Chapter 5
5
Dmitri
I park my car in Granddad’s driveway. My parents are already here, and Danica, and my aunts. The midafternoon sun sends a long shadow from the house over our cars.
A few days have gone by since I fucked Leah in Gage’s office. Right after, I had to return to my post at the doors to the club. There was no time to talk. Since then, my mind has been going in circles around the same thoughts, over and over. Ad fucking nauseam.
So, Gage wants to marry Leah.
Great.
Really, really great.
Asshole cut in line.
Shouldn’t surprise me. He’s efficient if nothing else. Sees what he wants, goes after it. He didn’t debate with himself for years, feeling wrong for looking at Leah.
But the other thing—he hasn’t even known her for two fucking months. How can he know , and know with such fucking certainty as to propose?
I get out of my car, slamming the door harder than necessary. I shouldn’t have let myself think about this. I don’t want to talk to my family—I want to punch Gage’s stupid face. What the fuck .
I don’t bother knocking, just go straight to the kitchen. That’s where everybody always gathers at Granddad’s.
Danica stands near the fridge, as far from everyone as she can get. Granddad holds court, somehow looking regal where he sits on one of the tall chairs next to the kitchen island. He’s pale, though. Thinner than he was before the heart attack. A cane leans against the island next to his chair. I wish he would go back to his full strength so I could go back to hating him.
“Dmitri.” He smiles as he says it. “I’m glad you could make it. Coffee? Help yourself.”
I pour myself a cup. Mostly so I don’t have to stand awkwardly facing my family. I shoot a glance over at Danica. She’s nursing a mug of coffee and a scowl of her own.
A full spread of sandwiches and cookies is laid out over the island, untouched. Rachel eyeballs one of the sandwiches.
Granddad’s lips curve up in a fond smile as he grabs a napkin and passes the sandwich to her. “Eat, Rachel.”
“Thanks, Granddad.” She gingerly takes the sandwich.
I grab one, too. Less because I’m hungry, more because I want to make sure Rachel feels comfortable eating. I remember Danica being weird about food when she was a teenager.
Granddad waits until Rachel takes a bite. He clears his throat. “Our family is in crisis. Patrick’s arrest has torn us apart. We need to repair our family bond. I don’t want to die and leave a fractured family behind.”
It isn’t Patrick’s arrest that tore us apart. It’s that he assaulted Leah. And half our family rushed to take his side, instead of Leah’s. But of course Danica and I will be blamed for calling the cops.
I wait for Granddad to turn his stern gaze to Danica and me, but instead he looks at Mom and Aunt Milana. “What will you say?”
“We’re sorry.” Mom’s face twists with regret as she addresses Danica and me. “We coddled Patrick, ignoring that our other children need our love and support, also. This includes Leah. Your dad and I failed her. And we failed the two of you.”
“We all did.” Aunt Sylvia’s dark brown eyes are sincere. She grips Milana’s hand in hers.
Aunt Milana makes a face like she’s about to drink motor oil. “Patrick made a mistake. I didn’t want to punish him for one mistake. It’s too harsh.”
“He’s an adult —” Danica starts to say.
“We were wrong.” Mom’s voice is flat, but she shoots an annoyed look at Milana. “It isn’t too harsh for him to be punished for attempted assault.”
A long silence descends. Danica gives a long, obnoxious slurp of coffee. Dad shoots her a look, like Really ?
“So where is Patrick now?” I look around, ready to throw a punch if he jumps out from behind the kitchen island.
“He is on probation. So I sent him to Las Vegas, with my cousin Aleksandr.” Granddad offers us a grim smile. “Aleksandr will set him right.”
Aleksandr will probably set Patrick further along the path to the family business. But at least Patrick isn’t here .
Dad steps forward and holds his arms out toward Danica. “We should have listened to you two earlier. I’m sorry we didn’t.”
Danica’s face crumples and she leans into his hug. He gestures me forward, so I allow him to hug me, too. Mom joins in, which is a shock because she isn’t usually much of a hugger.
It’s a lot. I want them to apologize to Leah, too. They will eventually.
We put on the basketball game, mostly for background noise. We eat, we talk about what everyone’s been up to. Granddad has a new, heart-healthy diet he has to follow. He does good-natured complaining about that.
Patrick’s absence is no longer remarked on. I don’t miss him. I miss what I wanted with him—that feeling of being partners, brothers. Couple of weeks ago, I was mad about that. Now I’m just sad and empty.
The absence I really notice is Leah’s. I miss her so bad it hurts. Am I supposed to propose now? That’s the only reason I think Gage would’ve mentioned it. He’s always pushing, manipulating, trying to get me to move.
It would be a problem, except the direction he’s pushing me is toward Leah.
I leave before dinner—I lie and say I have work. As soon as I’m in my car, I text Leah. Please. I need to see you tonight, I miss you so much .
Her response is quick. Dinner tonight, after tutoring?
YES.
* * *
Leah
After my tutoring shift is over, I call Gage. “I’m going out to dinner with Dmitri.”
“Have fun.” There’s a smile in his voice.
I wonder if I should invite him, too. But it’s been a while since I spent time alone with Dmitri.
He shows up in his Mustang, which complicates things a little. Today’s bodyguard, a red-haired guy called Squid, drove me here in Gage’s car.
“I’ll follow behind,” Squid says.
The drive from the Bellefleur district to Dorado Heights takes about ten minutes. We park in a garage off of Caro and start walking. Dmitri holds my hand. “Anything you want for dinner, in particular?”
I never expected I’d get to walk down Caro, hand-in-hand with Dmitri Montrose. We’re together. We aren’t hiding. His hand is warm, our fingers intertwined.
It takes me a moment to realize he asked me a question. Right. Food. Eating. “I’m starving, so everything sounds good.”
“There’s that fancy ramen place you like, up ahead.”
I grin. He remembers my favorite restaurants. “Perfect.”
The sidewalk is busy with people. Offices are closing, restaurants are bustling with the early crowd. A new blockbuster came out this week, so the sidewalk in front of the movie theater is packed.
Squid’s a few feet behind us when I see a face across the street—a face I never expected to see.
A gray goatee and round nose. His eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, even though the sun has gone down.
I looked him up a couple of days ago. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t search for Gage’s information, but I wanted to know more about Billings. Searching his name only gave me what films and shows he’s produced and directed. Boring—nothing helpful in those articles and lists. But the search terms Harvey Billings + scandal didn’t give me much to go on, either. Fans were angry the first time AoG was canceled, but the news didn’t give much more detail than that. Whatever Billings did, it was probably buried.
I told myself that it was buried for good reason. Prying any further would be disrespectful to Gage. If I want to know that bad, I can ask him.
But the face I saw in my search results is right there, across the street.
I pause, and nearly get mowed down by the group behind us.
“What is it?” Dmitri tugs me out of danger.
“I thought I saw…” I peer through the traffic. The opposite side of the street is just as crowded as this one. The face I saw, though—gone. “I must have imagined him.”
“Who? Gage?”
“No. It’s stupid.”
“Baby.” He narrows those Arctic eyes at me. “Who?”
“Harvey Billings. I’m sure my imagination ran off with me.”
Dmitri waves at Squid. “Do you see Harvey Billings over there?”
Squid stares across the street, scanning the crowd. “No.”
All three of us are looking, and I feel like an idiot. “I was just seeing things, I swear. Let’s move on, okay?”
Dmitri’s frown accompanies us all the way to the ramen restaurant. We walk in and I inhale the scents of broth, cumin, garlic, and sage. It’s the kind of place where you order at a digital kiosk, grab your food at the counter, and sit down. Nice and casual.
We pay for Squid’s meal. He sits nearby with a bowl, taking methodical spoonfuls, his pale green eyes watchful. Dmitri isn’t much different, his expression wary as he eats.
I set down my spoon. “I ruined our date.”
“What?” Dmitri pauses, his spoon halfway to his mouth. “No, you didn’t.”
“We’re not even talking. We’re looking for someone who isn’t there—who was never there. I looked up Billings online the other day, curious about some stuff Claudia mentioned.”
“And?”
“I didn’t find much. But it planted his picture in my head, and I think that’s why I saw him.”
Dmitri takes out his phone. “I wonder if anyone else has spotted him in town. He’s a celebrity, right?”
“Yeah, but…”
He scrolls through some search results. “Shit.”
“What?”
“A couple of gossip sites have reported him in town. Harvey Billings Spotted in San Esteban with Daughter Vanessa . ‘Sources wonder if Billings is scoping out the site to film a new series.’”
“Maybe he’s here, maybe he isn’t. But let’s move on, okay?” I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Harvey Billings should have no place at our table. “Danica said you had a big family meeting today. How’d that go?”
He groans. “Heavy. Granddad laid on the guilt about not wanting to die and leave a ‘fractured family’ behind. Mom and Milana apologized, we all hugged it out. More importantly, Patrick is in Las Vegas. And he can fucking stay there, for all I care.”
My heart squeezes with sympathy. Dmitri’s mad, yeah, but he loved his cousin. He loves his family.
I stare down at the noodles in my bowl. “You don’t have to stay mad at him for my sake, you know.”
“What?” The sharpness in Dmitri’s tone has me looking back up. His eyes are narrowed in anger. “He assaulted you, Leah. That’s not okay. Ever. I don’t even know if there’s any coming back from that. Like, how could someone make up for that in his lifetime? How can he redeem himself? I don’t think he can.”
I try to make it into a joke. “Well, if you feel that strongly about it…”
Dmitri isn’t amused. “Leah. I know you want to make light of it. But in all seriousness, it was bad, what he did. The worst. And it’s up to you how you want to deal with it, but I can’t pretend to be okay with it.”
“I’m not okay with it.” I sigh, chastened. Gage called me out on the same thing, after I sprained my wrist. “But I also don’t want Patrick to have a place at our date, either. Not him, not Harvey Billings.”
“Then who?”
“Right now? Just you, just me.”
“And Gage?”
I glare. “Right now—just you and me.”
“How about later?” He waggles his eyebrows, the absolute dork.
“I guess we’ll have to see.” I need to steer us off the topic of Gage. I don’t want to talk about the “proposal,” if we can even call it that. A marry me after sex doesn’t count, does it?
Except Gage was serious.
Dmitri beats me to the conversation shift. “Tell me about the Youth Arts program. How’s it going?”
A nice, safe topic. I regale him with some of the stories of the evening, including an embarrassing one where the vocabulary word was kerfuffle , and I was convinced it was spelled wrong. Apparently, I’ve lived my whole life believing it was kerfluffle . One of the seniors kept correcting me, and I didn’t believe her.
Our food is gone, my belly full. The restaurant is packed and people are waiting for tables, so we gather our things and head out.
I purposefully avoid looking at the other side of the street. Harvey Billings isn’t there. Of course he isn’t—he never was.
We get into Dmitri’s car, with Squid following in Gage’s. Instead of going to Dmitri’s neighborhood, though, we travel a few blocks down Caro. Dmitri navigates us into the parking garage where Gage and I live.
I shoot him a glance. “We aren’t going to your place? I thought we’d spend the night together.”
“All your stuff is here, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And Gage is here.”
“…Yeah?”
“I seem to remember you coming on my dick a couple of weeks ago, saying how you wished you were coming on both our cocks.”
I gulp, immediately nervous and excited. It’s a dream—a fantasy. But most fantasies stay that way forever.
His smile is full of dark promises. “Tonight, baby girl, you’re gonna get fucked. By both of us.”