Two years, and now she was working in a strip club, her long legs falling out of a slutty black skirt and cheap sequined tops.
Okay. Not what I’d expected.
But technically, none of my business.
I owed Kyril a few things, but I’d promised him only one: to keep her out of the wrong hands. I had never promised I wouldn’t let Natalia turn into a whore. It was disappointing. Sad. A little bit of a waste. Well, once I got a look at her, it was actually a huge waste.
But not my problem, and I’m not the kind of guy who takes on problems if they aren’t mine.
I don’t know why I kept Jake on her. He was a real inept guy, not even in the game, but I must have been paranoid. I know a lot of people would think I’m stupid. But for me, my word is my word, whether anyone will ever find out about or it not.
On the other hand, if I hadn’t have been paranoid, I guess I never would have found out that Natalia was being a whore for Andrej Sulov.
By himself, Andrej isn’t a very big piece of shit in this shithouse.
But it was too close to the line.
Because eventually, one of those asshole associates of his was going to recognize Kyril’s daughter.
And that, unfortunately, was my problem.
I’m not a funny guy. I don’t make jokes and I haven’t laughed in probably ten years. It’s part of the deal.
But it was hard not to laugh at Natalia, who was going by Natalie Paulson, as she wobbled into that room on those clear plastic heels.
Don’t get me wrong: she looked hot. But it’s my ‘job’ to notice details, and those shoes were a half size too big, which wouldn’t have stopped a real stripper, but it was pretty clear that Natalia was not that.
Interesting. And not much interests me, even something I’ve given my word about, even gorgeous women, especially gorgeous women, who fill a need that is pretty obvious and not much else.
Natalia’s sass to Andrej piqued my interest, mostly because I was curious what sort of ‘deal’ she had going on with him, and now that she looked like a newborn colt walking around in a costume that was so obviously not hers, I hated to admit it: I was curious.
Curiosity, though, killed the cat, and in a business like mine, you need to be curious about things that matter. And in the end, it didn’t really matter why Natalia Karkarov was such a bad stripper.
It also didn’t matter that when I touched her, she sent an electric shock through me. All that mattered was that Natalia Karkarov got the message: she needed to get out of town.
I’m not sure why I handled it the way I did. I don’t make it a secret that I like control, especially in bed, but I don’t handle business that way. My plan had been to terrify her, make her see how dangerous it was to be working in a strip joint, make her think I was going to kill her. Andrej was going to break it up, and she was going to wise up and leave of her own accord.
Instead, I tied her up and spanked her, and she didn’t react at all the way I wanted her to.
All it did was leave me wanting more of her.
I was actually glad I had to stop it, knowing that Andrej was coming back, because she was getting to me in a way I never intended.
Things were calmed down by the time I got away from her. She came flying out the back door and caught a cab. She didn’t even look back.
I lifted my fingers to my nose, to smell her scent, and for just one second I lost control again.
And that’s when she looked back.
I turned on the lights. She lifted her chin—such a defiant little vixen, exactly the kind of thing I would love to slowly mold into submission. The wind picked up her hair.
There was something more to her, too.
Go away, I thought.
And she did.
I leaned my head back against the seat.
Kyril was dead, and I was the only person on earth who knew what I had promised him, or what he had done for me. I could easily walk away from all of this and never think about it again.
I rolled to the end of the alley. Turned on the left blinker. Her cab had gone to the right.
“Leave it,” I said aloud to myself.
When I had turned the lights on, the flash of them had washed over her: navy eyes, pouty lips, fear in her expression, defiance held up against me like a shield. I could still smell her on my fingers.
I turned right.
Chapter Three
Natalie
At the end of Brighton Avenue, you’re back in the suburbs. The road gets narrower and narrower until it hits a T at a gated community. I’d never been this far east before.
The cabbie stopped at the intersection. “Left or right?”
The cab ride had been $72.50 so far.
I looked to the left and saw one of those strip malls with the same set of restaurants and stores in them: Chili’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Chapters. I slipped the hundred at him. “I’ll get out here,” I said.
It seemed like nothing could go wrong in a strip mall like that.
The cabbie shrugged.
I got out and walked across the street toward the strip mall. Nothing was open, but I walked like I had somewhere to go. The cabbie had been starting to give me the creeps, and I just needed to be alone to have some time to think.
I didn’t look back. I was in the middle of a part of town I never went to, and I didn’t belong here; this was a place for soccer moms and people with regular jobs. It was where I wanted to be, but I was keenly aware that with my strip-club eye shadow and tight sequined shirt, jeans and shoes, and the bag full of money at my side, I was going to get into some kind of trouble if I ran into anyone.
I walked around the Chapters and to the back of the building, which was still well-lit, and pretty clean; there was a dumpster but it wasn’t a dumpster from my part of town. This was not the kind of dumpster bodies ended up in.
I looked around, and seeing nothing and no one, slid down the side of the wall and listlessly opened my bag.
My bottom burned, reminding me of what had just happened.
That guy. Fuck. What the fuck was he about?
And why did I hate him so much, for obvious reasons, but have the feelings I did when I thought about him?
“You are so fucked in the head,” I told myself, as a micro-fantasy flitted through my mind. What would it be like to have a man like that inside of you? And the way he had touched me.
I shifted on my sore bottom.
What the hell kind of wacko comes in to watch a girl strip, spanks her, doesn’t screw her, and then just leaves, leaving ten thousand dollars on the table?
I had no idea, and I had even less of an idea why I would be having the physical reaction to him that I did. Or why I would be thinking about him as anything other than a twisted fuck I had been lucky to get away from.
“What the hell,” I muttered. I opened my bag to take stock of my situation. Focus was what I needed.
A quick leaf-through of the money revealed that, unless it was counterfeit, it was, in fact, ten thousand dollars.
But I was no dummy. That money would have to be... I didn’t know... laundered somehow. I didn’t know much about the mob or the FBI or how it all intersected at Kitty Bang Bang—these were things I had decided not to think about and were coming back to bite me in the ass, almost literally. But if this guy was mob, I was in trouble, and if the guy was some sort of wacko Fed, I needed some unmarked bills.
I had watched my fair share of movies.
Okay, I thought. Okay, okay, okay...
I had some lipstick, socks for some reason, which I put on, Kleenex, and a pack of cigarettes from like six months before, when a girl named Janine had told me to hold onto them.
I peered inside, as if there would be something in there that would give me an answer. There was a lighter inside the cigarette pack.
I didn’t smoke, because I couldn’t afford it, but I decided that if ever there was a time, it was then. What the hell else was I going to do? I had no phone, it was t
hree in the morning, the suburbanite shops wouldn’t open until nine, I was probably going to get mugged with this wad of cash, and I had a sneaking suspicion that heading back to my own part of town was a dumb idea.
I lit the cigarette and looked disdainfully at the bushes on the other side of the parking lot.
I guessed I could hide in there until dawn.
And then what?
Common sense told me to just blow this Popsicle stand. But what would I do? Where would I go?
For a moment, I had a pleasant daydream about disappearing into the country somewhere. With ten thousand dollars, I’d have enough to rent something, chill out, and figure out what to do next.
But there was school, and hell if I was ditching that now.
And then, descending on me like a black cloud, the real reason I couldn’t do that: Lucy.
I leaned my head back against the cinderblock.
What the fuck was I going to do? Who the hell was this guy?
My thoughts felt like they were moving through mud.
“Look,” I said, to no one in particular, not even myself. “You can see the stars.”
Bright, pink, green, and neon blue stars...
Chapter Four
Alaric
“What the hell are you doing?” I heard myself say.
I turned on Assobine Avenue, way at the end of town where the upper middle-class plebes live, oblivious that anything but brunch and Starbucks goes on in the world. Natalia had finally emerged from the taxi she’d caught, and now she was strolling into a strip mall like she knew where she was going.
I went down a street, but when I looked in the mirror, I saw that she had no idea she was being followed, so I turned off the lights and swung around into the parking lot behind a Starbucks.
I was used to tracking down thugs, who are paranoid, or higher-ups, who have usually been trained in some kind of counter-surveillance. So my first thoughts were that Natalia had a plan.
But no: she just sat down behind a Chapters bookstore. In plain sight. And didn’t even watch her ass.
Fuck.
I had gone into the situation half-cocked. Normally, my targets were men, and normally the job was something else entirely. I should have just scared Natalia the old-fashioned way. I should have researched her better, more like a target, less like a debt. And one thing I definitely shouldn’t have done—or be doing—was think about Natalia the way I was thinking about her.
I could see a few things more clearly now: Natalia was in way over her head, and she didn’t understand the game at all. What I couldn’t figure out is what kind of deal she’d struck with Andrej, or how she even struck it.
What was my plan? I didn’t even have a good explanation for why I was watching her. Something about her attracted me to her, but hell if I was going to let that kind of muddied thinking rise to the surface of my mind. I had done what I needed to do—in fact, I’d gone above and beyond any kind of call of duty that could be expected, considering that it would cost me nothing to leave town, right then, and get on with my life.
The thing I’d learned about this life, though, was that if you don’t live up to your code, you have to live with that forever.
But I had lived up to it. I’d kept an eye on Natalia, and I’d scared her off working for Andrej. There was no reason I couldn’t just walk away with a clear conscience.
No reason.
Pretty hair, soft blue eyes, a soft, helpless center masquerading under a tough exterior and long legs—these were not reasons to get involved. In anything. You could find a hot girl anywhere. I could get any girl I wanted.
But Natalia had something that intrigued me, whether I was ready to admit it to myself or not.
So there I was, getting involved in something I did not have to do. Breaking Rule #1 in this game: above all things, if you want to get out alive, look out for yourself, and only yourself. If you’re doing anyone a favor, do it because it pays you.
This had a payoff of zero. Zero street cred, zero rep, zero money, zero code, zero clear conscience. So what the fuck was I doing?
I was not too far from her when she lit up a cigarette. It wasn’t hard to sneak up on her, and I’m good at what I do. So I heard her distinctly when she said there were stars, and then she fell over. Went down like a dead body.
My thoughts went first to a sniper. She crumpled so quickly, my first thought was a sniper. Drugs never occurred to me. Jake had only seen her remain sober when everyone else did them.
I scanned the area. Nothing.
Gun in hand, all my senses on alert, I crept toward her.
Nothing.
I felt her pulse. It was weak, slow, her respiration shallow. “Natalia,” I said.
Nothing.
It’s not a good idea, I thought.
It’s not a good idea to carry a woman’s body slung over your shoulder through a parking lot and into your car. Always a chance of CCTV, always a chance someone will be looking. I needed the city cops looking for me like I needed a swarm of mosquitoes in my face.
But I had this nagging voice, or feeling, gnawing at me: I couldn’t just leave her there. Why not? She was nothing to me, I’d given it a shot, I’d paid off my debt, I couldn’t control an out-of-control girl who was too stupid to get lost when she was told to and given the money to do it.
Instead I started thinking: the chance that anyone would see me here in the clean, crime-free suburbs at this hour of night was actually a lot less than anywhere else. And people only look at CCTV if they have a reason to.
Natalia wasn’t going to give anyone a reason. She had no family, and she was from Brighton Heights, which meant whenever she stopped showing up somewhere, people would figure she’d ended up like all the other girls from Brighton Heights: dead or somewhere else.
Even as I scooped her up and tossed her over my shoulder, I was still trying to talk myself into the rules I swore by. But once I had her in my arms, there was no way I was going to dump her back on the ground, no matter how many times I said I would.
Her weight was light, but dead weight was dead weight—I’d know, I’d carried a lot of it. It wasn’t a cakewalk to move quickly and get her into the car, and the fastest way to do that was to toss her over my shoulder. That’s when she puked, and it was pretty clear what had happened.
“God. Damn. It,” I muttered.
I laid her out in the back seat and took her pulse again—still weak, but about where it was before—and then I drove to avoid a tail, just in case, before pulling over and taking my kit from the back seat.
It was a standard paramedic supply of drugs, including dosable Narcan, which seemed like the likeliest candidate. No harm if it doesn’t work. Just 0.1 mg, just enough to keep her alive. I injected it, waited, and felt the return of her pulse. One tenth of a milligram more.
Not enough to wake her up.
She made a sound, and stirred, which was a good sign of two things: one, not a heavy user. Two, she was going to be okay.
I drove out to my place in the Highlands. It was a temporary measure until she was stabilized.
And then, me and Miss Karkarov, or Paulson, or whatever she was going by, were going to have a really serious talk.
Chapter Five
Natalie
The first thing I felt was hot, which was about normal in the crappy apartment I rented, with no air. I slept with the windows closed because everyone yelling on the street kept me awake. So I wasn’t tipped off right away to anything being strange. My memory didn’t catch up just because I woke up. In fact, I had the idea I’d been out drinking—which I rarely did, but when I did, I usually overdid it.
Covers.
I kicked them off like a reflex, and that’s when things started happening. It was cold in the air around me.
My eyes flew open. Instead of my dingy apartment, dim light from the narrow space between my window and the brick wall of another apartment building edging from behind a ratty curtain, this room was bathed in a pale blue li
ght. Instead of patchwork furniture I’d practically fished out of the dumpster, one expensive-looking and modern, perfectly clean table rested against a spotless white wall. A blue orchid plant almost four feet tall was the only object on a shelf.
Beneath me, very soft, sweet-smelling sheets caressed my skin, on a non-lumpy mattress.
Hotel?
I sat up.
A soreness in my arm registered with me, but I paid it little attention because all of the events from the day before started coming into my head—all but how I got here. I vaguely remembered a taxi ride to get away from that psycho guy... the money... shit. What had I done?
A quick survey of the room indicated that there was no one else in it. It didn’t look like a hotel. I couldn’t say why, it just... didn’t.
I scanned for my purse.
Nowhere in sight.
I looked down at my arm, and two very bad pieces of information came into view.
One, I was naked.
Two, I had an IV in my arm.
I jerked the covers back up over my body.
The light in the room was getting brighter, and a blue orb on the desk where it came from was fading to purplish pink. It was actually a very pleasant way to wake up—if you happen to know where you are, and you don’t have an IV in your arm, and you don’t have a set of memories that began with getting spanked by a random stranger, trailing off into a fog of taxi rides and money and strip malls...
I couldn’t see my purse. I couldn’t see my clothes. I didn’t want to get up and walk around, but what else was there to do?
I surveyed the IV situation. It looked pretty professional, which at first reassured me, but then I took for a bad sign. Drugged? Probably. Serial killer danger level was getting pretty high.
For a second, that thought gripped me by the guts and I almost completely lost my shit, thinking about Hannibal Lecter and all that.
But I was fairly practiced at getting my cool back. Panic was not the remedy for anything.
His for the Taking Page 3
