Chapter 2 - Viktor
My shirt is still on the floor where she’d torn it open and shoved it down my arms. I’m sitting here in yesterday’s pants, barefoot, like some fucking bargain-bin Romeo.
I sit on the edge of the unmade bed; the sheets are still tangled from our night of passion.
Morning has already bled into an endless afternoon.
The light reflects off my black phone screen, idle and ignored.
I haven’t checked it once. It’s not as if she’ll call it.
She doesn’t have the number. I don’t even know her fucking name.
What can I say? Not exchanging names had felt like a good idea at the time. Mysterious, playful, sexy—all traits the woman herself embodied.
One would think it would’ve posed an issue while in the throes of pleasure. But, no, there’s never been a more tantalizing sound than those husky, breathless cries my Mystery Woman had bitten into her own knuckles.
Now, in retrospect, the sheer idiocy of the choice is glaring.
I’d say it’s about as glaring as the fact that I’ve been sitting in this godforsaken hotel room for the past four hours, waiting on the off-chance that she might come back.
She’s not coming back.
Deep down, I’ve known this since I woke up alone, sheets where her body should’ve been waiting for me gone cold.
The pillows she’d lain her head on still smell like the black coffee and the woody, sweet smell of her mesmerizing perfume.
I know, because I’ve checked twice. It’s fucking ludicrous.
I’m not some lovesick fool, no matter how endlessly magnetic she was.
Or how tight her sweet, slippery cunt was.
I rake a hand through my hair, probably standing on end by now from the number of times I’ve already done it.
I should go. It isn’t smart to linger in place too long when those nosy Yuris have eyes everywhere in the city. These days, staying rooted is begging to get caught.
But I can’t move.
I can’t stop replaying last night in my head like a movie, parsing through it frame by frame, mining my memory for any real defining clues.
It’s what I’m built for: to gather intel, find patterns, solve puzzles.
It’s how I outsmart everyone all the fucking time.
The devil in the details everyone’s always on about? That’s me.
Except right now, the details are laughably sparse. It fucking irks me.
I’ve got her physical traits embedded in my mind—nearly six feet tall in those sky-high heels, looking even taller with her willowy build, and otherworldly with skin so pale it looked translucent.
It bruised beautifully. Her hair is a blonde closer to silver than gold, obviously dyed.
Dramatic grey-blue eyes that I’d made roll back into her head, lined heavily with eyeliner that had streaked down her cheeks with her overwhelmed tears.
Probably too fucking young for me. Mid-twenties, at most.
The tiny little mole above her pouty mouth is pretty distinct—but not enough.
I need more.
My mind circles back to the club. The vision of her body moving on that dance floor—limber and loose, mindless and fearless.
It had been enjoyable just to watch her move, every whirl and writhe of her body daring the world to keep up with it.
Then that drunk bastard put his hands on the woman to her right, and she’d spun on him.
From all the way on the mezzanine, I couldn’t have heard the words exchanged.
But there was no mistaking the way her fist flew to his mouth, knuckles split and pouring red where she knocked his teeth loose. Fucking Christ.
A fucking firestorm in a matchstick frame.
I’d been ready to leave with the woman behind me.
I’d confirmed the exits and ensured no surveillance would catch me on the way out.
She wrecked all my plans. I caught her slipping out the back for a cigarette, already tapping out the box in her palm, and some magnetic force lured me along behind her.
A stupid risk to take, even if I’d chosen the Disco Monkey for a reason.
The alley had been jarringly quiet, the bass from within the club reduced to thumps against the door I shut behind myself.
My heart had echoed the rhythm against my ribs and in my gums.
Adrenaline had ratcheted within me at the sight of her leaning up against the brick wall, a cigarette already between her teeth. Her knuckles still bleeding as she took a deep inhale and plucked the cigarette from her lips, blowing wisps of dreamy smoke.
“Smoker or just a stalker?” were the first words she’d said to me, nonplussed by either answer.
“A little of both,” I admitted.
She’d hummed in acknowledgment.
Then, quick as lightning, she tossed me her pack of cigarettes with no warning.
My reflexes moved of their own accord, a palm snapping out to trap the pack against my chest a millisecond before gravity stole it.
She had the audacity to applaud. Her mouth split in an unbridled grin, pearly whites holding her cigarette like a mousetrap.
“You can have one,” she’d deigned.
“I’m having all of them.”
Her eyes—more blue in them than the pure grey I’d assumed from a distance—gleamed with interest. “Okay then. But you’ll have to entertain me. Can you?”
It was a risk to follow her out. To keep standing there in plain sight, all other variables of the night unaccounted for.
A worthwhile risk, too. To watch her face when she’d told me later, sans shame or the faintest hint of trepidation, that she’d never had penetrative sex before. I didn’t think that was a kink for me, honestly.
And then, “Is that going to be a problem?” she’d challenged me, chin jutting out, already rearing for a fight. There had been hunger in her eyes.
I knew it, because I recognized it. I’ve felt it all my life.
There was a shift. A point of no return.
It could never be anything but worth it to feel her come apart beneath my hands. The visceral memories of it swirl through me now, like a tempestuous storm, the color of her eyes.
I turn away from the window, frustration knotting my brows in a perpetual frown. My hands flex against my thighs with a restlessness I can’t quell. The walls of the hotel room are pressing in.
I should already be in New York. A shipment is arriving at Port Newark tonight.
It’s the largest one yet, after years of planning; the lynchpin of everything I’ve been working to build brick by fucking brick.
Three other gangs have staked their reputations on my word.
If this falls apart, it isn’t just my operation that goes up in smoke—it’ll be every alliance I’ve spent the past two years cultivating, every back-channel deal, every carefully-plotted smuggling route through those ports. Men have died for less.
The alliance is still precarious as fuck.
Yet here I am, fixating on a nameless woman.
***
I give up the ghost and check out of the hotel at 4 PM, five hours past the checkout time.
Not that the concierge would dare comment on either my demolished state or the tardiness.
Money talks, and I’ve got plenty of it lining up my pockets, even without the benefit of resources courtesy of my brother’s carefully curated empire. And mine doesn’t leave a paper trail.
Stepping out into the streets, I force my head clear. I angle the navy Red Sox cap low on my head and dodge traffic cams with a familiar dance.
My car is parked where I left it, four blocks away. The precaution might be overkill to some. But it’s necessary. The Yuris are relentless when they’ve caught a scent—and it’s safe to say they’ve got a taste for mine.
I can’t afford to be this fucked up over some girl. It’s insanity. All signs point to the same conclusion. I should tuck her away into my spank bank and let it end there. She was probably just some college girl out for a wild night, who slunk out wearing smeared makeup and dripping regret.
Even as I think it, though, my gut calls bullshit.
It knows that she isn’t some careless girl.
She wasn’t just a notch on my bedpost. At forty-two, I’ve had enough of those—though not as many as I oftentimes let some motherfuckers believe, if it’s the only way they’ll respect me—and I know the difference.
If it weren’t for it being hands-down the best sex of my fucking life, I’d deem the back and forth of the lead-up even more exceptional than the physical act of sex.
It had been, at the very least, the most remarkable foreplay.
My phone buzzes in the pocket of my jeans. I fish it out. I’m too distracted to check the screen, but I’m not surprised by Anton’s voice greeting me from the other end.
As I’m sure he isn’t surprised by the way I answer, theatrically gasping, “The great Zakharov Pakhan calling me? I’m so fucking honored,” into the speaker.
“Viktor.” I can practically hear his eyes roll.
At least it’s entertaining to inundate him with ammunition. It costs less than waiting around for him to see me as anything other than the fuck-up he has, and probably will, always believed me to be.
“Anton,” I mimic his curt tone.
“I haven’t heard from you in a week.”
I drum my fingers against the steering wheel. “You noticed? Adorable.”
“Please,” he grits out between his teeth, “don’t test my patience.”
“Why? I thought it was a thing of legends, meant to be revered.”
I’d put money on him pinching the bridge of his nose on the other end. His heavy sigh crackles through the line. “Are you finished?” It isn’t a question. “You were out clubbing last night. You aren’t exactly inconspicuous. Did you believe I wouldn’t hear about it?”
I’m six feet and three inches tall and hot shit. No, I’m not fucking inconspicuous. No more than he is, albeit a few inches shorter and blond as a stack of hay.
“I know the Yuris are circling,” I say, swallowing down my irritation. It would blow his mind, the things I know, too. He can’t know any of them. “I’m being careful. I’m not the fucking idiot you think I am.”
“Careful,” Anton echoes stiffly. He lets the word hang between us, skeptical and dripping with exhaustion.
“Is that what you’re calling it these days, Viktor?
Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re jerking off in hotel rooms while Iosif Yuri tears the city apart looking for you because he believes you tried to have his wife kidnapped. ”
My jaw throbs from the effort of keeping my mouth shut.
Anton’s silence is condemning.
“I’m handling it,” I say finally.
“Are you? Because last I checked, you created this mess when you decided to shoot Valentin Yuri without running it by anyone. And now you’re—what? Lying low? Or are you too busy snorting lines off some whore’s thighs instead of dealing with problems of your own creation?”
The words don’t even sting anymore. I haven’t touched coke in two years. Haven’t touched any of it—the chaos, the excess, the reckless bullshit that almost cost me everything.
I’m fucking clean, and I know it won’t matter to tell him. He won’t believe me. He never does. He only sees who I used to be.
“I’m your second-in-command.”
I detest the way the words sound coming out of my mouth, small and pathetic. I’m not a little boy. I don’t need his fucking approval.
“Yet you act like a low-level thug.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper. “What would you have me do? Walk into their territory and shake Head Yuri’s hand? They want my head on a fucking spike.”
“Are you saying it’s undeserved?” Anton counters.
“I’m saying it’s—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” he cuts me off. “You’re a Zakharov. Our father gave you his name. When are you going to stop being a liability and honor it?”
A liability.
The word bears down on my chest, heavy as a boulder. Beneath it, every muscle in my body stiffens.
I hang up without saying another word and curl my fist around the phone tight enough to almost break it.
It immediately starts buzzing anew.
I turn the key in the ignition and make the engine purr.
It doesn’t make enough noise. So, I flick on the radio and drown it out with the generic pop song blasting out of the speakers.
It takes me more than a few minutes to temper my breath, throwing the car into drive and prowling through Boston. Eventually, the phone stops vibrating. The silence in its wake fucking kills me too.
Only when I look around do I realize where the car is idling. The sign isn’t aglow in bright pink and lime green neon anymore. But in the light of day, I can read it anyway. Disco Monkey.
I put the car in park and stare at it.
Memories from last night fill my head all over again, setting me on fire in a whole new way.