Chapter 10 - Mikhail
Damn it. I was still reeling from that kiss when we landed back in LA. Laurel was being sweet, asking if she could help, all while pretending it never happened. That might have annoyed me if I weren’t so caught up in what was going on at home.
I was already beginning to think of LA as home, and Laurel had a lot to do with that.
I was settled in, watching over her, enjoying the stress of starting a restaurant because of her.
In Moscow, I was only called in on Bratva business for dire emergencies when all hands were needed on deck.
I made it clear I didn’t want it to be that way here, when my cousins didn’t call me for the first rumblings of a new war only a few weeks ago.
They were my family, and if Los Angeles was going to be my town, I was going to help defend it.
Even my father, who was on yet another honeymoon with Tati, was racing back from wherever they were this time.
My two cousins who lived in San Francisco and Silicon Valley were on standby, ready to head down if things were settled by morning.
It was almost midnight by the time I got Laurel back to the restaurant, and it was only her seriousness underneath her sarcastic promise to stay inside until her taxi arrived that let me speed off to the location Aleks gave me.
The California Fokins owned a vast number of warehouses, importing and storing all sorts of items, both legal and not so much.
My cousins moved things around, changed ownerships, kept things hidden under shell corporations, but eventually, some enemy always found out and then had to set a fire or rig a bomb, or raid the place, stealing everything they could get their hands on.
It was fucking annoying, and the exact same in Moscow.
All thoughts of holding Laurel on my lap, the heat of her body, and her soft sighs disappeared when I arrived in the middle of a shootout.
With my gun cocked and ready, I jumped out of my car and tucked myself down beside my brother Lukyan, shielding himself from the hail of bullets behind a low cement wall between buildings.
“What’s the problem?” I asked Luk.
“Guns,” he answered. “Lots of guns.”
Very funny. Luk was in his element, a crackshot who loved any chance to show off. Someone ran screaming from the building, and as soon as he recognized he wasn’t one of ours, Luk took him out with a single shot.
“Nice,” Kolya called from further down the wall. He was married to my cousin Nat, and had once been on the other side of things, and though he didn’t hold the name of Fokin, he was definitely one of us now. “I think we can breach.”
He was right. The bullets had greatly slowed, and I ran to a window to peek inside. Kolya rolled a makeshift explosive over to me, followed by a lighter. I lit it up, broke the window with the butt of my gun, and tossed it through, hurrying back behind the wall before it went off.
More broken glass and bits of debris flew out the window seconds after the bang, followed by a few screams. We all ran in before a fire broke out, and Luk and I each went in separate directions with our guns drawn while Kolya, who was followed by Aleks and Dima, grabbed a nearby fire extinguisher.
As soon as I rounded a tall shelving unit, I got sucker punched in the face, the sickening crunch and gush of blood sending me reeling back.
Before the man could get past me, I fired an arc of bullets, dropping him and the one behind him.
His knife clattered uselessly onto the concrete floor, and I picked it up, moving a little more warily now.
A bullet whizzed past me as I came to the end of the aisle, and a shooter jumped out, his foot raised to kick me in the chest. I jumped aside, firing and missing, but able to swing the knife into his shoulder. That slowed him down enough for me to finish him.
“Save some,” Aleks hollered from another aisle.
I shook my head, but eased my finger off the trigger, getting a better grip on the knife. Right now, we had no idea who was committing these attacks. They could have been random, an old enemy rearing its head, or someone new trying to make a name for their organization.
I liked keeping things neat and tidy. If you fuck with me and mine, I kill you. Problem solved. But Aleks wanted information, and he was in charge here.
The smoke from the fire my incendiary started was quickly overwhelming the air, despite Kolya’s efforts to put it out, so we retreated. It looked like the guy I stabbed in the shoulder was miraculously still trying to crawl away.
“Hey, I thought I ended you,” I said, grabbing him by the back of the collar and dragging him out with me. “This must be your lucky day.”
He said something in a language I didn’t understand, most likely Spanish. Maybe that information would help Aleks identify who he worked for.
“It’s not his lucky day unless he wants to talk,” Aleks said, taking him from me and directing two of his guys to toss him in his trunk. Whatever he angrily said while bleeding profusely, Aleks answered in the same language.
“We’re trilingual now?” I asked him.
“You’ve got to be,” he answered. “I even learned a bit of Japanese when the Yakuza were giving us trouble.”
He told me I looked like shit, and I answered that he did too. We both wiped the blood from our faces and laughed, while he complained about not liking to go home when he was so banged up, since it upset his wife and daughter.
Family. A mixed blessing. It made me wonder what Laurel would think if she saw me in this state. We continued to joke around and catch up while making sure the fire was completely extinguished, and it was closer to morning than night by the time I took off.
Exhausted as I was, nose throbbing, I didn’t go home, but headed to Laurel’s apartment since she was back in the front of my thoughts. Keeping my eye on the subtle part in her curtains, I thought back to the trip up north, which seemed more like a week ago after all I’d been through.
I already felt like I knew her well, and was convinced that she was acting odd before we left for the vineyard.
The way she acted when we first arrived wasn’t like her either, hunger or no hunger, because she recovered before the cheese platter arrived.
What changed that had her swaying on her feet, as pale as a ghost, to being perfectly fine?
My search into her background had led me to a dead end, but there was someone who could dig deeper for me.
Despite the early hour, I was certain everyone in my family was still awake, even my cousin Mat and his wife, CJ, who were certainly waiting for updates on whether or not they should head down from Silicon Valley.
“I need your wife to check something for me,” I said when Mat answered. “And, yes, at this hour.”
The next voice I heard was CJ’s, a computer specialist who’d basically been sold into our family, and we were all very lucky she decided to stay. If her spy software couldn’t find anything else on Laurel, there wasn’t anything else to find.
After I gave her Laurel’s information, I mentioned the Canyon Vines winery, and Mat jumped back in, listening in on speaker.
“We know that place,” he said. “We went there a couple of years ago, but stopped because the owner has ties to the Angelo family as well as a few other people we’re less than friendly with.”
My blood went cold. Surely not. Not innocent Laurel, who blushed every time she stood up to me. “Organized crime?” I asked. “You think the vineyard’s a front, or a money laundering scheme?”
I could almost hear my cousin shrug. “Maybe, maybe not. All I know is the owner sells to those families, and that’s all I needed to know to take my weekends off elsewhere.”
“Okay, so it could be nothing.”
“Do you think your Laurel is tied to them somehow?” CJ asked.
Your Laurel. I liked the sound of that too much. “That’s what I’m hoping you’ll find out.”
We ended the call, and I watched Laurel’s window, my mind drifting in all directions, trying not to land on the fact that Canyon Vines did business with the mob. It wasn’t a big deal. Everyone had a right to buy wine, but if it was something deeper than that and Laurel was involved?
I should have taken my ass home, but couldn’t tear myself away, as if I felt the need to keep her safe from all the bad guys out there in the world.
I ended up falling asleep in my car, and woke up just as Laurel was coming out of her courtyard.
I had to duck down and hope she didn’t see my car, cursing myself for being so sloppy.