Chapter Nine #2
My ears were ringing. I barely heard Drake’s final threat before he left me alone in the dining room.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Frozen. Ashamed. Unable to breathe. My tormented mind filled with repressed memories.
“Miss?” One of the restaurant busboys hovered nearby. “Do you need help?”
I smiled weakly and shook myself from the PTSD induced stupor, “I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”
I found my handbag and fled the restaurant. Out in the balmy early summer night, I wandered aimlessly down the crowded sidewalks. Memories I didn’t want to relive wouldn’t leave me alone. Feelings of shame and regret soured my stomach. Panic gripped my chest, squeezing like a vise.
Who else knew? Did everyone at work know? Were they all whispering about me behind my back? Making up salacious stories to explain my role at the company? Casting ugly aspersions at Brett who had only ever been a father to me? Who had fought to save me? To protect me?
“Elona Dushku?”
Startled by the sound of my name, I stopped and turned to my right. A man emerged from a doorway of a noodle shop, and I was taken aback by the all too familiar sight of him. What the hell was Luka doing here in Shanghai?
Except, as the man drew closer, I realized it wasn’t Luka. It was an eerily similar doppelganger.
“Kristo.” Not-Luka introduced himself with a pleasant smile. “I’m Luka’s cousin.”
“Elona.” I shook his hand, marveling at the similarities between the two men. The eyes. The beard. The nose. The chin. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were twins.”
“We get that a lot.” He gently reached out to take my arm and pull me out of the way as a boisterous group advanced on us. “What are you doing in Shanghai?”
“I’m on a work trip. You?” I had no idea what he did for a living. Probably something illegal.
“A work trip.” Kristo offered a lopsided smile. “That I’m failing at miserably.”
His candid reply surprised me. “I’m sorry.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you weren’t,” he said with a harsh laugh. “Luka sent me here to save the family, but I can’t make it work.”
My feelings of shame and panic fled immediately. My only priority now was figuring out what sort of financial mess my sister was about to enter. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“In a few days, we’ll be family,” I reminded him.
Kristo hesitated and then glanced around the busy street. “Not here.”
“I have a suite at the Peninsula. We could talk there.”
Kristo shook his head. “I don’t think that would be appropriate.”
His reply amused and surprised me. “We could go to yours instead.”
“That would definitely not be appropriate. How about a drink? I know a place nearby.”
“Yeah, I could use a drink.” Anything to wash the taste of that bitter discussion with Drake from my mouth.
The sound of thunder rippled through the night, and I glanced up toward the hazy sky.
I was definitely not dressed for sloshing through the flooding streets of Shanghai in my Alexandre Birman ankle tie heels. “Do you mind if I grab us a ride?”
“That’s fine.” He seemed equally as unsure about the weather turning on us.
I used my phone to order a ride share through DiDi. “Where are we going?”
Kristo rattled off the name of a laundromat and assured me, “I promise it’s actually a bar.”
“Okay.” I sent a screenshot of the address to Cheyenne, just in case, with a quick note about where I was going and with whom.
“I’m not going to kidnap you.” Kristo had been reading over my shoulder, and he frowned down at me.
“Do you mind?” I bumped him with my shoulder, not aggressively but enough to make my point. “Not that it’s any of your business, but Cheyenne and I have a pact. We never go anywhere without sending a message to the other.”
“That’s paranoid.”
“Better to be paranoid than dead,” I reasoned.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have ended up in prison if I’d been paranoid like that.”
I clocked the bitterness in his voice. “You were in prison?”
He nodded stiffly. “Twenty-two months. Al Wathba.”
“Abu Dhabi?” I recognized the name from a travel advisory packet the company had given me a few years ago before a trip to the UAE. “For what?”
“Allegedly, I was driving a car while drunk and caused a fatal accident.”
“Allegedly?”
“I was a passenger. Someone else was driving.”
“Someone else?”
He glanced away as if trying to hide something. “A friend.”
I narrowed my eyes at the way he clearly didn’t want to name that friend. “So why didn’t you fight the charges? I’ve been to Abu Dhabi. There are cameras everywhere. You can’t walk five feet without having your face scanned. Their streets are just as heavily surveilled.”
“The cameras weren’t working,” he grumbled. “Malfunctioned right before we crashed. I woke up in a hospital surrounded by police. A week later, I was in jail. Within a month, I was convicted and thrown in prison.”
“And no one from your family tried to pay off officials? Money will make anything disappear there.”
“Not my charges,” he muttered. “Luka was able to pay to shorten the sentence.”
“Which is why you only did two years.”
Kristo nodded. “I was lucky all things considered.”
I wasn’t sure I’d go that far. Frankly, I was shocked that Luka would have allowed his blood relative to suffer like that when a little more money might have solved the problem.
So much for family loyalty! It left me wondering what awaited my sister once she was Luka’s wife.
Would he protect her? Or would he sacrifice her as easily as he had his cousin?
A ride share car pulled up to the sidewalk, and I slipped into the backseat first. As Kristo followed, I made quick small talk with the driver who spoke English about as well as I spoke Mandarin. As the car merged into traffic, Kristo asked, “When did you learn Chinese?”
“I spent two summers in Singapore when I was in high school and picked up some useful Mandarin. I did a semester internship in Beijing during my bachelor’s and then another semester in Hong Kong where I learned some Cantonese.
I read better than I can speak. I’m conversational.
I still need a lot of work to master it. ”
He settled back in his seat and swiped at his phone screen. “Do you enjoy working for family?”
“I do. Do you?”
He smirked. “Some days are better than others.” He pocketed his phone. “What business were you handling tonight?”
I shifted in my seat but kept an eye on the windshield.
The drivers here were a bit too aggressive for my taste, and I always felt like I needed to have my hand braced on the door or the seat.
“Final negotiations on taking over the supply chain logistics in South and North America for a Shanghai-based company.”
“And you enjoy that?” Kristo asked with badly disguised distaste.
“I do. I like puzzles.” I studied him for a moment, taking in his obviously tailor-made suit and shoes. “What do you do?”
“A little of this and a little of that,” he replied with a coy smile. “Whatever Luka needs me to do.”
“Including coming to China to fail?”
He laughed harshly. “It seems so.” He inhaled a cleansing breath and pocketed his phone. “A few years ago, we inherited a large warehouse complex when a small outfit we financed defaulted on their loans.”
“Inherited? What was in it before?”
“It was a leather factory.”
I frowned as I tried to imagine how that would have made any financial sense. “Were you hoping they would default so you could get your hands on the real estate instead?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“We were looking ahead to the end of the truce and the return of some property that’s been kept from us. A trade route, if you will, and the warehouse complex is in a very useful part of a certain city near a certain port where things that aren’t leather arrive on ships.”
“Things?”
He gave me a look. “Narkotike.”
“Oh.” I suddenly regretted my decision to get into a car with him. In Albanian, I quickly instructed, “Don’t say anything else about that, please. Not here.”
He understood and eyed the driver who seemed to be totally oblivious to anything but the congested traffic and the K-Pop tune blaring out of his speakers.
“You’re here looking for something legitimate?” I asked, still in Albanian.
He nodded. “The complex has access to the port in Vlorre. We need some kind of trade, you understand?”
To launder money and hide shipments. “And you came here for it?”
“I’ve been to Hong Kong, Beijing and a few others. I can’t find anyone who will work with us.”
“The amount of business you’re offering isn’t enough to interest large companies. The headache of dealing with the government in Albania isn’t worth the small amount of profit I’d assume.”
“Harsh.” He frowned at me. “But not untrue.”
“What were you trying to get imported? Electronics?”
“We figured those would be the easiest to sell and move in large quantities.”
“We? You and Luka?”
Kristo nodded. “Why? What’s wrong with our plan?”
I snorted indelicately. “Where should I begin?”
“Ouch.”
“You asked.”
“Well, you could be a little more diplomatic about calling us idiots.”
“Why?”
He made a choking sound. “I see why you got under Luka’s skin.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I bristled at his remark.
“He hasn’t stopped talking about you since he came back to Tirana,” Kristo explained. “Elona this and Elona that. You really unsettled him.”
That was the last thing I wanted to hear. Luka thinking about me? Talking about me?
But it was bit hypocritical of me to be mad at him for having my name in his mouth when I had been dreaming of having his mouth between my legs, serving me, apologizing to me.
“If anyone should be complaining, it’s me about him,” I shot back a bit dramatically. “He called me a pig in my mother’s house.”
Kristo stiffened in shock. “He did what?”
“You heard me.”