Chapter 22 - Mikhail
For a few minutes, I cursed my sister and cousins, because a distinct twinkle had started to spark in Laurel’s eyes as she tried to get me to realize how much money I wasted by taking the damn rabbit dishes off the old menu.
Maybe she was right, maybe I didn’t care about the wine she was so passionate about not going to waste.
Maybe I just wanted to feel her mouth on mine.
It had been too damn long. One, she was definitely working hard to keep things at a distance between us, still believing this was an arrangement that was going to end one day.
Not if I could help it.
Two, we hadn’t had much time alone together in the past month. The restaurant was coming along nicely despite what everyone who ran around like chickens with their heads cut off thought about my changes. But things were getting worse with my family’s situation.
Ultimately, I was glad that Laurel was going out for a while, because now I could slip out to the meeting with my cousins without her knowing anything about it.
Dodging her curiosity about why I was out so much at night was already rough.
Now I didn’t have to deal with her wondering why I was leaving the restaurant for no good reason during the day.
No good reason that I could give her. Lying to her caused me physical pain, yet another phenomenon that had never happened to me before. It wasn’t like I thrived on being deceitful, but it was necessary in the Bratva, so it wasn’t as if I wasn’t good at it when I needed to be.
I didn’t want there to be any more untruths between us than there already were, so ignoring her curiosity altogether was the best I could come up with.
It infuriated her, which infuriated me, because I hated seeing her upset.
And because she was so damn sexy when she was mad, but she was holding me at arm’s length.
I headed out to the meeting place, a bar downtown that nobody would dare mess with. It was an open secret that it belonged to the Fokins, but it had been run by neighborhood locals for two generations, back when Aleks’s father first came to the US to start the legacy we were all fighting for today.
The people in the area were fiercely loyal, many of them working for my cousins, and glad that their neighborhood was under their protection. I parked behind the Irish pub, and my mouth was already watering for a good lager. Gavril pulled up at the same time I did, looking serious.
“Thanks for coming,” he said, clapping me on the back as we walked in. Not for the first time, I marveled that someone who would have happily killed any one of us at one time was now fighting on our side.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said.
We pushed our way through the heavy door and entered the dark back area of the bar, making our way down some stairs to a meeting room which could have doubled as a bomb shelter. It was so fortified against earthquakes as well as human-made disasters.
My brother sank into the chair beside me, trying to grin as he rested his elbows on the table in front of us.
Luk had dark circles under his eyes and fresh scrapes on his knuckles.
He was currently hanging out in LA to help out and hadn’t decided definitively if he was going to make this his new home.
With no new projects to work on, he was still staying with our cousin and throwing his energy full-time into helping out.
“No sleep last night?” I asked, smiling as a server from upstairs brought in a tray laden down with mugs of beer.
I myself was running on stolen naps in my office, but I had been trying to keep out of the physical fights as much as I could.
It was bad enough not explaining where I was going.
Pretending I was working out at the boxing gym at three in the morning wasn’t going to cut it with Laurel when I came home with bruises I couldn’t cover up.
“Running on caffeine,” he answered, yawning hugely as he reached for a beer. “This’ll help me get an hour or two of sleep before I head back out.”
He filled me in on the people he was following, or had been following before they figured it out, hence the freshly busted knuckles. Aleks called the meeting to order, and we settled in for updates.
Over the past few weeks, we had discovered that the Collective, which had been a massive pain in our ass all over the world before being broken down and brought under control when their leader, Gavril, married into the family, now had a rogue faction.
He wasn’t happy that someone he once trusted was terrorizing his new family and gaining traction.
Not just here in LA, they had started branching out to cause trouble for Lev up in San Francisco and Mat in Silicon Valley.
It made me glad I hadn’t gotten around to pulling the surveillance I had on Canyon Vines.
Nothing had happened to raise my suspicions further, but they could be biding their time.
CJ wanted me to believe they had a sleeper cell waiting to be activated, but I couldn’t take it too seriously after learning the truth about Laurel’s relationship with the vineyard’s shady owner.
If he was seriously involved, though, that only raised my concern for Laurel’s safety.
None of us were safe with all these attacks going on, and we were on the brink of a full-on turf war if we couldn’t find the head of this new operation and cut it off.
None of us were safe, even on the best of days, in whatever tenuous moments of peace we could broker and maintain.
But my family was battle-hardened, used to watching their backs, and all of them highly trained to fight. Laurel was as soft and innocent as they came, shutting down at violence, going pale at overly raised voices.
Right now, she believed she was safe, and I would do everything in my power to keep her that way, but it would have been easier if she knew there was something she had to watch out for.
She was with my sister and cousins now, all of them packing hidden weapons, all of them on high alert, and with a trained guard doubling as their driver.
What would happen if Laurel was out shopping alone?
We were a lot more low profile than my Los Angeles cousins, since I hadn’t been in town long and didn’t go out too much.
It bothered me that Rand knew where Laurel worked, but it was still up in the air if he knew who I was and what that meant if he was involved with this rogue Collective faction.
“Hey, Mik, wake up.” Luk thumped me in the back of the head, jarring me out of my thoughts. “How do you feel about helping me stake out this place in Santa Monica tonight?”
Everyone was divvying up assignments while I was beginning to think about how nice it would be to take Laurel back to Moscow. She’d be safe in my place there by the woods, and I’d set up a wine bar next to my brewery that she could have full reign over. I’d only argue with her for fun.
“Oh, yeah, that’ll be fine,” I said.
It meant I’d have to leave after dinner again with no explanation, but this was what it meant to be part of a family.
Sacrifice, loyalty. I only wished I could share it all with Laurel.
It would certainly help to keep her safe if she understood what we were up against and just how hard the shit could hit the fan at any moment.
But what would someone as pure as Laurel do if she knew everything about me? The answer came all too quickly because she already ran from one dangerous man, and Rand Eckvald didn’t hold a candle to me.
If Laurel knew everything I’d done in the past, would she believe I was worse than the man she hated most in the world?
I couldn’t protect her at all if she ran away, thinking I was the bad guy.