“Oh, God. No…”
Zane, hearing his name, walks closer. I take the gun from him and say firmly, “I’m going to take your sister home, and then we’ll get you to a hospital. Come with me.”
“I should go to the hospital, too,” Chelle says weakly.
“You’re going home.” I place my hand on her back and gently lead her away from the building. “Unless you have injuries that need to be looked at.”
She touches the back of her head but just says in a small voice, “I want to go home.”
The three of us are dead silent on the ride to her apartment. I’m still in crisis mode, my emotions overridden by adrenaline, my brain only focused on what needs to be done.
Zane tries to apologize to Chelle a couple times, but she doesn’t answer him.
“I’ll walk you up,” I say when we get there.
“No,” she says too sharply. Too quickly. “Please. Please just get Zane to the hospital.”
I want to say a thousand things. Tell her that she means more than the money Zane owes. That I love her. That she means everything.
But I don’t say any of them. Now is not the time.
I should have told her those things before we got to this moment, so she had something to hold onto.
But now she has nothing. I’m just the mobster who lured her brother to the dark side and almost got her raped or killed. I’m the killer who gunned down six men in a warehouse. I’m the guy who bought her for a month.
I’m nothing.
I should tell her I’ll bring her things by, but I don’t want to go there either. I don’t want any words between us that make it officially over.
So I say nothing.
I just wait for the door to shut and drive away.
At the hospital, I want to be a dick and drop Zane at the door because this shit storm is all his doing, but I can’t.
He’s her brother and as lost as she is.
If I can’t take care of her right now, at least I can take care of him.
21
Chelle
I go to work the next day like nothing happened. Like everything’s normal in my world. I told Janette I got the bruise from running into the doorframe when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Zane texted me at two in the morning to tell me his hand requires surgery.
I didn’t reply. I had zero fucks left to give about Zane’s situation.
I know I should be grateful to Nikolai for getting me and Zane out of his mess. I am grateful.
Except the gratitude rips my heart to shreds. I don’t want to feel anything for him.
I want to write this whole thing off.
Pretend it never happened. Move on and never, ever look back.
I can’t have this level of drama in my life. I don’t run with motorcycle clubs or drug dealers. I definitely shouldn’t run with the Russian mafiya. Not with killers who can single-handedly gun down a room of armed and dangerous men.
Nikolai let me walk away, but I don’t know if it’s over.
Our deal was thirty days or nothing, but I don’t care. I’m out, regardless. Zane can figure out his own shit.
I’m officially done.
It’s not like Nikolai didn’t try to warn me off in the first place. He told me not to bail Zane out.
Well, I guess I had to learn in the hardest way possible.
I will never, ever allow myself to be in a situation like I was at that warehouse again.
I can’t be in bed with a killer, no matter how great the orgasms.
I can make it through the day. And then I’ll make it through the next one.
Eventually I’ll allow myself to feel again, and this will all be over.
Nikolai
I text Chelle the next afternoon. Are you okay?
She doesn’t reply.
I start to text Can we talk? but I delete the message before I hit send. I already know where this is going. Chelle is done. Pretending otherwise would only delay the pain. And yeah, maybe I could talk her into prolonging what we have—or had—but at the end of it all, she’s not going to stay with me.
She only agreed to be with me because of a bargain we made.
Fuck. It feels like my heart just shriveled up and died inside my chest. Just when I found what felt like my new purpose in life, I fucked it up.
I close my eyes, trying to push away the torrent of fresh memories we made the last few weeks. Chelle, drunk, tugging me into her apartment and begging me to spank her. Showing up at my game full of piss and vinegar. The way she looked tied to my chair. The smiles she tossed over her shoulder when we rode bikes along the lake. The way she filled my kitchen. My apartment.
Goddammit. I wanted the real deal, and I’d found it.
I fucking love Chelle.
But that means I have to let her go. I care too much about her to push when she wants out, even though walking away feels like it will kill me.
I ache right down to my soul, so I drink a bottle of vodka on an empty stomach and when that’s gone, I order one of our soldiers to bring me more and crash on the couch.
I intend to drink until I forget she was ever here.
Chelle
I need to get my stuff from Nikolai’s, but I’m not ready to see him. I’m still pretending to myself that nothing’s wrong. That every day is normal, just like all the days I had before I met Nikolai.
I do double workouts at my spin gym and make an excuse to skip Wednesday at the Red Room, and I send Shanna vague texts about being busy. I don’t want to—I can’t—be with anyone who will talk about feelings. I’m working very hard not to have any.
On Sunday afternoon, Shanna shows up at my door with two grocery bags of brunch food.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, stepping back.
“You need me. I can tell.” She gives me a critical look, taking in the faded bruise on my face, then pushes past me and into my kitchen to start unloading. I follow her but can’t make myself move to help or to speak.
She pops a champagne bottle, pours us mimosas and puts coffee cake and fruit salad on plates for us. “Come on,” she says, picking up her mimosa and plate. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“How do you know I need you?” I ask, mechanically picking up my plate and glass and following.
“You’re doing robot-Chelle. This is how you were after your dad died. What happened?” She eyes the bruise again. When I don’t answer, she asks very quietly, “Did Nikolai do that?”
I shake my head miserably. “It’s a really long story.”
“That’s why we have champagne. I’ve got you, sister. Spill.”
I set my plate and fork down on the coffee table and straighten my back. “Maybe it’s not that long. Here’s that short version. Zane couldn’t stand me having sex with Nikolai to pay off his debt, so he somehow got into bed with a motorcycle club—I think selling drugs, but I’m not sure. I don’t even want to know. Then things went bad—again, I don’t know how, and they came and trashed my apartment and kidnapped me.” My voice breaks on the word kidnapped.
Dang it. I was trying to keep it together.
Shanna sets her champagne down and pulls me into a hug. “Jesus, Chelle. That’s terrifying. Then what happened?”