Analiese
Analiese
Thanks to Vasily’s dramatics, I can’t focus on anything I need to do here. I have a whole pile of assignments— and I really need to read Twelfth Night if I’m going to have a prayer of passing Shakespeare— but I’m too stressed about what’s happening to poor Reggie down in Phoenix to concentrate.
I end up back at my recent default of cooking, pulling up a recipe for risotto just because it seems like a challenge. As I hunt down the rice, I glance at the package Kseniya left yesterday, which got shuffled to the kitchen counter to make room for dinner when we got home. My eyes stray to the label, reading it for the first time.
It’s not for Vasily. It’s for me.
I’m feeling a bit like the cat about to lose a life to curiosity as I open it. I don’t know, I haven’t seen anything horrible, but it’s always been a possibility in my family, and now there’s nobody screening packages or anything. It’s a small box, way too small for a horse’s head, but someone’s hand? Or a brain? Or what if it’s filled with roaches or something?
It’s ridiculous, I know, but I turn away from the box as I pop the flaps up and go as far as listening and sniffing for anything strange before I look inside.
It’s a brand-new cellphone, still in its original packaging. Nothing fancy, probably a burner phone, but why is someone sending me a phone? And who? I look back at the label, and the address is definitely a Mafia front. Deb’s Deli and Phone Depot.
No packing slip. Huh.
After some more debate, I find the power button, hold it for two seconds, then chuck it into the spare room and duck.
No explosion. Cool. Probably a cell phone-sized bomb could have detonated the entire apartment with me inside it, but I’m trying to be as not-dead-cat as possible here.
I’m hesitant as I open the door and walk back in, just in case there’s a delay in this sort of thing, but honestly? I’m basing this more on stuff I’ve seen in movies, not anything they taught us in, like . . . Italian Princess school.
Look, I’m not upset Vasily called me that on camera. It all made sense with the show we were putting on. And I am an Italian Princess in the way he meant it. But the thought was in his head for him to say it, so yes, I’ve been a little irritated about it.
The phone is dim but has a blinking indicator light, so it’s definitely turned on and connected to a network. I hit the power button again and swipe the unlocked screen to open it. The icons are all the standard ones, the background a logo from the carrier. There is a single notification, a text.
Cartwheel
R U OK
I smile as I sink down to the Turkish rug and lean against the bed. In normal times, I wouldn’t even notice the name Cartwheel. It wouldn’t register as anything significant. But it’s been a week now since I talked to my best friend, and yeah, I’m weirdly okay, but I’ve needed her.
I’ve needed the memory of the hours I spent trying to teach her how to do a cartwheel in my backyard, too. I could do it all: cartwheels, somersaults, back flips, hand springs. I had dreams that I’d be a cheerleader one day, that I’d have that kind of high school experience. When I was forbidden from trying out in middle school by my father, making it clear it wasn’t going to happen in high school either, I lost interest in gymnastics. But now, sitting here on the floor in a stranger’s guest room in the middle of winter, I can smell the grass and the buttercups and the sun blazing down on us as Camilla fell on her butt over and over again, never once completing a somersault unassisted but laughing the entire time.
We had no idea that our lives were entirely in the hands of the men surrounding us. In my backyard, we were free.
I type in a quick I miss you and send it before I realize that she sent a phone to Kseniya to hand to me. I’m typing in a much longer message to find out how she knew I was here and with the Bratva, how she knew anyone in the Bratva to get this passed to me, when the phone starts ringing.
I hesitate to answer. Not because I don’t want to talk to her but because there are already tears leaking out of my eyes and I’m not even talking to her yet.
“Cartwheel?” I whisper once I bite the bullet and hit the answer button.
“Can you talk? Is it safe?” she whispers just as quietly, an epic feat for Camilla.
I laugh through my sniffling. “Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t know if the phone is okay, but I’m by myself. I’ll ask Vasily if I can have the phone when he comes home.”
“Don’t ask him that!” she hisses, like I’m too dumb to know what I should and shouldn’t ask. “Are you there by yourself now? Do you know how many guards are posted? Gino says he can have an extraction team there in forty-five minutes, but not if Baranov’s there.”
Baranov . Vasily Baranov . Now that I know his last name, I wonder if he has a middle name.
“Gino would do that for me?”
“Well, he would do it for me.”
I have to smile at that. Camilla bitches about Gino non-stop usually, and I’m smuggling her birth control because he’s not giving her an option and she’s not ready for babies yet, but Gino isn’t a terrible guy. Not amazing by any stretch of the imagination, and the fact that he’s twenty years older than Camilla skeeves me out while also reminding that there’s no guarantee my future husband will even be my generation, but he’s not cruel to her and generally does what he can to make her happy.
Yeah, if Camilla asked him to and it was feasible without creating too much disaster, he’d send an extraction team for me.
“That’s sweet of him, but I’m fine.”
Camilla takes an incredibly slow, deep breath before saying an equally long and skeptical, “Ohhhhhhkay.”
“What?”
“You just said a nice thing about Gino. You . Who hates Gino and has on many occasion promised you’d figure out some way to get me out of this not ideal but also not terrible situation. So I don’t believe you’re fine.”
She has a point. But when I was bashing Gino, it was with the thought that my world was going to somehow be amazing, that Tony would pick the perfect man for me and I’d have a great life. I wanted Camilla to experience that, too.
I’ve since learned better. I’m treated better by the man Tony sold me to for nothing except to ruin me and throw me back than I’ve ever been by Tony. Which makes Camilla’s pairing with Gino seem a little less awful. Gino isn’t great, but she’ll be okay there, and he’ll keep her safe.
“I’m fine. I mean, I’m in a weird situation, which how did you even—” I gasp and am no longer fine. “You saw it. You saw the stream. Oh god.”
“Oh sweetheart,” she says softly. “It’s horrible what he forced you to do! And to make everyone watch it like that? To brag about it like that? To flaunt it? Also, I know you’ve never done this before so that might have seemed normal to you, but it was absolutely not normal. Like, are you okay ? Physically?”
I cringe and sink down, curling myself into a ball on my side and wishing I could bury myself right in this Turkish rug.
That smells like corn chips.
That’s weird. Kind of gross. But fixable. I’ve learned things.
I sigh and drag myself back up to my feet to grab the vacuum and the stuff that gets sprinkled on carpets. I’ve been avoiding this room because I figured spare rooms didn’t need regular cleaning, but I guess I was wrong. “Okay, that was not my first time, and I wasn’t forced to do anything. Not like that.”
Camilla gasps. It’s not a video call so I can’t see what she’s doing, but I swear I hear her leaning forward in excitement over the gossip. “You little slut!” she laughs. “I cannot believe you hid this from me. I’m your best friend! I tell you everything! And meanwhile, you pretend like you’re so sweet and innocent and too good of a girl to get on your knees for anyone but God while gobbling down Bratva meat like you’re going to starve if you don’t get another inch down your throat?”
I’ve reached the cleaning closet by the time she shuts up, which is perfect timing for me to bang my forehead against the molding there. “I never should have turned this phone on.”
“Come on, admit you’re a slut like the rest of us. Be proud of how yummy that Bratva boy is. And that voice? Fuck, I was never going to say this because I thought you were getting, you know, R-worded, but I got a little wet just listening to him when Gino showed me.”
This is Camilla. I love her to bits. She’s truly my best friend. And we were probably cut from the same stencil when we were little, but we grew into two very different people. I love that about us, but I really didn’t want to know that she thought Vasily’s too-arrogant-to-admit-he’s-American voice was that sexy.
And that he’s yummy.
I’m horrified by the way she says it. Truly. But as I dump the powder all over the carpet, giving it a good coating, I get a vision of that moment when Vasily’s cock was in my mouth and his eyes met mine. There was such a gentle affection — probably blowjob-induced — but it made me so happy. And yes, that voice is sexy when it’s saying dirty things that I shouldn’t like. Yes, he’s yummy, although I like the ‘hanging out in front of the TV or in front of the stove’ version of Vasily and the Vasily who made stupid jokes and pointed at every single squirrel while we circled the park for hours yesterday just as much.
I like him.
Oh man.
This has got to be Stockholm Syndrome.
“I do wish Gino hadn’t shown you the video,” I mumble as I plug the cord in.
“He needed me to confirm it was you. Again, we thought you’d been kidnapped and had your virginity stolen like some crazy medieval bride theft. And then I wanted to make sure you weren’t hurt or killed or whatever.”
“Oh, no. You . . . watched the whole thing, didn’t you?”
Camilla is silent for too long before she says, “Yeah, but at least you had fun, right? And, okay, I was absolutely never going to ask this, but were those piercings all over his dick?”
I squeeze my eyes shut, wanting to lie because that’s a private thing that’s going to lead to more questions that I have no answers to because I have nothing to compare Vasily’s equipment to, but a lie wouldn’t do anything but push other questions. “Yes?” I squeak out.
“Fuck that is hot. I’m wet again. Dammit. So how long— are you vacuuming?”
“Yeah, but it’s just a little rug. I’m almost done.”
“Wow, so you’ve just moved right into Baranov’s place and decided to take up housekeeping? Is Tony shitting kittens? Do I need to get Gino on damage control?”
I finish up the vacuuming, ignoring this urge I have to vacuum the rest of the apartment again. Our housekeeper in Phoenix vacuums every day, but I’ve only done it once here. I should probably vacuum everything while I’m thinking of it.
But I do need to explain what’s going on to Camilla, even if it means admitting that I instructed Vasily to make that video.
And also admitting that I pay way more attention than I ever let on when she’s explained the crazy scenes in the books she’s read.
I set the phone to speakerphone so my hands are both free. “I tell you what, if you talk me through your nonna’s ravioli recipe, I’ll tell you everything.”
“Deal.”