15. Yuri
FIFTEEN
Yuri
I storm into Kotya’s woodworking shed. I wish the door were the kind I could easily slam shut, but the sliding door remains wide open.
Kotya doesn’t even hear me approaching because he’s busy with the tablesaw.
It deflates some of my anger because I can’t take it out on anyone immediately. I end up sitting on the rocking chair in the corner. It’s one of the pieces Konstantin is working on restoring. So far, all he’s done is sand the veneer away.
I rock angrily, until Kotya finishes cutting whatever he’s working on and turns the saw off.
He inspects the pieces, and after a few seconds he deems them satisfactory and sets them down on the workbench.
I glare at him, willing him to fucking notice me already.
I don’t think I’m psychic, but he does pull the face mask and the ear mufflers off and finally turns to face me.
Maybe he did notice me enter.
“What’s wrong?” he asks in Russian.
“Nothing,” I answer, although my tone of voice and the tension in my body instantly contradict me .
Kotya rolls his eyes. “If nothing’s wrong, help me with these new cabinet fronts.”
I huff but walk over to see what he’s working on. The pieces he’d cut look like molding, and they match the drawers on the cabinet next to the workbench. One drawer has been removed completely.
I don’t know why he bothers with this stuff. It’s not like he can’t afford to buy new furniture.
“Here, hold the piece steady while I glue this on.” Kotya applies wood glue along the bottom of the molding, then lays it down on the flat wood of what I assume will be a cabinet face. I hold everything in place while he checks that it’s aligned properly and clamps it down.
We repeat that until all four pieces of the molding are set.
When it’s done, I start to move back to the rocking chair, but Kotya grabs my arm. “Tell me. You didn’t come here just to sulk.”
He knows me well enough. If I’d wanted to just sulk, I could have done that in my own room, or on my bike. Hell, that would have been the better choice to clear my head.
Except I would have remembered Sierra’s arms around me, or her hands near my cock, teasing me.
“Nikolai and Sierra are back from her classes,” I say, a little subdued.
Kotya releases me and eyes me steadily. “Did she misbehave?”
“No.” I stuff my hands into my pockets. I hate that I feel like a stupid teenager now. I shouldn’t be this emotional about something as silly as Sierra having had a boyfriend. “Nikolai and I fucked her over the kitchen island.”
“Sounds hot,” Kotya says. He walks over to the industrial sink and washes his hands. “Did she fight you?”
“I guess.” I shrug. “It wasn’t the fuck that pissed me off.”
“So what did?” Kotya dries his hands, then turns his full attention to me. “You’ve been acting strange, Yura. Nikolai said you were mad we claimed Sierra, but she’s exactly your type. You were excited to take her on the bike ride, but you come back even more upset. And now you fuck her, and are more angry than ever? ”
When he lays it out like that, I really do seem irrational.
“It isn’t because of her,” I say.
Kotya raises his brows at me. “Are you jealous? Do you think she’s stealing my attention?”
“No!” I interject immediately. “It’s not like that.”
Of course, my protests sound hollow, when it was exactly like that a few years ago, before we’d arrived in New Bristol. There’d been this lovely piece of ass back in Russia that had her eye on Kotya, and I’d done everything in my power to scare her away.
Maybe if she’d agreed to fuck both of us, it would have been different.
She’d called me a little boy, though, not worthy of her time. Fuck, I don’t want to think about that memory.
Konstantin blew her off after a few months, though, and soon after, we got sent to America.
“Are you jealous, because you want her all to yourself?” Kotya asks in his steady tone.
I inhale sharply and straighten my posture. “That’s not it either. Kotya, you know that I wouldn’t ever want to…”
Kotya reaches out to brush a strand of hair out of my face. “I don’t doubt your loyalty or commitment to me, Yura. But if Sierra is a problem, we will get rid of her.”
“No!” I shout. A second later I realize just how loud I’ve been. “No. I don’t want to get rid of her, Kotya.”
“Then tell me what the problem is.” His voice is dark and authoritative now. “I don’t need somebody who can’t keep it together.”
Fuck. Maybe the real reason I don’t want to tell him or Nikolai is that I’m fucking embarrassed.
“Sierra Winters…” I let out a frustrated sound. “You’re right. She’s my type. I noticed her years ago, when I was dealing with Sean Winters.” I sound so fucking pathetic. “I tried to… court her? I don’t know what to call it. But Sean Winters didn’t like that. So he set me up to land in jail.”
The resentment boils up again. He’d sent me to fucking jail for daring to breathe near his sister, but wasn’t paying any attention while she dated some fucking piece of shit worm who’d cheated on her.
“He’s doing worse than you are now,” Kotya says. “In jail, his sister is with us, his brother is shacked up with their enemy…”
“We should kill his wife and children,” I mutter, but I don’t really mean it. I rest my head against Konstantin’s shoulder, and he strokes the back of my head.
I really hope none of the others decide to choose now to bother Konstantin. The open door would reveal just how weak and pathetic I am, taking comfort like this.
“We’ll continue to fuck Sierra.” Kotya’s hand on the back of my head is soothing. “And you’ll tell me why you’re upset right now. It isn’t because of your jail time.”
I sigh, and I hate that Kotya knows me well enough to see through me.
“Yeah.” I pull away from him, but I keep my gaze averted. “Nikolai said he ran into Sierra’s ex-boyfriend. Some little pissboy who cheated on her. And thinking about somebody else touching her, defiling her, then treating her like that?—”
Kotya makes a spitting sound. “If he comes near her again, we break his fingers.”
He understands. He knows exactly why something like that upset me. Sierra and Nikolai both acted like I wasn’t making any sense, but Kotya gets me.
“Thank you,” I whisper. I straighten my shoulders and pretend I hadn’t been overly emotional. “Yeah. He didn’t deserve to touch her. She’s… special. I can tell. From the first moment I laid eyes on her.” I brush my hair back and, with a small flutter of nervousness, I add, “It’s like when I met you.”
Kotya laughs, his deep rumble soothing me. “I hope not. I’m not somebody you need to protect, Yura. In fact, I think it’s my job to protect you .”
I shake my head, but I know he’d never agree with me.
He doesn’t know just how much it meant to me that he noticed me at all, that he saw my pathetic, uneducated self and decided to take me under his wing and help me rise up in the world .
The first few times we’d shared a woman, I’d been elated. He claimed he was showing me the ropes, but his hands were on me the entire time, I’d felt his cock brush against me, and a few times his lips were on my skin.
I close the gap between us and press my face against his neck. I can smell the sweat and the sawdust on him, and I don’t even care.
“If you want something, we should get Sierra,” Kotya mumbles.
“I just had Sierra,” I answer. “I just want a taste of you right now.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Kotya grumbles, but he lets me stay like this for a few moments longer.
It’s the sound of approaching footsteps that has me pull away from him. I move back to the rocking chair.
Nikolai rounds the corner to the shed, his body silhouetted in the open doorway. “Kotya? Have you seen… oh, Yura’s here.”
“Yep,” I answer, waving to him. “You need something?”
“To talk about your weirdness,” Nikolai says, looking between the two of us.
It’s not like he doesn’t know Kotya and I have a more intimate relationship than he has with either of us. I’ve seen the jealousy before, but Nikolai tries to hide it.
Mostly unsuccessfully. He’s easy to read sometimes.
“We’ve resolved the weirdness,” Kotya says definitively. “But what’s this about somebody cheating on Sierra?”
“Ah…” Nikolai looks between the two of us. “Her ex-boyfriend. They split up when she found out.” He pauses, then adds, “She may have found out the day we took her.”
Kotya bursts out laughing. “We made her forget about him very fast, then.”
That doesn’t really soothe the anger I feel about somebody having used her like that. Part of me realizes how hypocritical it is, considering what we’re doing to her, but that’s different. She’s ours. We aren’t going to discard her for some other woman.
I’m not, at least.
“Speaking of Sierrochka though,” Kotya continues. “How do you two think she’s doing? Has she been keeping up her end of the bargain?”
Nikolai shrugs. “She’s been receptive enough, I guess. She argues, but she always gives in.” He pauses, his expression turning pensive. “I don’t think I’d like it as much if she just meekly bent over and took it, though.”
“She isn’t like that,” I mutter. “She helped find her brother’s secret notebook. And we got a few leads thanks to her.”
Kotya nods and goes to sit at the bench he’d restored last summer. “I caught her eavesdropping on me when I was on the phone with my father, but we spoke only in Russian.” He glances over to Nikolai. “Have you noticed her doing anything she shouldn’t be?”
Nikolai shakes his head. “I don’t think so, unless she did it during class.” He purses his lips. “But then, I wouldn’t know. If she’s as good with computers as she says she is, it’s possible she’s doing something right under our noses.”
“We could ask Lev—I assume he’s still doing the credit card scams for us? He might be able to check her work,” I suggest. “If you trust him near those computers.”
Nikolai glances at Kotya, shrugging. “If we did, why didn’t we have him do it from the start?”
I scowl at him. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. You made all the decisions without me.”
He glares right back at me. “I was asking Kotya, not you,” he retorts.
Kotya holds up his hand to silence us. “Lev is good with the credit cards. I don’t want to involve him with the guns. I am also not keen to allow him access to that much information.”
“So we rely on our little rabbit,” Nikolai says. “We… trust her?”
I don’t know if I like the way he talks about her.
“Don’t let her cunt distract you,” Kotya says firmly, his eyes pointedly on me. “But we can keep using her. At least until she leads us to her father’s hidden stashes. After that… we’ll have to see.”
I’m torn between anger and shame. Of course Kotya wants to be smart about everything. But it feels like he’s calling me out, after I’d just confessed something so private to him.
Nikolai nods. “I think that maybe…” He glances at me. “Maybe we might not always want her.”
“Maybe we should switch to English, because you just said fucking nonsense in Russian,” I snap back at him.
“Why are you so obsessed with her?” Nikolai asks, throwing his hands in the air. “She’s just another fucking woman. Pretty, yes. Intelligent, yes. But there are plenty of pretty, intelligent women out there for us to share.”
“I’m not obsessed,” I snarl. “And you’ve had her more than I have. You’re the one who picked her out and branded her! So don’t fucking talk to me about obsessed .”
“Shut up, both of you!” Kotya shouts, standing up. “This is fucking stupid. I won’t have my two best men fighting over a cunt.” He glares at us. “We will keep her around until we have no use for her. We can decide what to do with her once that time comes. So until then, keep your fucking squabbling to yourselves, or it won’t be Sierrochka who I tie to a wall and whip. Understood?”
Nikolai glares at me as he answers Kotya. “Understood.”
“Understood,” I grumble.
So much for Kotya being on my side. I get off the rocking chair and try to leave, but Kotya grabs me again. He forces me to meet his eyes.
“Understood?” he growls again.
I feel some of the fight leaving me in the face of his angry disappointment. “Yes,” I answer, much more subdued.
I don’t think he would actually whip me, but sometimes it’s hard to tell with Kotya.
He nods and releases me. “Then get the fuck out of here, both of you. I want to finish this project in peace.”
I shoot one more glare at Nikolai before I calmly walk away. I can hear Nikolai mumbling something to Kotya, but I can’t make it out.
It’s fine.
What I want doesn’t matter. After all, I was gone for two years.
They wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t come back at all.