“So?”
“She ate when you starved. Laughed when you cried. Kept safe while you hid. But I think that’s not what came through.”
“Maybe I was jacking off,” I say.
He smiles. “You are good at that.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You are good at answering a question with a question. That’s what you did just now. Like a fighter. Slipping the hit.”
I look away. He’s right, of course. I spent long hours watching her, wondering how she was faring. If she’d found other friends.
I would try to remember what it was like to feel safe. To have people who care for me. I owe everything to Konstantin, but we weren’t like a family. More like gunsmith and gun.
A call comes in. The investigator has tracked down the old Worland director to a yoga class. “I’ll have him within the hour,” he says.
Viktor is back at his gun cleaning, A-1 mobster that he is.
I pull out the parmesan. Then I get an idea for another angle to pursue. I call Tito. “That accountant old man Nikolla used—Ligne. Go back at him. Act like we got something new. Try to shake him that way.”
“We decided Ligne knows nothing,” Viktor says once I get off the phone. “He was kept in the dark.”
“Just something new to try. We have these few hours.”
Viktor holds part of the action to the light. He tends to channel his passion into weaponry, just like Konstantin. He fucks women now and then, but he’s really about the guns. “You really think the old accountant holds something back?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to show the movie to the old man,” he observes.
I let the chopping fill the silence.
“Don’t let the breaking game break you, brother.”
She’s lying in a deck chair when I go out there with the plates. Book in her lap, face to the sun.
She looks good, but not as good as when she was sucking my dick in that hotel room, eyes cloudy with lust above blotches of mascara.
The Russians are invisible around the perimeter now, but she knows they’re there. Growing up, Mira and I were always aware of our bodyguards. We bonded over our hatred of being watched. We had fun slipping them, like it was a game. Mira would be laughing and running, same as me.
I set two plates down on the table and pull out a chair. “Come on,” I growl.
“Any word about my dad?”
“Not awake yet. Come on.”
She looks out at the forest perimeter. “Any leads on who can give us the key to the code?”
“Our guy’s in pursuit. He tracked him to a yoga class.”
“Thank goodness.”
“Doesn’t mean he has the code. We might still go with plan B.”
She frowns. Not a fan of plan B. “Dad told you everything he could. He wouldn’t gamble me.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her she’s letting her optimism keep her stupid. Such a Mira thing to do, believing in him like that. Believing in the goodness in people. A luxury she got, growing up in peace like she did.
Part of me wants to take it away from her.
A bigger part of me wants her to keep it, I guess, because I just yank her chair out another noisy inch.
She gets up. Comes over and eyes the food. “You gonna shove this in my mouth, too?”
I smile. Just a smile and she goes red. She knows I’m remembering. Thinking about a replay. The hotness of that scene runs thick between us.
“Sit the fuck down,” I growl.
She sits.
She stiffens when I touch her glossy ponytail, impossibly smooth. All those pictures. The smiling girl in the perfect life. I pull her ponytail aside and touch the spot at the back of her neck. Soft and secret. Sensitive. It’s a good spot. A spot I love. “Maybe I will shove it in your mouth,” I say. “I bet you’d enjoy that.”
Red floods her cheeks and the back of her neck.
“Hard and fast and mean. How’s that sound? Because you liked it fucked up.”
She turns up to look at me. “I did kind of like it fucked up,” she confesses. “I don’t know what to think about that.”
My heart pounds. Only Mira would come at me with an honest confession. Most people hold their shields down tight, but not Mira. She lifts them. She shows you her heart.
You can never have her. I repeat Viktor’s words like a mantra. You can never have her. Never have her.
“I’ll be honest, part of me is just a little horrified I was into it, but I was so into it. In normal life, I’d be mad if a guy was so tyranical with me. But in sex? I loved when you…” she lowers her voice… “when you grabbed the back of my head and…you know, shoved into my face? I never thought I’d like that kind of thing. But it was hot, don’t you think?”
I stare down at her, breathless. I saw fucking stars, that’s what I think. I want to do it again, that’s what I think. I’m supposed to be focusing on Kiro, not thinking about dragging her into the bedroom.
“It was so dirty and forbidden. I felt like we went somewhere, or just were weirdly connected in this new way and—”
I close my fist around the ponytail and twist.
Her lips part. Her eyes have caramel-colored flecks in the sunshine. Like shards of beer glass.
I want her so bad, I might go up in flames. This is a dangerous game, and not just for her.
“A connection?” I growl. “Wake up. I fucked your face and took a movie of it.”
“Yeah, I remember that part.”
“So don’t make it into some encounter of sensual exploration. I think all those fumes from shoe glue went to your head or something.” I give her hair a twist and let it go.
She frowns and puts her napkin in her lap and picks up her fork. She pivots it on the end tine, making a little arc. “Oh, Aleksio.”
“Oh, Aleksio? Really? That’s what you want to say to me right now?”
“You always were so serious.” She whispers it, and I’m thinking about that hotel couch again.
She likes it rough, she just told me as much. It’s bad that she told me, because now all I can think about is her lips on my cock. Or what it would feel like to hold her down and be inside her.
She’d like it. I’d definitely like it.
Kiro’s out there in danger and every mobster in Chicago wants to kill me and I’m obsessed with fucking Mira. Like we found this thing in common, like drug addicts trapped at a boring party, realizing we could maybe sneak off.
Maybe it’s because of the pressure that I’m thinking all this.
“Shut up and eat, or I’ll feed your meal to the dogs.” I take my seat across from her. “And don’t play with your silverware,” I growl.
She stops with the fork and presses it into the side of the frittata.
Tito and Viktor ate theirs with their hands, but she has perfect manners in everything. I remind myself she’s Aldo’s spoiled daughter, with her smiles and her safe life.
Maybe we have some connection, but it won’t matter if Kiro’s life is on the line. I’ll do what I have to.
I always do what I have to. No woman will change that. Not even Mira.
She takes a small bite.