Chapter 18 Roman
ROMAN
Sasha hasn’t said a single word to me since we got in the car. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this girl.
After Ember left, we argued in the parking lot for a few minutes before I brought down the hammer and grounded her again. I just lifted her previous sentence and this is the thanks I get for it. At this rate, I’m going to have to build a tower and lock her in it until she’s eighteen.
We pull into the garage. The car’s not even off before she grabs for the door handle. I lock the doors quickly. The sudden finality of the door lock’s thump makes her jump a little. She looks forward, her back ramrod straight as she sets her jaw.
“What’s with you, Sasha?” I ask her. “A month ago, you were talking about cheerleader practice and trying to con me into getting you a pair of Red Bottom shoes. Now, all of a sudden, I catch you with boys in your room and going to strip clubs. What am I supposed to do with you?”
She doesn’t say anything. She just sits and stares out the windshield.
“Answer me, Sasha.”
She huffs. “I’m not a baby anymore, Dad,” she says. “I’m practically an adult.”
“You’re fifteen. You are nowhere near being an adult.”
“In three years, I’ll be going to college,” she says. “I’ll be able to vote, join the army—”
“If you want to go to strip clubs with your idiot friends at eighteen years old, that’s an entirely different conversation. Right now, tonight, you are my fifteen-year-old daughter. You don’t get to do whatever you fucking want. You understand me?”
She rolls her eyes.
“Don’t, okay? You’re on thin ice as it is.”
She takes a beat, looking at her nails tentatively. “So, now what?” she says softly. “I’m grounded for another month. Great.”
“Yeah. And this time, you’re not about to sulk in your room every day. Tomorrow morning, I’m sending your uncle to pick you up. You’re going to help clean up the back rooms at the club before school.”
Her face immediately scrunches up in disgust. “What?”
“You heard me.”
She just gapes, her mouth turned down in a pre-vomitous scowl. “Dad, I can’t clean up jizz off the floor of a strip club! I’m, I’m underage!”
“Oh, so now you want to be a kid?”
“I’m serious. That’s… that’s illegal or something, right? You can’t make a kid clean up after strippers and alcohol and, and…” She trails off, unable to truly vocalize her disgust.
“The club won’t be open,” I tell her. “There won’t be any drinks being served and you will be under the close supervision of the cleaning crew. You will get up early, every single day, and go help clean up the club. When you are done, your uncle will bring you back here to get ready for school.”
“I can’t believe this. You can’t make me go to school after that. Dad, I can’t go to school smelling like a strip club every day. You can’t do that to me.”
“It’s already done.” I look over at her. She’s pleading with those big, brown eyes of hers. There was a time when all she had to do was look at me like that and I’d cave. It used to drive her mother crazy.
“Dad,” she says. “Please.”
I look away and unlock the doors. “Go to bed, Sasha. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
She gets out of the car, slamming the door. As I watch her stomp through the door and into the house, I sigh heavily. Whoever said raising kids was easy?
And now that the smoke’s clear, there’s one person I need to apologize to.
I really lost my shit tonight when I saw Ember with Sasha.
It was like all I could see was some grand conspiracy playing out right under my nose.
If Junie hadn’t noticed Ember going into the VIP rooms in the first place, I might never have known about all this.
No. That’s not true. Ember would have told me or made Sasha tell me.
I can’t picture her keeping something this from me.
She was trying to save me from exploding on my kid.
She failed at that. Right before her eyes, I turned into that monster I told her I was.
Telling her and having her see it for herself are two different things.
I may have chased her off. I might still have chased her away even after I apologize. I pull out my phone. The screen glows the time—three a.m. Ember’s probably closing the books at the club right now.
I call her. Hopefully, she answers. The line clicks over after the line trills almost four times.
“Yes, Mr. Orlov?”
Ouch. “All right. I deserve that.” I take a beat, listening to the sound of her soft breath over the line. “I apologize for losing my temper with you. I just lost my shit when I saw Sasha at the club. I shouldn’t have taken that out on you. I realize you were just trying to protect her.”
She pauses so long that I think that she’s hung up. Finally, she says, “Did you talk to her? Like talk without yelling, I mean?”
“I did. She’s grounded for a month. And she’s got to help the cleaning crew every morning before school.”
“Wow,” she says, and I think I hear a smile on her voice. “That’s pretty severe.”
“Better than locking her away in a tower,” I joke. “Better than what my father would have done to me. She just stomped off to her room completely unharmed. Not a single hair out of place. That’s better than what I and Ares had to face when we were her age.”
She pauses. I hope that’s not pity from her. I loathe pity. “I mean,” she says, the tone in her voice changing, “you did find her in a strip club. I’d be a fool to expect no punishment.”
I have to hesitate. If I hadn’t caught them, Sasha might never have told me. I should be pissed at Ember for trying to save her from my wrath. But I’m not, for some reason.
“For what it’s worth,” she says, “I was going to tell you. I know how it must have looked with me sneaking her out the back and everything, but… but I never intended to keep you out of the loop.” She stops, and I hear the soft sound of a pencil scratching in the background.
Her doodling as she talks, something that I’ve seen her do in passing when she’s on the phone.
“You needed to deal with that situation away from the club,” she says. “The shock of finding her there was… I don’t know, I guess I was afraid you’d ruin your relationship with her and say something you didn’t mean out of anger. Honestly, I guess I was just trying to look out for you two.”
It’s noble. Maybe that’s why I’m not pissed about it. “Thank you,” I say. “You know, most people in my life don’t have my back the way you do. Fear keeps them from speaking up in situations like last night.”
She chuckles. “Thought you didn’t like disobedience, Mr. Orlov. Since when do you like it when I stand up to you?”
“I like it when you challenge me. And being with you has definitely been that.” I pause.
We’ve been dancing around the matter of bringing her all the way into the fold.
I’ve been in her ear about the ins and outs of owning a club, certainly.
But I’ve been deliberately leaving out the bits surrounding funneling money to the gang and all the nuances of moving in the shadows, even with the law always circling. She expressed an interest weeks ago.
What she doesn’t realize is how risky of a decision it truly is. If she’s going to be a part of all this, she has to be loyal to me. Completely.
I think she’s that woman. I want to believe she is, anyway.
“What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?” I ask.
“Probably sleeping. Why?”
“Meet me at the club. Say, one o’clock?”
She laughs. “Again? I thought we had an understanding about fucking around at the job.”
“It’s not that. Though, if you ever change your mind—”
“I haven’t. I like you better in the privacy of the bedroom.”
“All right, all right. Just say you’ll meet me tomorrow afternoon.”
“I will. One o’clock.”
I hang up and lean my head back against the head rest. She might be the one. I hope she’s the one.
Her eyes slowly widen while she stares at the ledger, open on my desk before her.
Ivan and I are both standing on opposite sides of the desk while she sits in my chair, looking down at the yellowed papers that I asked Ivan to bring in.
Her finger stops on one of the lines and she draws her hand back slowly.
“This isn’t for the club finances,” she says. “This is… this is for the Bratva.”
“Yeah, it is.”
She swallows and glances up at me. “This shouldn’t be on paper. You should have it on a flash drive or something. If it fell into the wrong hands, if the wrong people even knew about this book’s existence—”
“Nobody knows about this book except Ivan and me,” I say, “And now you.”
I look up at Ivan. His mouth is pursed as he watches Ember cautiously.
That old school Bratva suspicion glows in his eyes.
He clears his throat and adds, “Ultimately, it makes no real difference whether it’s on paper or on a flash drive.
Someone looking to steal this information will find a way to do it.
This way, if we ever need to destroy the evidence, it can be easily dispatched with fire and not some overpriced tech nerd. ”
She looks up at him as he talks, taking him in, then she looks back down at the book, slowing turning the page and looking over the entries.
“This is a big responsibility,” she says.
“It is,” I say. “But you’re good with numbers. As good as Ivan is, in fact. It benefits all of us if you two work together.”
“I don’t know if I’m the right person to handle this.”
“You are.” I lean into her, getting her attention and locking eyes with her. “You’ve got this. Fundamentally, it’s no different from balancing the books in the club.”
She turns her eyes to Ivan. “And… and you want me to work with your Obi… um…”
“Obshchak,” I say. “Yes. You’ll be working closely with Ivan. He maintains the funds of the Bratva. He’s the one I report a lot of these numbers to at the end of the month. You keep the books balanced here and he keeps them balanced in the back.”
He raises his eyebrows, his mouth turning into something resembling a smile. “Obshchak is my title in the Kostromo,” he says. “It’s basically the treasurer.”