Wrecked Bratva Daddy (Ruthless Bratva Daddies #14)

1. Lily

LILY

There are worse ways to meet the love of your life than driving your dead mother's car through his front gate at sixty miles an hour. I just couldn't think of any at the time.

Just then I had my hands full arguing with the storm, and the storm was winning.

"You and I are going to get along fine," I told the windshield. The wipers hurled themselves across the glass and came back with nothing to show for it. "I have scraped worse than you off an ER floor at three in the morning. You're wind and bad temper, and you'll give out long before I do."

The dashboard clock showed a time I'd given up on an hour ago.

The heater breathed out something thin and warm that smelled of dust and old vinyl and, underneath all of it, faintly of her.

It was Chanel and the cigarettes she had sworn for years she'd given up.

I had driven this car for twelve years, and it still handed her back to me on the nights I could least afford the company.

"Don't," I warned the passenger seat.

The Nikon rode where a person should have, its strap looped through the seatbelt the way you'd secure a kid.

It was the only thing in the car worth saving, which told you most of what you needed to know about the last two years.

The camera got the seat of honor, and everything I actually owned rode in the trunk, crammed into two duffels and a milk crate.

"Duluth," I said, testing the word like it was somewhere I'd actually unpack instead of the next place I'd leave behind. "Stroke unit, a cafeteria that won't poison me, a break room with a couch that's genuinely a couch. We can do three months standing on our heads."

She had gotten very good at not answering.

"That's fair," I said. "You always went quiet on me when I was about to do something stupid. For the record, I know this one counts."

Here is the truth about running: it works right up until it doesn't. Eleven days stood between me and the date I was driving away from, the one that would turn me back into a woman in a hospice hallway holding a paper cup of ice chips no one would ever eat.

I had refused to count them since the state line, and my head had kept the tally anyway, the way it always did.

So I did what I do. I took a contract eight hundred miles from the last one, pointed the car at it, and drove.

Then the GPS died.

It didn't go gracefully. There was no reroute, no polite little spinning wheel of apology. The screen blinked once, like it was reconsidering, and cut to black.

"Rude," I informed it. "That's fine, though. I'm a grown woman. I own a paper map."

I did not own a paper map.

The radio was next. It had been keeping me company with some soft-rock ballad, a man promising a woman he'd never leave her, and right on the vow it crumbled into static and then into the dead hiss you get from holding a shell to your ear.

I turned the dial one way and then the other, and both directions gave me the same nothing.

"You too," I said. "It's all right. He was going to leave her anyway."

The highway had stopped being a highway a few miles back and become a rumor of one, two faint ruts under a foot of blowing white, black trees crowding both shoulders like they'd leaned in for a better look.

My headlights only made it worse. They turned the storm into a pale wall that charged the glass, shattered at the last second, and rebuilt itself to charge again, over and over, until I couldn't trust what I saw.

My hands had welded to the wheel, and I pried them loose a finger at a time, the way I'd talk a patient down from a panic attack, breathing in through the nose and out slow.

"Talk to me," I said, to her, to the car, to whatever was listening. "Tell me the one about the tomatoes, about the summer Dad flooded the whole garden and blamed the hose for a week."

That was when the animal stepped into my headlights.

It came out of the tree line on my side of the road, in no particular hurry.

It was huge, all shoulder and knee, its head the size of a kitchen appliance and its antlers throwing my high beams straight back at me.

Moose, my brain said, about a second too late to be any use, because everything below thinking had already taken the wheel.

I stood on the brake. I hauled the wheel to the right.

Two mistakes in one breath, and the road punished both.

Under the snow there was ice, and the second my tires found it, they stopped being tires. They turned slick and useless, and the car became something the night had picked up to throw. The back end swung wide, almost lazy, and the trees on the right quit standing still and came at me sideways.

The guardrail caught the front bumper with a sound like a struck bell, and it didn't stop me.

It launched me. The nose dropped, the seat fell out from under me, my stomach floated up into my throat, and for one long weightless second there was no road, no ground, no sound but my own breath going out of me.

One thought arrived, calm and clear and completely useless: so this is how it happens.

Another came right behind it, and of all the absurd things to feel, it was relief that I'd buckled in the camera.

The embankment came up to meet the hood, and the car hit the bottom and remembered gravity all at once.

Then came the iron. A gate loomed up in the headlights out of nowhere, and the hood punched it aside like the bars were something a person had only promised to build. Metal shrieked over metal, and deep in the engine something tore loose with a bang I felt in my teeth.

The airbag hit me in the face like it had been waiting its whole life to do it.

Then all of it went still.

I sat there and let it ring. The bag was already going soft, wheezing out a chalky dust that coated the back of my throat, and a single high note sang in my ears.

Snow poured in at the driver's window, which wasn't a window anymore so much as a ragged mouth breathing cold into the car, settling on the dash and drifting over the black body of the Nikon.

Copper spread bright across my tongue. I pressed two fingers to my hairline, and they came back dark and slick, and the nurse in me clocked it without a flicker of drama.

A scalp laceration bleeds like a faucet and looks far worse than it is.

The rest of me landed somewhere simpler.

That was my blood, and out here there was no one whose job it was to care.

"Camera first," I said, and the words came out thick and slow, like someone else was borrowing my mouth. I wrestled the belt off the Nikon with fingers that wouldn't quite close and hugged it against my chest. "Okay. On your feet, Chen."

The door fought me for two shoves and gave on the third, dumping me out into snow past my knees and into a cold that had stopped being weather.

This one felt personal. It felt like something that had waited out here a long time, patient as that moose, and now had all the time in the world and only me to spend it on.

I got my feet under me. The ground tilted like the deck of a boat, and I let it, keeping one glove flat on the ruined door while I lifted my face into the storm.

Up a slope I couldn't see the top of, through all that swirling white, one square of amber light burned.

A window meant a bulb, a bulb meant power, and power meant a person with a phone. It meant I wasn't going to lie down and freeze forty feet from my own taillights on the ugliest night of a long, bad year.

"See?" I said, to the camera, or to her, or to the snow. "Somebody's home."

The climb to that light is the part I could tell you the least about.

It took everything I had. I went down twice, and the second time the drift came up so soft and so complete that a big, reasonable voice in me suggested that down here was fine, that down here was even pleasant, and that I could just stop.

I got up because getting up was the one thing I had stayed reliably good at.

I moved one boot and then the other, and a red thread unspooled behind me across the white, bright as a ribbon, the last color left in the world.

The house resolved a plank at a time: dark log, a steep roof loaded with snow, a stack of split wood taller than me under the eave.

I couldn't find a car anywhere. There was no number on the door, no wreath, no sign a human being had ever bothered to soften a single inch of the place.

There was only that lit window, the heavy door, and me, swaying in front of it with the camera clutched against my chest like a hymnal.

I raised my fist. It weighed as much as I did. I knocked three times anyway, and the sound disappeared into the wind so completely that I almost laughed.

"Hello?" The word came out as a croak. "I crashed. I'm hurt. Please…"

Then, quieter, to whoever had raised me to be polite even while bleeding from my own eyebrow in a snowstorm, I added, "Sorry about the gate."

Nothing happened for a while. I heard only the wind, felt only the snow packing against my back, and saw only the light holding steady under the door.

Then came footsteps, heavy and unhurried, the steps of a man in no rush at all to find out who was dying on his porch.

The lock turned.

The door swung inward, lamplight spilled across the snow, and the first thing I understood about the man in the doorway was the gun.

It was pointed at my face, and it was steady.

My gaze climbed the barrel without waiting for permission, up a forearm, up to a face I'd have crossed four lanes of traffic to avoid on a good day.

He was big in a way that had little to do with height, a stillness with real mass behind it.

His dark hair had gone silver at the temples, and his beard hadn't met a pair of scissors in a long while.

His eyes moved over me once, head to boots, and did the coldest, fastest math I have ever watched happen on a human face.

Neither of us said anything, and the silence stretched on far too long.

"You're bleeding on my step," he said. The voice was low and even, the accent worn almost all the way down, and the gun didn't waver.

Of all the things I'd braced for, that wasn't on the list. I looked down at the snow between us, where my red ribbon came to its end.

"I know," I said. "I've got a gift for it." I lifted the camera an inch, like it explained anything at all. "There was a moose."

Something moved behind his eyes, and it wasn't sympathy. It was a recalculation.

"How many with you?" It wasn't really a question. He set it down between us like a bill long overdue.

"In a two-door?" The cold was making it hard to keep hold of a thought. "There's barely room for me and my regrets."

"The number."

He flicked a look past me, out to the dark heap of the car with its one surviving headlight still pushing a thin cone into the falling snow. Whatever he read out there didn't soften anything in him.

"None." I went for a shrug, and my whole body did it instead. "It's always just me. Ask anyone who's ever tried to make me stay."

"Most people are afraid by now," he said.

"Give me a minute," I said. "I'll get there. But you're only second on tonight's list, and I met the first one at sixty."

He didn't answer. He looked at me the way you look at a problem that has turned up uninvited on the worst possible night, and I felt the exact second he decided that was what I was.

My knees sent up word that they were finished. The edges of him, of the doorway, of the warm light behind him, all started to go soft and gray.

"If you're going to shoot me," I said, and my voice was already drifting somewhere far off, "do it inside. I really hate the cold…"

The last thing I saw before the dark reached up and took me was the barrel of that gun and a pair of eyes that had already decided I was the worst thing to happen to them all winter.