Chapter 2 #2
Allie grabs the bottle and we go into the closest room so we can at least slather our butts in private. She pumps some into her palm and then hands it to Yulia. Slipping a hand in her pants, she sighs in relief when the cool gel hits her skin.
“It’s like boiling a lobster,” she says while I take the bottle after Yulia. “It’s so slow you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late.”
“Oh god that feels good,” I say, rubbing the cool gel all over my backside. “We’re not going to be able to sit down. What are we going to say happened?”
“No one will notice,” Allie says while Yulia and I share a look.
“They better not,” I say, “because I plan on taking this incident to the grave. My brothers will never let me live this down if they find out.”
“I don’t want my brother finding out either,” Yulia says and then grimaces. “Or my dad.”
“Well, I definitely don’t want Dima finding out,” Allie mutters, the mere thought of my cousin finding out has her setting her mouth in a hard line. “He will never let me hear the end of it if he finds out I’ve burnt my ass.”
Yulia, ever the softie, gives her a dimpled smile and says, “Don’t worry, we’re gonna keep this a secret. No one will find out. We’ll make excuses to not sit down in front of everyone, and none of us will say a word. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Allie and I say in unison.
With that settled, we quickly change into clothes and let the guards know we’re ready to head back.
They manage to not openly laugh when we remain standing for the rest of the trip.
In less than an hour, we’re pulling up to the dock outside my Uncle Vasya’s property.
Allie’s eyes scan the shoreline, and when she doesn’t see anyone, her shoulders relax only to tighten up again when Bran and Dima come walking out from the house that’s overlooking the beach.
I can see glimpses of the other houses on the property through the tree line, but Max and Talia’s house is too far down the coast to see from here.
“Wonderful,” Allie mutters. “I was hoping to at least be able to sit on a bag of ice before I had to be around people and fake it.”
She goes to grab her stuff while our cousins each get on a four-wheeler to make their way to us. I wave at them and when they’re walking on the dock towards us, I sign, How’s it going?
Bran grins and shoots a quick look at his brother. Lyra threw up on him this morning.
Yulia and I both laugh while Dima says, “Only because I’m her favorite.”
We’ve all gotten so used to ASL that it feels completely natural to sign and speak everything we say.
Bran joined our family when he was three.
My Aunt Nina runs a women’s shelter in the city, and one morning someone dropped him off and never came back.
He was quickly adopted into the family. He was five when I was born, so I’ve never known a life without him.
We have no idea who his birth parents were, and none of us cares. He’s one of us, a Medvedev to his core.
Have fun? Bran asks.
Before I can answer, Allie whizzes past and signs, Yeah, it was great.
Dima steps closer to help her off the boat, but she waves him off and jumps down on her own.
“Just trying to help, Allie cat,” he teases, using the nickname he gave her when we were kids, the one that never fails to earn him a scowl.
Today is no different and when he sees the look on her face, he laughs and starts to walk back to shore while he calls over his shoulder to her, “Hurry your ass up! Your dad asked me to bring you home.”
Bran reaches for her bag, and she hands it over to him with a much nicer smile.
When it becomes clear that Dima expects Allie to ride behind him on the four-wheeler, she shoots us a panicked look before straightening her spine, determined to not let on how much this is going to hurt.
Yulia and I both groan in sympathy as we watch Allie sit on the back.
Her cringe is visible from here, and my own ass throbs at knowing how much pain she’s in.
It doesn’t help that Dima takes off like a bat out of hell, hitting the trail that goes up into the woods, the one that’s filled with a million bumps and dips.
“Jesus, her ass is going to be one giant bruise by the time he drops her off,” Yulia says.
We wave goodbye as one of the guards guides the boat away from the dock so we can make our way down the coast to my house.
It’s not long before we get to my place, the long stretch of beach and woods as familiar to me as my own reflection.
There’s not an inch of this property that I don’t know about.
My brothers and I spent our childhoods exploring, and when I see Nyx come bounding down from the house, I smile at the sight of her.
My dad’s always had cane corsos. The three we grew up with passed away from old age, and it ripped a hole in all our hearts.
We’d all spent weeks mourning them before we could even bear the thought of getting another, but eventually my dad came home one day with three puppies, one for each of us, and Nyx has been glued to me ever since.
Her large black body races along the shore while her tail goes a mile a minute and she barks her excitement for all the world to hear.
Her coat is midnight black, and I’d been on a Greek mythology kick at the time, so I’d named her Nyx after the Goddess of the Night.
I think she’s perfect, and as soon as the boat is docked, I give Yulia a big hug goodbye and then go racing down the dock after shouting a quick thanks to the bodyguards.
The stoic nods I get in return are all I’d been expecting.
We were taught from a young age to not play too nice with the armed men on the payroll.
Allie’s, Tyoma’s, and Kostya’s dads are different.
They’re like extra uncles and are treated like family.
Ignoring my sore ass, I race along the dock and drop to my knees as soon as I hit the sand.
Nyx whines in excitement and barrels into me, nearly knocking me over with the force of her love.
I praise the hell out of her, kiss her head, and give her several minutes of belly scratching before she finally calms down enough to follow me up the path to the house.
We don’t have as much land as my Uncle Vasya, but there’s still plenty of acreage to make it feel secluded.
There are a couple of cabins on the property.
Our grandparents live in one of them, and my brothers have claimed the other one for themselves.
Sometimes they stay there, sometimes they stay at the main house.
They get up to a lot of things that I probably don’t want to ever know about.
Our dad’s mom lives at Uncle Vasya’s. She shares an apartment above the garage with Allie’s grandma.
It works out beautifully, and if you ignore the fact that anyone who’s not a member of the Bratva has to be escorted off the property and watched, then it really is perfect.
I glance down at the tattoo that marks my inner left forearm, the one I was given the day I turned eighteen.
Kostya’s dad gave it to me. Nikolai does the tattoos for everyone, and there’s no denying he’s a skilled artist. I trace a finger over the large bear and the Cyrillic letters beneath it that spell out our last name.
I’m not a member of the Bratva, but this mark proves I’m protected by it.
It’s a deterrent, but it’s not a guarantee I’ll never be hurt.
It’s a promise that if I am, the person responsible will be hunted down and given a slow, merciless death.
The thought makes me grin as I reach down to pet Nyx’s head before I open the back door and step inside. My mom is in the kitchen, and as soon as she sees me, she stops chopping vegetables for the large stew she’s making and gives me a big smile.
“I saw you get off the boat, but I didn’t want to interrupt your bonding with Nyx.” She laughs as she pulls me in for a hug. “She’s the biggest baby as soon as you leave. All she does is mope around no matter how much I try to keep her happy. Did you girls have fun at the island?”
“Yeah, we had a lot of fun,” I say, returning her hug and then grabbing a bottle of strawberry lemonade from the fridge.
I tell her all about how beautiful it was, how we slept in hammocks the first night because the sky was so clear and we wanted to see the stars and about all the food we ate. I leave out the sunburnt ass part.
“I’m glad you had fun. Your aunts and I are joining you next time. It’s been too long since we went to the island. Maybe we can convince Talia to sneak out for at least one night. She can pump beforehand, and I’m sure Max and the guys can handle one tiny baby.”
“Lyra’s a sweetheart. She’d probably just sleep the whole time,” I say.
“Exactly. Girls’ night it is.”
“What girls’ night?” I hear my dad ask before he walks in to join us. He stops to give me a big hug on the way to my mom and kisses my head. “Good to have you back, derevtse moyo.”
I grin at being called my little tree in Russian. It’s the nickname he gave me when I was little, and I’ve always loved it. We’re surrounded by Sitka Spruces, and my parents love the forest as much as my brothers and I do, so much so that they named me after the large, beautiful trees.
Hugging him back, I say, “Thanks, Dad. It’s good to be back.”
After he lets me go, he grabs my mom and kisses her before smacking her ass and making her laugh.
My parents are ridiculously in love, and even though my dad looks like the kind of guy who would make other men piss their pants, he’s never anything but sweet to his family.
He raised his voice one time when I was five, and I’d immediately started crying.
I think it broke his heart to see it, and he’s never been able to do it since.
Lucky for him I’m an angel, or at the very least I could be a lot worse, but I choose not to be.