was lit from below by his phone.

  “But his words are the truth – there is no escape for men like us. Never.”

  Sergei cradled the smartphone in both han
ds, with one thumb hovering over the screen, and he looked straight at us.

  “I now deliver your father’s message, David. He wishes me to tell you that it is time to put away childish things and accept the responsibilities of a man. You are to come home immediately. If you fail to do so, there will be consequences. No matter where you run, no matter where you think to hide, he will seek you out, he will find you, and those who shelter you will pay the price. This price.”

  The world exploded in white light.

  7

  I sat in the road, watching the Jayhawk Tavern burn to the ground.

  The first explosion tore the building apart into matchsticks. Fire roared into the sky, as smoldering chunks of wood and metal and God knows what else rained down onto the road, the closest landing just short of us. Other pieces of Mom and Dad’s dream fell into the fields on either side of the blacktop, starting several small fires in the dry grass. A half-melted plastic booth landed on a barbed-wire fence, the mangled remains of a deep fryer tore a road sign – ‘Buckle Up, It’s The Law!’ – out of the ground, and a single block of steel that had to be the door to the walk-in cooler crashed onto the asphalt with a hollow boom.

  One fragment, a single fleck of metal no bigger than a fingernail, reached us. It hissed into range, pinged off the hood of the rental car, and vanished into the darkness. Sergei, standing next to the Corolla with his arms folded, raised an eyebrow and reached out to brush his fingers over what might have been a tiny scratch marring the paint. He muttered something in a language I couldn’t begin to identify, and his tone suggested that he was personally offended by the damage.

  More explosions thundered in the night, smaller catastrophes set off by the first blast. The vibrations thrummed through my body as I sat sprawled on the center line, and I ticked off the sources in my mind – the spare canisters of propane, gas cans to feed the emergency generator, the water heater …

  I noticed my truck was on fire.

  Dave crouched behind me, his arms wrapped around my body. He held me tight, protecting me when it was far too late for that, and he whispered something to me, his breath warm against my ear.

  I let him hold me. I heard what he said, but the meaning didn’t register.

  Smoke roiled above the blazing wreckage, lit from below by the flames. Across from what was left of my only source of income, the twisted and scorched bulk of the dumpster lay on the gravel shoulder of the road. A few singed napkins spiraled down out of the sky like dying birds.

  Some distant part of me was angry. Something inside my mind insisted that I should be on my feet and screaming, pummeling Dave with my fists and leaping at Sergei to tear his throat out.

  I didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t shout, I didn’t attack, I didn’t cry – I just sat there, watching my life burn away in the night.

  Shock is weird like that.

  Dave stayed with me. He held me close, he murmured into my ear again, again I didn’t hear him, and then he turned to say something to Sergei. My brain picked up on that at random, like a radio tuning in to a static-filled broadcast about nothing important.

  “C-4, right?”

  Sergei’s reply was a like a bulletin coming in from another planet – nothing to do with me, not at all.

  “Oh, yes. This particular batch was military surplus from the Slovak Republic – reliable, reasonably priced, and the detonators were controlled” – he waggled the smartphone – “by an app my nephew wrote himself. Anton is very good with the new technology.”

  “He always was a smart guy.”

  “A simple matter, a small job compared to most – but the next time, it may not be such a small thing. If you force me to do this again, it may be a bigger building, one with people inside, people whose lives will be sacrificed to your dream of escape. Will there be a next time, David?”

  Dave breathed his answer into my hair. “No.”

  “I thought not. You are a good-hearted boy. Take care that your father does not tear your kind heart from you and bury it in the earth, yes? Otherwise, you may become such a one as I am, and that would be a sad thing.”

  A siren howled, faint and far away. Another joined it, closer and stronger, and then two more. Dogs for miles around cut loose with yips and howls of their own, and distant lights, red and blue, flashed off the tower of smoke rising from the ruins of my bar.

  “And now the authorities come – always a delicate moment for a man in my position, and so I must leave you.”

  Sergei thrust his phone back into his jacket and walked around to the driver’s side door of his anonymous rental sedan. He pulled open the door, brisk and business-like, and then I heard words come out of my mouth.

  “How did he get his hooks into you, Sergei?”

  He stopped and turned to look at me, as he stood next to the open car door.

  “I do not understand. Explain, please?”

  My voice belonged to someone else. “How did Dave’s dad get you running and fetching and doing his dirty work for him? You’re not his son, so what hold does he have on you?”

  I wasn’t sure why I cared.

  Sergei stared. The sirens came closer. The flames crackled and spat. I heard a rumbling that sounded like the one and only truck belonging to our town’s volunteer fire department.

  Sergei’s voice was colder than Antarctica.

  “I have already said that long ago, in another time and place, I was much like your David – I too was an idealist, full of plans and bold dreams. I say now that in those days I also had a woman, as he has you. She did not look like you, she was small and quiet and shy, but she had your spirit. She was courage and kindness through to her bones, and she loved me – I do not know why, I have always questioned her taste in this matter, but she did.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “David’s father happened.”

  Sergei ducked into the car and slammed the driver’s door shut behind him. He backed up and then turned and pulled onto the road in front of us, with the Corolla’s nose pointing in the opposite direction from the oncoming flurry of sirens.

  The man who blew up my life vanished into the night just in time. I watched his red taillights winking out of sight as he hung a left and disappeared behind a line of scrubby trees a quarter of a mile away, and I wondered about the woman who had loved him.

  I wondered what Dave’s father had done.

  I wondered who was the real monster here.

  ***

  Cassie went away somewhere after Sergei left. She was still there beside me, soft and warm in my arms, and I never wanted to let her go – but the real Cassie, the one who would spit in the devil’s eye and kick ass like an Amazon warrior if the situation called for it, was hiding.

  She didn’t say a word for the longest time. She clung to me, and I did all the talking – to the firefighters, to nearby ranch families who came to see if they could help, to a sleepy reporter from the town paper, and to various random somebodies who had nothing better to do in the middle of the night than show up and stand around gawking at someone else’s misfortune.

  I also talked to that incompetent jackass who called himself a sheriff, although what I really wanted to do was punch him in his fat, smirking face. I had to spin a story for the guy, though, like it or not, because I knew even a cursory investigation of the burning remains of the building would find traces of the C-4. If that stuff came to light, agents from the FBI and maybe even Homeland Security would be called in – and they’d be people who knew what they were doing, people who’d ask questions that I didn’t dare answer.

  So I explained that the bar’s propane tank had been leaking lately, and a spark from the building’s haphazard wiring must have set it off, and yes, it surely was a terrible tragedy. The idiot bought it like a cat swallows cream, he said something condescending and not at all comforting to Cassie – she didn’t even look up, just kept staring at the bar while the firefighters hosed it down – and then he swaggered away, thumbs hooked in h
is belt and doubtless thinking about what a great job he was doing for the people of the county. Asshole.

  Not that I could talk. I was the one who was lying, I was the coward who was grateful my shell-shocked girlfriend was way too out of it to ask questions – like how her new boyfriend happened to know so much about military-grade plastic explosives, and why he was on a first-name basis with a man who was on every terrorist watchlist in the world.

  All I could do was try to make this right, somehow. Cassie was just the latest in a long line of people who lost everything thanks to my father, but at least she was one person I could help. A new life for her was a phone call away – a life full of every shiny thing money could buy, a life without bills or work, a life where she could follow her dream of becoming a veterinarian.

  Somebody deserved to come out on the right side of this mess, and I decided it would be Cassie.

  I just prayed she’d never find out that the price tag on her dream was written in blood.

  8

  Dorothy put the dry fields and farms of Kansas in her rear-view mirror by riding a tornado out of town; I left courtesy of a Bell 525 Relentless helicopter that probably cost more than the entire town of Eli Springs.

  Somewhere during the sirens and the concerned faces and the flames and the reeking clouds of smoke and the loss of everything I had, Dave asked to borrow my phone.

  I pulled the phone out of the front pocket of my jeans like a dog trained to do a not-very-interesting trick. I popped it into his hand, and I never looked away from my burning, utterly dead and gone bar.

  “Here. Go for it, call Timbuktu or Grand Rapids or Mars if you want – somebody might as well use it before it’s cut off because I can’t pay the bill, seeing as how I no longer have any source of income whatsoever.”

  It’s as strange as a two-headed cow to hear yourself talking like someone who isn’t even there. As previously stated, shock and confusion and absolute loss do weird things to your brain.