Chapter 41 – Vivian
“ A re there any other secrets I should know?” It had taken the drive over here, the dark walk through enemy territory, and a strange midnight meal with an ancient being to work up the courage to ask that.
Luka smoothed the paint off the end of the brush before slowly drawing it across the length of my toenail. Mrs. O’Conner snoozed in her lounge chair, her toes already a bright shade of burnt orange.
“Sneaking into the enemy’s territory every week to have a midnight supper and pedicure isn’t a big enough secret?” Luka countered.
I shook my head. “Luka, I’m serious. I thought you had a secret sidepiece and it’s been driving me crazy for weeks. I don’t know you. I need to know the big stuff, so I can relax and start enjoying the small things.”
Like the fact that this mobster gave the best pedicures. Granted, it helped that Mrs. O’Conner had invested in salon quality products, but Luka was a master at this form of pampering.
His cool breath fanned over my pretty taupe toes. “There’s no one else, Vivian. There has only been you and Sasha.”
“Only two women?” I gaped.
His face fell but he didn’t look away. “I tried to date. But it left me feeling hollow and empty. The release wasn’t worth the pain afterward.”
The wave of raw emotion in his voice made my heart ache. That was going to take a whole hell of a lot of dissecting. Absently I rubbed the fourth finger of my left hand. We have time. What we needed right this moment was a lighter mood. Only then could I dare ask my question.
I smirked at him, dangling a bottle of base coat. “Your turn, mister.”
Luka gave me a withering look. “You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m joking? There’s nothing more serious than a pedicure.” Moving to the floor, I patted the vacated seat and took out fresh supplies. “I won’t do a color.”
Luka flicked a glance at Mrs. O’Conner. “Burnt orange.”
I arched a brow, the grin on my lips growing broader with each second. Luka plucked off his socks and wiggled his toes at me.
“Huh, they’re not ugly,” I teased, rubbing cuticle remover on them. Drawing in a steadying breath of air and whispering a prayer, I let the next words fall from my lips. “Tell me about your wife.”
The air around Luka grew very still. I didn’t dare look up, not wanting to see what was in his eyes. Taking the cleaned metal implement, I began to scrape the excess skin from his toes.
“I can’t remember a time when Sasha wasn’t around,” Luka started to say. His voice was far away, the tone soft and yet full of something heavy. “Her dad brought her to our house when he was on guard duty. He was a single parent, and we kind of just adopted Sasha and Nadia—Zoey’s biological mother—into our home. They did everything with us three boys.”
I snapped my gaze up. “Three?”
Instantly, I regretted asking, because Luka opened his eyes, coming out of the storytelling trance, and gave me a tired smile. “Kazimir didn’t join our crew until we were teens, and Ilya came along a few years after that.”
Keeping quiet, and focusing on the pedicure, I listened as Luka told me how Sasha was his sweetheart in high school. How she and her sister were trained as female soldiers in the bratva. How the late pakhan no doubt planned that they become silk-assassins—women who bedded our enemies only to eliminate them—but they proved themselves on more than one mission to be worth their weight in gold. The old pakhan gave up on that idea and used them as regular soldiers. I thought it would hurt to hear about the wedding and their life together. But I found myself aching with Luka as the story reached its tragic end. His voice stayed steady as he told me how one night their convoy was ambushed, and Armenians gunned her down.
Blinking rapidly, I held up the bottle of polish. “Are you sure about this?”
Luka nodded. “I can stop.”
He wasn’t talking about the paint.
“There’s more?” I croaked.
He nodded again. The words came out barely a whisper. “Stuff I haven’t told anyone.”
“But you’d tell me?”
A fat drop of burnt orange dripped on the towel. I hissed, dabbing at it with acetone.
“It completes the story,” Luka admitted.
Setting my shoulders, I met his gaze. “Go ahead.”
“When she died in my arms, I promised her I was going with.”
I paused mid-stroke on his big toe.
“I went into the rival mob’s territory guns-a-blazing. When I ran out of bullets, I took them down with a knife. I kept thinking, ‘Any minute now’. But death never came. I went home, still bloody, and got rip-roaring drunk. My plan was to shoot myself, but I needed the liquid courage to take that way out. That’s how my brother found me on his first day of leave from the military.” Luka let out a bitter laugh. “I remember Kolya’s face like he’s standing right there. That’s an expression even vodka can’t erase.”
The tears trickled down my cheeks, but I no longer tried to stop them. “Shit, Luka.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“There isn’t much to say,” Mrs. O’Conner murmured, squinting at me through the slits in her eyes. “But the Good Lord kept ye safe because He isn’t done with your dumb arse.”
Instead of crying, we broke out laughing.
“Saints, babushka, I’ve missed you,” Luka gasped. “When are you moving to my side of town?”
Mrs. O’Conner wagged her finger. “I fled the unrest and poverty of the rural Emerald Island. I paid with sweat equity for this home, and raised my own babes in it—”
“Babes who don’t visit,” Luka muttered.
“—and buried me husband out at St. Patrick’s. I’m not leaving this home.”
I swear I was in tune with the man in front of me. I felt him bristling, winding up for a good argument. So I interrupted his outburst. “I’m not sure the color was a good idea.”
Mrs. O’Conner peered over her chair. “Makes him less manly,” she agreed.
“I’ll go tear the skin off a man right now, bare handed, as soon as these dry.” Luka pointed at the door. “I’ve always wondered if Irishmen bleed green.”
“Red, lad, red as yer arse if you don’t stop talking foolish.”
Luka pinned me with a determined look. “I’ll do it. I’ll kill one right now if you think I’m not a man.”
“I believe you, mister.”
Grumbling something about men and hot tempers, Mrs. O’Conner rose and waddled to the bathroom, the foam separators still between her toes.
“I hate color,” Luka admitted, wiggling his toes. “But I suppose it’s pretty.”
I frowned. “Says the man who drives a yellow Jeep?”
Luka didn’t smirk. “Sasha’s ideal vehicle, not mine.”
My heart thundered against my ribs.
“I like black and white—it makes the world simpler,” Luka explained. “But Sasha wanted something that made a statement. I never let her, even though we could easily afford it, because yellow would draw a target on her back.”
It took exactly three seconds to infer what he meant by that. “You got the car so you had a target on you.”
Luka inclined his chin. “Everything I’ve done for the last nine years has been to keep that target on my back. Up until…recently.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat.
Luka moved forward, cupping my chin in his hand. “There was no hope for my soul, so I waited and begged death to find me. I stopped dreaming. Now I can’t seem to wake up, but I don’t want to try. Life’s a nightmare, but I no longer crave death’s kiss. I need yours, baby, to keep dreaming.”
He closed the distance, lips crashing into mine. The kiss was hard and dark. This mobster was ravenous, desperate for me. Well, I was too. He plundered my mouth without mercy. I clung to him, waiting for an opening to strike.
It took a glass of cold water tossed on our heads to separate. Apparently, we hadn’t heard Mrs. O’Conner’s throat clearing. “Clean that mess up and scoot before the dawn comes.”