Chapter 11
“ Y ou should have eaten more at breakfast,” Rurik says two hours into the final stretch of our drive home.
He’s sworn I’ll be at Megan’s place by late afternoon, but he won’t tell me why Megan’s place isn’t our apartment.
“I ate enough.” I pull my feet up onto the seat with me and lean my head against the headrest.
“I can hear your stomach growling from here.”
“Well, don’t listen.” I am hungry, but I’m not giving him the satisfaction of knowing it.
I eye the mini-iPad tucked into the side pocket of his duffel bag in the back seat. After a short search of the cabin this morning, he found it tucked beneath a stack of dirty magazines sitting on the nightstand.
Seeing what sort of condition the magazines had been in, I took an extra-hot, extra-long shower. I can’t believe we slept in that bed.
“What’s on the iPad?” I ask, after the silence starts strangling me.
“Information.”
“What sort of information?”
“The sort that costs a lot of money to keep safe.” He turns the radio on, switching over to the car play. Opera music fills the car.
I sit up and turn to look at him with curiosity. This guy– this rough-looking, leather-wearing, gun-wielding Bratva enforcer– is listening to opera .
On purpose.
“What?” he snaps when he feels me staring.
“Nothing.” I lean away. “I just didn’t peg you for an opera sort of guy.”
“Why? What does an opera sort of guy look like?” He throws on a forced midwestern American accent when he asks his question.
I think he’s trying to mock me.
“I don’t know.” I fold my arms over my chest. “More like a business guy? Tailored suit, slicked back hair, fancy shoes. You know, like the guy in Pretty Woman .”
He cocks an eyebrow. “Pretty woman?”
“Yeah, the movie. ”
He shakes his head, like he has no idea what I’m talking about.
“You’ve never seen it?”
“I don’t watch a lot of television.” He frowns.
I wonder if he ever has any sort of downtime. Does the mafia give paid vacations?
“It’s not TV, it’s a movie. An old one, too. So right up your alley.”
“Old?” He laughs. “I am only seven years older than you.”
“How do you know how old I am?”
“I know a lot about you, Mira Pierce.” He glances at me with this look that sets my insides on fire.
It’s his voice. He’s clearly mastered the deep, dark, and dirty voice that turns my body to mush.
“My name and my birthday?” I laugh. “You probably looked at my driver’s license when I was sleeping.”
He chuckles.
“You’re twenty-three years old, turning twenty-four this thanksgiving.
Your mother lives with her fifth husband in Brazil, but you don’t speak to her very often.
Your father is on his third marriage to a woman named Barb who sells cemetery plots and lives in Florida, but you don’t talk to him. Ever.”
My jaw drops as he continues.
“You’ve lived with Megan Reed for the last three years. You are allergic to strawberries and penicillin. Hate fish, but love shrimp. You have a sensitive spot just behind your left ear that makes you giggle when it’s bit, and another spot just inside?— ”
“Okay! Okay!” I stop him before he starts to list all of the things he’s found out about me in the last twelve hours while we were supposed to be sleeping at the cabin. “You’ve made your point. How the hell do you know all of that?”
He lifts a shoulder like it’s not that big of a deal. “When you know where to look it’s not hard.”
Before I can question him further, the music cuts out and a call comes through the dash. The name Sasha flashes just before he takes the call.
“I have it,” Rurik says. “There was a small problem. He didn’t make it.”
Sasha says something in Russian I don’t understand, but it makes Rurik grin, so I suppose it’s not more trouble.
The conversation goes on for several minutes, and since Sasha keeps it in Russian, I have no idea what’s going on. But when Rurik finally ends the call, there’s a dark cloud hanging over his expression.
“Is something wrong?” I swallow. “Was that guy like some big mafia guy? Are you in trouble now because?—”
“Mira.” He puts a hand on my knee, squeezing. “I told you, he was no one worth grieving over.”
“Someone might not think that.”
“He wasn’t married. Had no children. He was a piece of shit who deserved a much worse death than I gave him.” He looks over at me again, and I can see he’s telling the truth.
Every one of my exes lied, and about the dumbest things.
Some were small lies, like when Erik swore he didn’t eat the last of the Oreos even though I found the empty package sitting next to him while he played video games.
Others were a little bigger, like when Travis swore he wasn’t sleeping with the blond bartender even though her panties were stuffed beneath his pillow.
I’ve become quite the human lie detector, and there are no falsehoods detected in Rurik’s eyes.
“Okay, then what’s wrong? I may not understand Russian, but I understand tone, and your tone got really hard there at the end. So did Sasha’s.”
His nostrils flare with his heavy sigh.
“Calloway is still looking for you. There’s been an unmarked car outside your apartment building several times in the last week. Seems he’s really wants to talk to you.”
“I’ve already told him I don’t know anything.” Which is a complete lie, but ratting out the mobster who killed Nico and would easily do the same to me carries much graver consequences.
“He’s just looking at Marco for the death of your boyfriend?” Disdain drips from his words, but I can’t tell if it’s because he’s talking about Marco or referring to Nico.
“I don’t know.” Another lie. Detective Calloway kept me in that interrogation room for two hours. He was very clear what he wanted from me.
“Mira. I can’t fix this if you’re not honest with me.” Rurik’s voice lowers. “No more lies. Why is he so intent on talking to you?”
Rurik killed a man to keep me safe less than twenty-four hours ago, if I can’t trust him, I’m not sure there’s a single man on the planet who can be trusted.
And yet, I hesitate .
This could just be my normal reaction to any man who pays me the right sort of attention. I get a little butterfly sputtering in my insides at the right smile, right tone of voice, and my heart is off to the races in love.
Not this time.
This time, I have to think with my head. Leave whatever fanciful notions I’ve carried about love to the fairytales, because that’s all it is.
Fiction.
“He wants to go after Marco for anything he can. He already knows about the drugs he sells, but he doesn’t have anything solid enough to go after him for it,” I explain.
“So, he wants you to help him? Testify against Marco or something like that?”
“He didn’t say anything about that. He just asked about Nico, insisting I knew what happened. And then he started asking about the drugs. Was Nico dealing for Marco? That sort of thing. Then he started pressuring me to help him get Marco on a wire about the drugs.”
“He wanted you to wear a wire?” Rurik’s angry tone is back, at least it’s not aimed at me this time.
“Yeah. I said I didn’t know anything about anything. That I wasn’t sure what Nico was doing, and I didn’t know any Marco DeAngelo.” I glance at the mile maker as we pass. We’re almost home.
“But he’s still looking for you.”
“A dog with a bone, that detective,” I mutter as I reach into my bag .
We’re close enough now, I pull my original cellphone from the bottom of the bag.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to try calling Megan. We’re basically in town, so even if I ping a cell tower, what does it matter? Now that we’re here.”
“We’ll be at Alexander’s soon; don’t turn it on. When we’re home tonight, do it then. Your cell can’t be tracked there.”
“Why?”
“Because I have jammers that prevent tracking and surveillance.”
“Wait.” I drop the phone back into the bag and turn to him. “Did you say when we get home?”
“I did.” He nods, changing lanes so he can merge into the exit lane soon.
“If the cops are outside my apartment, it would be smarter to stay with Megan for a few days, right? Do you think this Alexander might be okay with that?”
Aside from which, we’re going to need at least a full night and day for us to catch up on everything crazy thing that’s happened.
“You’re not going back to your apartment, no,” he agrees, a little too quickly. “But you won’t be staying at Alexander’s, either. You’ll come home with me, where you belong.”
Okay. Did I miss something, somewhere?
“What the hell are you talking about? I don’t belong at your house.”
“Mira.” It’s a warning shot .
He’s suggesting with one word that I don’t push him. But yeah, I’m gonna push him.
If I could reach across and get his door open, I might just shove him out of the car.
“Rurik. It’s a nice offer, but really, once you drop me with Megan, you can go on your merry way.”
Isn’t that what he told me he was going to do anyway? I would become Alexander’s problem once he dropped me on his doorstep?
“No.”
“I’m not going home with you.”
“Yes, you are.”
I laugh, because he’s back to making me want to rip his eyes out.
“No, caveman, I am not.”
“I protect what’s mine. You’ll come home with me.”
“What’s yours?” I swallow around the arrogance he’s just shoved down my throat. “I’m not yours. I’m not anyone’s.”
“That may have been true yesterday, but last night changed things.”
“Last night?” Oh, the mind-blowing, soul-exploding sex.
That’s what he’s talking about. “Rurik, we’re not a couple just because we had sex.
It was a one-night thing. I know you’re of a much older, conservative, generation but these days you don’t have to date a woman in order to go to bed with them. ”
His knuckles go white as he grips the steering wheel tighter. Maybe it was the dig at his age. He seems to get a little peeved when I remind him he’s older than me .
And it’s not that much, I know, but it gets a rile out of him. And he’s sexy as hell when he’s riled.
“One.” He holds up a finger. “And we’re not dating.”