Chapter 4Vasily
Vasily
I pay my staff enough that when I return to my condo, I don’t return to a disaster.
But everything feels just slightly off.
Kostya did exactly what I asked of him, protesting every step of the way.
He doesn’t think it’s right that I’ve decided to keep Ana for a little while.
He actually argued with me when I told him to heighten security and keep Benedetti out of the building while Ana is here— I don’t need Benedetti reporting this to Ana’s brother.
I don’t need Tony showing up before I’m ready to let him know he needs to be more careful with his things.
She’s not a pawn, Kostya reminded me repeatedly. She’s a human being.
But Kostya was the one who drove the vehicle that brought her to Flagstaff six years ago, after her brother sold her virginity to my brother and I was the one suckered into taking the actual payment.
I was the only one who treated her like a human being.
And the only reason there’s video footage floating around to this day of me treating her like a pawn is she asked me to film it.
Those homemade pornos were supposed to save her.
So why did Sasha and the rest of the boys at Consummate have to save her? What the hell was she doing in Florida to begin with?
Those are questions for another day. Dima was supposed to keep an eye on her. When I let her go to keep her out of the mess I was inheriting on my brother’s deathbed, Dima was supposed to watch her from afar and intervene if an intervention was necessary. All I asked was that she be kept safe.
Dima has failed me.
It’s all he seems to ever do anymore.
But I love him too much to deal with him at this moment.
The lights turn on the moment Ana steps foot inside the apartment, but they’re dim.
It feels like we’re stuck in a perpetual night, having left Orlando in the early morning and landed in Los Angeles six hours later but still well before dawn.
My nights of partying well into those early morning hours were over long before I ever moved to California; if I’m coming home past midnight, I’m half asleep and want nothing more than a night light barely bright enough to keep me from stubbing my toe on errant furniture.
The handful of days Ana lived with me in my shitty apartment in Flagstaff should have been a drug-fueled blur, at least on my end.
I told myself nothing remained of that time except the sick fantasies of a masochist hell-bent on cutting himself on lies of the past. Instead, I’m suddenly struck by a crisp, unshakable memory of stubbing my toe in the haze of a pre-coffee morning, taking out my anger on the poor girl I’d all but kidnapped on a falsely noble quest to show her that the world was more than the nonsense our brothers had forced her into.
I screamed at her for rearranging my furniture, and her bottom lip quivered as she yelled back at me, so desperate to have something to do, some attention given to her, that she risked my rage to tell me that my apartment had crafted a prison cell of her thoughts the day before.
I whisk the memory away as I take note of the fresh flowers that have been added to the sideboard, the coffee table, and the kitchen island.
New cookware has been added to the rack hanging above the island, left empty because I rarely cook and stick with a simple pot and frying pan when I do.
There’s an array of fresh fruit in the bowl that usually just has a handful of oranges, and I trust that whomever filled the bowl had Ana’s allergy list.
I did request a few EpiPens be stashed about, but I casually stroll over to that fruit bowl, making sure that there are no cherries, strawberries, or kiwis as I select an orange from it and begin to peel.
Ana is standing by the sideboard, watching me expectantly.
She’s still dressed in the scrubs from Consummate, which are too big for her.
She’s swallowed up by the stiff blue fabric, so it’s hard to see how she’s changed in the last six years.
She’s cut her glossy black curls shorter; they’re pulled back in a ponytail, but it’s impossible they’re as long as they used to be.
On the plane, I caught the shimmer of a couple silver strands that I swear she’s too young for at 25.
And there are gentle creases in her previously flawless face, but not nearly so many as there are in mine.
Still beautiful. More so, even. My memories have warped her into a child, frozen in time at 20 as I’ve continued to age. Now she’s a woman .
Kostya argued with me about that, too. Tried to pull some shit about how she’s no more the same girl she was than I’m the same man, so I shouldn’t treat her how I treated her then and she’s not going to fall for me now.
Like I want her falling for me. Just for her to get her memories back and remember how it all ended last time?
Not hardly. This is between me and her brother, and there’s no chance on God’s green hell I’m going to let her fall for me this time, knowing it’s just going to end the same way it did before.
But her brother fucked up again. And my brother— my brother by choice, Dima— fucked up, again, and here I am, fixing it. Again.
She stares at me expectantly with her big brown eyes, and I remember my manners. I toss the orange peel, split the fruit in half, and hand half to her.
There.
She takes it in both hands, cupping it like she’s not sure what to do with it. Does amnesia affect that? I assumed she would be fine with this, but maybe not. I rip off a segment of my own orange and pop it in my mouth. “See? You eat it.”
She looks back down at the orange and scowls.
“Yes, I know what an orange is. I just...” She sighs, a frustration I well remember from her.
We had a good couple of weeks together, but the good was mixed with a lot of bad.
And a lot of the bad was little frustrations that finessed big reactions from each other.
We knew how to push each other’s buttons, and we weren’t afraid to.
“You don’t want an orange?” I ask.
She closes her hands around the orange and pulls it in to her bosom. I haven’t touched her much, and she’s swimming in those scrubs, but I swear there’s more to that bosom than there used to be .
Of course there is. She was flat as a twelve-year-old boy back then. I loved those hidden pads of soft flesh with their daintily puckered dark centers, but again, she is a woman now. I’m sure there are curves just waiting to be undressed.
Not tonight.
Oh, I’m going to fuck Ana. When nothing else was going right between us, she came apart like a prized whore the second my cock filled her tight pussy. I’m not nearly so noble as to hold back from that just because she doesn’t know who I truly am. But not tonight.
But fuck, the way she yells, “I do want the orange!” at me?
I’m half ready to bend her over the back of the sofa— a distinctly different sofa from what was here eighteen hours ago, so I guess someone decided the firm leather love seat wasn’t suitable for Ana’s ass— and spank her pussy with my palm and my cock.
But then that sweet bottom lip of hers quivers. “But, umm, I want my clothes. And my shower. And my bed.”
I have none of those things. Not in the sense she thinks they’ll be.
After I sent Ana away the first time, I hated sleeping in my bed.
It reeked of her, no matter how many times I washed the sheets.
I ended up moving into my childhood home— then the home of my brother’s widow— by the end of the month.
So no, I’d rather Ana sleep in that guest room.
I nod to her in dismissal, and her eyes widen as though attempting to communicate something obvious to me. I blame the chaos of the day on the delay before I say, “Right. You don’t know where anything is.”
She softens, her cheeks blooming pink. “I know. It’s weird. I was hoping that coming home would help. But the neurologist warned me that sometimes, the only thing that helps is time. And sometimes, not even that. ”
She shrugs like it is what it is, she’s just rolling with it, but I can see the fear in her eyes. The best way to avoid it is to show her the guest room.
Which is irritatingly brighter than the rest of the apartment, as it’s not a room that’s ever used.
It’s been aired out though, with even more flowers to perfume it and a new bedspread that looks more feminine as well as a vanity with an array of beauty products on it.
She eyes the room skeptically, but when I pause at the door, she continues on bravely, looking around, opening doors, poking her head into the closet and bathroom.
“This is . . . our room?” she asks.
I clear my throat. “Your room. We keep different schedules, so it’s easier.
” I’ve heard people say that before. Kseniya and Miguel, her husband, used to be like that, back when he was night auditor of the hotel he now has a corporate position for, a perk to having me as a brother-in-law.
It helped their marriage that they weren’t ruining each other’s sleep cycles, and they’re still disgustingly happily married and even discussing when to start having another baby even though they waited nearly a decade on the first and just had her six months ago.
Seven months? Eight? Fuck, Janson was right, I really do need to get to Flagstaff at some point to meet her while she’s still little.
But not now. Definitely not with Ana here. Kseniya will shit a brick if she finds out I’ve sort-of imprisoned Ana again.
“Oh? What do I do? Where do I work? Do I like my job? Do they know what happened?”
“You, ahh, you work at a theater,” I finally sputter out, recalling that she majored in theatre arts.
She thought she’d be a stage manager or work somewhere in community outreach.
Funding is a big issue for community theaters, and since she assumed she’d end up being a Mafia wife, it was a job she could do, that her husband would allow, and she’d be fulfilled with.
I can give her that fulfillment. Not in practice, but in her mind.
“Oh,” she says, a clipped note. “Like, I work concessions or... I’m a projectionist?”
“No, not at a movie theater. At a stage. You’re an event coordinator.” Hopefully that’s close enough to what she meant before.
She does perk up a little there. “Oh! That sounds nice. Am I in the middle of, umm, is there something big or do I have some responsibility that—?”
“No, you’re more of a contract worker,” I say quickly. “They reach out to you when they need you, and you don’t have anything going on.”
“Guess I picked a good time to get kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring.” She laughs awkwardly.
“Yeah.”
She looks at the bed again, tests the springs. Glances back at the bathroom. “Doesn’t seem like anything I’d be too worried about my sleep schedule for,” she murmurs.
“It’s more me. My work schedule is difficult. In fact...”
She frowns once she catches what I’m hinting at. “You need to work now? It’s the middle of the night! What do you do?”
It never crossed my mind that she wouldn’t know who I am.
Hubris, I suppose. But if everything is going the way I want it to, I’m a ghost. If actual law enforcement had rescued her— not that they would have; Janson and Benedetti are both proof of how poor a job they do of dealing with anything at the ground level— she would have been a Jane Doe until her memories came back .
And then she’d have had to figure out how to explain to them that she needed to be returned to her mob family, so the fact that Sasha’s crew found her was a victory all around.
“I’m a printer,” I tell her, and at her quizzical look, I spin a lie that’s closer to the truth. “I run a 3D printing company. Large scale. Specialty equipment.”
She nods like it makes sense. That’s how most people react when I say ghost guns . It’s an unknown, incredibly lucrative field. God bless the Second Amendment.
“Well, have a good night,” I tell her, exiting the room before she can ask me any additional questions.