Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A few moments earlier
AXEL
My phone rang with Anton’s number, which meant the call was about Mila.
“What is it?”
“Look out your window, boss.” Anton sounded stressed.
I stood up and looked out the second floor window that overlooked the warehouse floor.
Giselle and Mila were talking below.
“Fuck,” I breathed. “What is Mila doing here?”
“She wouldn’t take no for an answer.” Anton sounded mournful. “She made me drive her here.”
“You could have warned me,” I hissed while my eyes drank in the sight of her. She looked adorable with her tight jeans and her thick ponytail.
“She ordered me not to call you.”
My lips twitched. Anton was one of the most ruthless men on my crew. “You sound scared of her.”
“I am,” he shot back.
I’d seen Anton take down two men with nothing more than a ballpoint pen. “You can’t let her boss you around.”
“Speak for yourself. I caught Oleg, on his night off, brushing up on his high school math last week. Not because she asked him to, but because that’s how it happens. It’s just who she is,” he confessed. “She never expects anything, and we just do stuff for her.”
I couldn’t even blame him. My only line of defense against Mila’s innate charm was forced distance. And even that wasn’t working for me.
Giselle was talking, and Mila was rocking back on her heels with her hands in her back pockets. I couldn’t tell if Mila was upset. I watched as she turned away from Giselle and started walking toward the offices.
“Bring my wife to me,” I told Anton.
She strode into the office and yet completely avoided my gaze.
I armed myself by staying seated at my large desk. “Mila.”
“Sorry for barging in on you like this.” She glanced around my office.
I motioned for Anton to leave and shut the door.
Instead of sitting down across from me, she wandered over to the wall to check out the fishing photos that Demetrius had hung on the wall of himself.
“What brings you here?”
“I need to talk to you.” She leaned in closer to look at one photo. “I ran into Giselle on the way up.”
I sat back in my chair, curious to know where this would go. “She was just here for a meeting.”
“Is she married?”
“Is who married?”
She turned and looked over her shoulder at me. “Giselle.” Then she looked back at the photo. “Who are these people?”
“I have no idea.”
She looked back at me. “Which question did you just answer?”
I could feel my lips twitch. I was enjoying this conversation way too much. “Both.”
She gave a little shrug and moved onto my bookshelf that was stocked mostly with SOPs and financial ledgers. Then, she looked around the entire room, her face genuinely curious. “What exactly do you do here?”
She was wandering into dangerous territory. “Do you want to tell me why you’re here?”
A wave of excitement crossed her face as she remembered the reason for her visit. “Remember the other night when you told me I could get a dog?”
I couldn’t get that night out of my head. “I remember telling you that we’d talk about it.”
She rolled her eyes. “You also said you’d come home the next day to talk. That was over a week ago.”
“So let’s talk.”
I watched in fascination as her entire demeanor changed as she stood beside me and opened her phone.
She became giddy and gushy and softer than soft.
“Okay, his name is Bandit and he’s an Australian shepherd cross.
He needs a lot of exercise because his first rescue owner, who was really nice, got in a terrible car crash and was forced to surrender Bandit after they bonded.
And Bandit missed him so much that he hasn’t bonded with anyone else. ”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s been adopted twice more, but each time the families brought him back.”
That didn’t sound good at all. “Why did they bring him back?”
She waved her hand around with indifference.
“Everyone said he was a bad dog and had some destructive tendencies and some resource guarding and issues with other dogs and cats and small children, but they made him out to be totally evil. I know he’s sweet.
” She stepped closer with her phone and started scrolling through photos.
“Oh my god, look how cute he is here. Look at his ears.”
Bandit looked rough, grumpy and sullen, like a hard time criminal in a series of mug shots.
“Look at him smiling here.” Mila flipped to a photo of Bandit baring his teeth at the camera with menace.
“He looks pissed.” I looked down at my wife to see if she was messing with me. She couldn’t possibly be serious.
“That’s how he smiles,” she insisted.
I pulled her phone closer. Bandit looked like an escaped convict. “Don’t you want a puppy or something a bit smaller? How much does he weigh?”
“Well, the shelter said he’s about sixty pounds, but they think he’s crossed with something bigger and that he’s underweight. He needs to gain ten pounds or so.”
“What’s he crossed with?”
“A rottweiler.”
I squinted at the photo. “Are those scars on his face?”
Her expression was one of tragic empathy. “He was part of a vicious dogfighting ring before he got rescued the first time.”
“Mila.” There was no way I was letting this dog near her.
She must have heard the tone in my voice because she put her phone down and really looked at me. “Why are you saying no?”
“Because he sounds dangerous.” I tried to think of all the reasons Bandit sounded like a terrible idea, and there were almost too many to list. “What about the guard dogs? You said he doesn’t get along with other dogs.”
Her eyes looked misty. “Everyone misunderstands him. He’s not some stone cold killer. He was forced into that life, and now he’s allowed a chance at redemption. Why can’t you see that?”
Because not all of us are allowed redemption.
“I’m not going to risk you getting hurt.”
She thought about her response. “Okay.”
I frowned. There was no way she’d agree that easily. “Okay?”
“If Bandit is a hard no, then we need to move forward and talk about our plans to consummate this marriage so you can spend more time with me.” She paused dramatically.
“But you want to continue working around the clock and leaving me on my own, then you can let me get a dog to love. And not just any dog. I want Bandit.”
And that, right there, was the real reason I was holding myself back from her. Mila was looking for someone to love. And she was telling me that either she would look for connection between the two of us or I needed to get her a surrogate.
I forced myself to stay seated and remain expressionless. Every day, I was so fucking tempted to cross every single line with her, and every day, the same thing stopped me.
It stopped me again today.
I was living a lie. A lie that would eventually destroy her if I made her truly mine.
“What do we need to do to bring Bandit home?”
She squealed and did a little dance. “I was praying you’d say that.”
The irony that her first choice was Bandit and not me wasn’t lost on me. “What do you need?”
“Can you come with me to the shelter tomorrow and meet the adoption people? We can come pick you up after I get out of class.”
“Yes.”
She twirled in a celebratory circle. “I already made an appointment because I knew you’d say yes.”
I needed to give Anton and Oleg hazard pay for managing Mila’s irresistible charm. I didn’t know how they survived.
The next afternoon, I was finishing up some work at my desk, awaiting my wife’s arrival. She was picking me up to go adopt Bandit.
Anton: We’re two minutes out
I stood up from my desk just as Maksim appeared at the doorway of my office.
“How did the raid go last night?”
He looked pleased. “Went off without a hitch. We’ve returned all the stolen goods to the Italians and I’m pretty sure they will be your allies for life.”
Yup, right until I got them all arrested. “Anything else?”
“We just got a report of a suspicious vehicle parked on the west side of our property. I’m driving out there to take a look. Did you want to come?”
“Anyone in the vehicle?”
“No. The plates are stolen, the car probably is too. It might just be abandoned, but I still want to check it out.”
“Agreed.” I shrugged on my coat. “Can you handle it? I have an appointment with Mila, but I can be back here in a couple of hours.”
“Not an issue,” he said. “I’ll text you photos.”
I looked down into the warehouse bay. I could see Anton’s vehicle pull up, so I moved toward the door. “Did we sort out the Beijing issue?”
“Yup, it was a mix up on their end. All good now.”
The echo of gunfire and shouting in the bay below had both of us reaching for our weapons.
Mila!
Through the window, I could see Anton crouched behind our vehicle, exchanging gunfire with three unknown assailants. From every door, my men spilled into the bay area.
I bolted out of my office, and the gunfire continued as I ran through the main area and down the staircase. Maksim was right behind me.
“I saw three hostiles.”
“Fourth by the back door,” he said behind me.
But by the time we spilled into the warehouse bay area, it was already over.
Mila stood unharmed, but I rushed to her and checked her over with a sweeping glance.
Around us, my men continued to stream into the warehouse, all of them armed to the teeth with automatic rifles and calling out the areas they were responsible for.
“The back gate is clear.”
“West side, clear.”
“North end, clear.”
Mila wasn’t hurt, but she looked confused.
“Mila, are you okay?”
More of my men were running into the bay.
“Side shed, clear.”
“West truck pad, clear.”
She blinked as she looked around, and then she looked up at me. “I think I’m dreaming. Why are there so many guns?”
In my peripheral vision, I could see Anton kick the weapons away from the bodies. Around us stood a dozen men, all holding assault rifles.
“Weapons down,” I commanded.
Immediately and collectively, there was the loud clatter of dozens of weapons being lowered and put on safety.
Mila stared up at me like she was in a daze.