8. Cali
CALI
I might be overtaking Mother Teresa as the most tolerant woman in human history, because a week goes by, and I don't kill Ronan.
Even though there are a hundred small chances every day, I take none of them. Am I gracious and benevolent? I suppose I must be. Am I infinitely forgiving? All signs point to yes. Am I divinely chosen and doth my patience surpasseth all others? I mean, if you say so. I'm literally just a girl.
The motherfucker is testing my limits, though.
And he damn well knows it.
The coffee is the worst part. It just shows up, morning after morning, without fail.
I don't ask for it. I never do, never would.
But I'll be sitting at the kitchen island squinting at my laptop, and out of nowhere, boom, there it is, right at my elbow, in my preferred mug, made exactly how I like it, which is a lot of cream and just enough sugar to be embarrassing.
I don't remember ever even telling Ronan how I take my coffee. As a matter of fact, I'm quite sure I didn't. He just watched me make it once, back in the beginning, took those thorough mental notes of his, and, well, here we are.
Satisfied.
But mad about it.
I keep waiting to catch him doing it, so I can tell him to knock it off. But he never lets me catch him. It just appears, like it grew there.
That's manageable. I could live with that.
What I cannot live with is the reading glasses.
He comes down the stairs the third morning of our new cohabitation with a sheaf of papers tucked under his arm, sits at the far end of the island, crosses one knee over the other, and puts on a pair of reading glasses.
Reading glasses.
We're talking thin black frames. Sophisticated. Elegant. Downright slutty, if you ask me.
And on this man, no less?
Oh, he's playing with fire. He's playing dirty.
It's working.
It is also deeply unfair. I turn into a frozen gargoyle with my coffee halfway to my mouth.
He doesn't notice, or at least, he shows no outward signs of noticing.
He's reading whatever it is, his eyes roaming down the page behind the glasses, one thumb turning the corner, and he looks so unbearably calm about it that I want to throw something at his smug head just to break those manwhorish glasses of his.
"Something wrong?" he asks, without looking up.
"No," I snap, entirely too fast. "Why would there be something wrong?"
"You made a small sound." He turns a page. "Like a kettle deciding whether to boil."
"I'm fine. Read your—your whatever that is."
"Filings."
"Yeah. That."
He goes back to his filings.
I go back to hating my life.
And then it's the pancakes. Personally, I'm starting to get a little tired of them.
But Isabella could eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every meal for the rest of her life.
Even though we've negotiated to the point where she'll accept some fruit and eggs on the side, because I can't be depriving my children of both nutrition and personal safety, it's still pancakes as the centerpiece whenever I'll allow it.
Luckily, Ronan runs point on the whole process. He's perfected the fine art of those crispy lace edges that I have personally never once achieved in ten years of trying, and he flips them one-handed while questioning Hayden about how exactly do gills work.
He looks like a man auditioning to be somebody's husband.
Not mine. Obviously not mine. But somebody's. Some hypothetical woman out there who doesn't know what he is, who gets to keep the pancakes and the coffee and the slutty reading glasses without any of the bloodstained tarps or the associated body count.
I catch myself watching the back of his neck while he stands at the stove.
The line of it. The curve of it. It's manly, somehow, where his hair stops and curls ever so slightly at the edges.
I don't know how long I've been doing it before I catch myself.
When I do, my cheeks go blotchy with embarrassment.
I lurch up so fast I nearly knock my stool over, and hurry to go find something extremely urgent to do at the far end of the room.
There's a tingling in my stomach that I refuse to name. Butterflies? No. Definitely not. Not for Ronan "Asshole" Akov.
"You okay, Mommy?" Hayden asks, looking at me strangely.
"Great," I say breathlessly, combing hair out of my face. "Just remembered a thing."
"What thing?"
"A grown-up thing. Don't worry about it."
By Saturday, I decide I have to get out of the house.
Not for any reason. There's no real reason requiring my sudden departure. The kids are with my mother for the afternoon—shadowed by Ronan's guards, of course—the house is quiet, and Ronan himself is once again perched on the couch, buried deep in his papers.
And I cannot be near it for one more second. I need to be in a car, alone, going somewhere, doing anything, so that I can start the long, painful process of remembering who the hell I am.
"I'm going out," I announce.
He looks up. "Where?"
"Errands."
"Which errands?"
"None of your business." I grab my keys off the hook and step into my shoes.
He shrugs and flips a page over. It's so easy and argument-free that I'm tempted to turn back around just to bicker about it, because if I've learned anything lately, it's that nothing worth having comes with that little fuss.
But you can't look a gift horse in the mouth. I'm getting freedom? You bet your sweet, syrup-covered ass I'm taking it.
So I march out to the car and hurl myself into the front seat, breathing heavily for no reason at all. I wait a second to see if Ronan intends to follow me, but the front door stays shut. Fine by me.
I feel the eyes of the ever-present Bratva guards looking at me curiously, but I ignore them. If I can't see them, they can't see me. Or so the thinking goes.
To double down on that wishful thinking, I go searching for my biggest A-List movie star sunglasses. I have to riffle through the glove compartment for them, but before I can fish them out, something else catches my attention.
Something that does not belong there.
It's small and black. About the size of a matchbox, stuck to the inside back wall of the compartment with a little strip of adhesive, and it has a single, tiny light on one end that flashes every three seconds.
I don't know a lot about spy equipment. But I've seen enough movies to know a GPS tracker when I see one.
I sit in the driver's seat for a second, holding it between two fingers. Surely I'm mistaken. He can't… He wouldn't…
Oh, who the hell am I kidding? Of course he fucking would.
Then I spring out of the car, haul ass back up the front steps, burst through the vault door, and run rampant into the den, where the felon with boundary issues is reading the sports section.
I hold the tracker up between two fingers, out at arm's length, like it's a dead mouse I fished out from behind the fridge.
"Explain this shit, and do it fast."
He looks up, sees it. He does not, to his eternal discredit, look even a little bit surprised.
"That's a GPS tracker," he says simply.
"I know what it is. I asked you to explain it."
"You just said you knew what it was."
"Ronan, I swear on all that is holy…”
He folds the paper and sets it down on the couch next to him. Slowly, as if he has all the time in the world, he takes off the glasses, folds them, and tucks them into the collar of his shirt. Needless to say, that does not help my blood pressure. Those eyes alone are hypertension-inducing.
"I put a tracker on your car," he says. "Yes."
"You—" I stop in order to give myself a second to reboot. "You put a tracker on my car. And you're admitting it? Just like that?"
"Would you prefer I lied?" He tilts his head. "You've made it very clear how you feel about lying."
That's such a cheap shot that I actually gasp. "Don't you dare turn my trauma into a defense."
He folds his arms across his chest, biceps flexing against the thin material of his shirt.
"You asked me to explain, so I'm explaining.
Yes, I put a tracker on the car. I want to know where you are at all times, because there are people who would like to hog tie you in the back of a van, and I would like to know if that's happening while it's still happening, as opposed to afterward. "
"I think you've lost your mind."
"Better my mind than your life."
That's so painfully reasonable that my brain decides to put a pin in this topic and go scrambling for the next thing to be mad about. It very quickly stumbles upon an obvious follow-up question.
"Is it just the car?"
He shakes his head. "No," he says.
"What else have you bugged?"
"The kids' backpacks, for starters."
I take a staggering step like he just cold-cocked me in the head. "The what?!"
"One in each. For the same reasons, as I'm sure you'd understand."
I have to grab the edge of the counter, because I have gone white. I can feel it happening, all the blood leaving my face and going God knows where. "For how long?"
"Since the night I moved in, of course."
That was two weeks ago. Two weeks! My kids have been walking around this city with little black boxes broadcasting their location to a Bratva phone for two weeks and I didn't know, I had no idea, because he just did it, the way he does everything, without asking, deciding for me, deciding for them—
"You had no right," I whisper. "You had no right."
"I know."
"You fucking— wait, what?"
That's not what he was supposed to say next. I had the whole arc planned in my head, the accusations and his slippery lawyer counter-accusations and me getting the last, savage word. And instead, he just keeps saying yes and I know. You cannot fight a man who keeps agreeing with you.
"That's it?" I demand. "That's your whole defense? 'I know'?"
He bobs a shoulder shamelessly. "I don't have a defense. You're right. I should have told you."
"Damn straight you should have told me!"
"So I'm telling you now."
"After I found it!"
"That's true," he agrees. "I would have preferred to have this conversation without you finding it first. But here we are."