Chapter 36: Chapter 36

Charleigh

Was last night all a dream? The feeling of perfect being that accompanied me to sleep is, unfortunately, fading as fast as the morning sun is coming up in my bedroom window.

Dammit.

I push myself up and look around my room. There is no sign of anyone else having been in here. The only mess is a pile of texts and notebooks on my desk, which haven’t been touched in weeks and are now dusty. I look away, the reminder of my neglected courses too painful.

I don’t need another thing about myself to detest.

Then I get an idea. I jump out of bed, gathering all evidence of my former ambition into my arms. I find a place in the way back of my closet and shove all my books and notebooks there so I don’t have to look at them and be reminded of how my life has gotten so off track. I’ll get back to them someday, I imagine, but right now I don’t need these things out in the open, reminding me that the dream I once had of a better life has been burned to the ground. I don’t know what lies ahead anymore. I can only focus on a day at a time.

I’m pulling on my workout clothes when there’s a knock on my door.

“Char? It’s me, Evie.”

“Hey. Come in,” I call.

She pokes her head into the room, looking around as if she expects to see someone other than me.

“Char, were you having sex last night?” she asks, closing the door after she enters.

Oops.

“Yes, I was. Sorry about the noise,” I say, trying to keep things completely normal while I pull on my sock and sneakers.

Her eyes widen like she caught me at something and I wait for a smart-ass remark or two.

“Was it fun?” she teases, sauntering around my room, touching this and that like I’m really going to share details with her.

Not.

“Yes, it was fun, Evie. It was great. I loved it. Is there anything else you want to know?”

She’s trying not to smile, like she’s all grown up and stuff, but she giggles, either out of embarrassment or nervousness, or both.

“What about you, Evie. Have you had sex yet?” I ask.

God, I hope she didn’t do anything with that creep relative of Dimitris’s.

Her gaze whips in my direction, and she looks like she’d rather die than have this conversation with me.

But hell, she brought it up.

“Come here, Evie,” I say, patting the bed next to me. “Have a seat.”

She does, staring at her hands and picking at her chipped black nail polish.

“Have you? You can tell me,” I say.

She takes a deep breath. “No. I was going to. With that guy Arseny. He was really bugging me for it. But I wanted to wait for the right time and place. Thank God I didn’t,” she says, her voice breaking a little.

I stroke her hair, then start to braid it like our mother used to. “I’m sorry how all that turned out. I’m glad you found out the kind of person he was before it was too late.”

She sniffles and nods. “How could I have been so stupid?”

I take her chin and turn her toward me. “You liked him because he was nice to you. Until he wasn’t. He’s a bad guy from a family of bad guys. You had no way of knowing.”

She nods and her sad face reminds me of when she was six and our mother was gone. I had to try so hard to get her to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When she did, just to please me, she nearly choked, that’s how badly she didn’t want it, and ten years later I still feel horrible for trying to force her.

“You know what, honey? You’re going to be okay. Our lives are crazy right now, but they won’t always be. And with the guys looking out for us, there will be no more Arsenys to get within a hundred yards of you before they tell him to take a hike.”

She laughs a little. “Char?”

“Yeah?”

“I… I won’t make that mistake again,” she says, like she’s so old and wise.

If only I believed her.

“One other thing, Char.”

“Yeah?”

She swallows hard. “Well, um, Char, I want to move back home. With Pops. I miss my old life.”

Holy shit, I did not see that coming.

She looks up at me with her big, sad eyes and my heart breaks knowing I have to keep her here, that the Alekseev compound is the only safe place for the two of us, even though no teenager should have to live like she’s in a prison, even in a nice one like we have here.

I sigh and rub her back. “You know that’s not going to happen, Evie. I’m sorry. I wish things were different.”

She squirms, throwing my hand off her.

Punk.

“Did Pops really sell you to these guys? Is that why you can’t leave?” she suddenly asks, her eyes drilling mine like she’s daring me to lie.

My God.

“Where did you hear that?”

She shrugs. “I heard bit and pieces. I sort of put the story together.”

I look around the room, wondering where to start. “Look Evie, someday I will tell you the whole story, but Pops got into some financial trouble. It was… decided that I’d go to work for the guys. I waitressed for a while until… they said I didn’t have to anymore. And I’ve been here, with them, since. They feel it’s safer. Just like it is for you.”

Skeptical, she frowns. “Do you like them?”

Hmmm. How to answer that. “They have their good sides. So, I guess I could say I’m still deciding.”

If only I believed that. Any decision to be made already has been. They might have kidnapped or stolen me, or whatever the hell our arrangement can be called, but they’ve also stolen my heart, and that’s not something I’m going to get back.

*************

Kir

“The Pakhan wants to meet with you.”

Charleigh frowns, playing with the locker around her neck. “What? Me? Why?” she asks, trying but failing to hide the tremble in her voice.

I knew she wouldn’t be happy about this. After all, last time she was in front of the Pakhan, he dismissed her as an inconsequential female, as he does all women. Someone who grew up in our world might be used to such treatment by the older, more traditional men in the syndicate, but to Charleigh, it was pretty fucking insulting.

It pissed her off. Actually, she’s been pissed off a lot lately.

She needs to control her anger when she’s with him. She can vent with us guys, afterwards, but trying to put the Pakhan in his place is a waste of breath at the very least, and downright dangerous to her, at worst. If the man hasn’t learned by now that women deserve more respect than his generation doles out, Charleigh certainly isn’t going to change his ways, much as she’d like to.

I speak slowly, hoping to calm her nerves. “He wants to hear your version of what happened with Dimitri. He listens to both sides and then decides how he wants to settle matters,” I say like this is business as usual.

I know this won’t placate her. She has no patience for the Pakhan deciding anything. But if she doesn’t bide her time, she won’t accomplish a thing, and she’ll never get close to the revenge that is driving her soul right now. We’ve got to get that through to her.

Her fingers drill the arm of the chair she’s in, and she shifts like she’s uncomfortable. “You already told him everything. I have nothing to add.”

I reach for her hand. “It will be fine. He’ll be perfectly nice. Take it as a compliment, that he wants to hear the story straight from you. That shows he believes you.”

Her eyes widen. “He believes me? Was there ever any question? We know exactly who took me, what they did to me, and why. Are you saying he needs some sort of convincing or something?”

The pitch of her voice rises as she speaks faster and faster.

She throws her arms up. “What more can I tell him? I mean, does he think I made the whole thing up?”

I shake my head. “It’s not like that, Charleigh.”

She juts her chin out. “What if I don’t want to meet with him? He’s… a scary man. And besides, I know what Dimitri did, and that’s all that matters. And I know what I’m going to do to him in return. So who cares what the Pakhan says.”

I try not to laugh. What she is saying makes perfect sense.

Just not in our world.

“What’s a Pakhan, anyway?” she asks rolling her eyes.

It dawns on me that for as long as she’s been with us, she knows next to nothing about the organization. She hasn’t needed to, but since she’s asking, I’ll tell her the bare minimum she needs. Not sure how my brothers will feel about this, but they’re across the room, letting me take the lead.

I speak before they can interrupt me. “He’s basically the head guy, the head of several factions, anyway. The Bratva tends to be flatter than other organized… groups. That way, if something goes wrong, there’s always somebody to take over. We’re never caught without a leader. We’re harder to dismantle that way.”

She looks at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am.

I decide to give her a little context. “Russia’s organized crime pretty much started during the imperial times, when we had tsars and such. The rift between the haves and have-nots was beyond extreme. Some took from the rich and gave to the poor like Robin Hood, and an organized method for doing that came into being. They were folk heroes in their day.”

She furrows her brow. “Are you serious? Is that a true story?”

“That’s how I always heard it from my papa. I mean, it makes sense. It’s part of what brought Imperial Russia down. You know, Nicolas and Alexandra?”

She looks at me blankly.

I’m no expert in Russian history. Hell, I’ve never even been there. After Mama and Papa came to the US, they couldn’t have gone back if they wanted to. Apparently, Papa left behind some people who didn’t like him very much. There was a price on his head, which meant never seeing the old country again. When it came down to it, though, I’m not so sure he missed it. Here in the US, he built a life surrounded by other Russians in the same situation. It’s like he brought a piece of the land with him but with less danger and more opportunity. He exploited those opportunities every chance he got and made it into the empire my brothers and I run today. Some people would never approve of what he had to do to get buy, but they can suck my dick. We provide products and services that are in demand. Very high demand.

It's not hard to see that Charleigh has absorbed all the history she cares to for one day. She’s antsy, not happy with unfinished business hanging over her head, and isn’t buying my plea for patience. I know how she’s thinking. I’ve seen it a hundred times, and it never works out the way people think it will. She wants to just walk up to Dimitri and put a bullet to his head. To her, that’s the end of things, and a new beginning for her.

I mean sure, she could do that, but she’d just end up facing a dozen other problems. We have our ways of doing things, and if we follow protocol, things will be resolved to her satisfaction. If we don’t, a tit-for-tat response will consume all parties, and there will be more people left dead than not.

Of course, Charleigh wants to hear none of this. I can’t blame her, so our job, for the time being, is to keep her focused and out of trouble.

She crosses her arms tightly. “I don’t want to wait for the Pakhan’s blessing. I don’t need it. He’s nobody to me. I’m not part of his or your Bratva world, so I don’t give a shit what he says about anything.”

My brothers and I look at each other. If she doesn’t get it now, she never will. That’s the difference between someone brought up in our world, and someone brought up outside it.

I hate to see her like this, obsessed with something a girl like her was never meant to be confronted with. The attack by Dimitri killed something in her, and I don’t like it. None of us do. The light in her eyes is dimmer, and the spring in her step is pretty much gone. Her voice is nearly always flat, and she just picks at the food on her plate.

What angers me the most about this is that Dimitri didn’t just steal something big from Charleigh. He took it from us, too.

Which was the whole fucking point.

So yeah, I’d like to see the fucker on his knees, begging for mercy with tears running down his face and snot leaking from his nose before one of us explodes his skull with a bullet. I’d like to see that right now. Maybe even more than Charleigh does.

But it will happen, in due time. He’ll never get away with what he did and what he took from us.

Because what he took, we may never get back. The guileless young woman who enchanted my brothers and me could very well be gone forever.

Meaning this will be the second woman I’ve lost. I’m not sure I can take that again.

My own issues aside, no one is suffering more than our Charleigh. It’s like there’s no containing the anger seeping from her pores, and the consequences of rash choices—like killing Dimitri now—seem mild compared to what she’s carrying around. There is no hiding it, her suffering, wearing it on her sleeve as she does. We stalled on setting up her meeting with the Pakhan as long as we could, using her injuries as an excuse, because there’s no telling whether she’ll listen to him quietly as he expects, or lose her shit all over him.

Things could go right… or terribly wrong. There’s no controlling her, much as we’ve tried to. When Dimitri messed with Charleigh, he bought an enemy for life, adding to the roster of people who’d like to see him leave this earth.

What not only worries us about Charleigh not knowing our customs and saying the wrong thing, is also the knowledge of the deal she’s likely to be offered by the Pakhan—one where she walks away and forgets the attack ever happened because he offers her a large sum of money. That’s how he resolves things. We know that and accept it.

But clearly, the Pakhan doesn’t know our girl.

All the money in the universe would not sway her convictions.

Ever.

So my brothers and I have to balance this, which could turn ugly because two strong-willed people won’t be getting what they want.

The bottom line, which the Pakhan is going to find out, is that Charleigh can’t be bought. Problem is, he’s not used to negotiating with women. As in, he probably never has had to, not in his entire life. She’ll make the case, asking how safe will she really ever be with Dimitri still alive, but I doubt that will sway him, and if he feels he’s being challenged or disrespected, things will quickly go south.

Across the room I see Niko lean forward in his chair, hands clasped, in his best negotiating posture. “We know the Pakhan means nothing to you, Charleigh. But we need you to do this for us? Will you? For us?”

What can I say? The man has skills.

She looks around the room, obviously not happy. “I guess,” she says with a drawn-out sigh. “Yeah, I’ll meet with him. I mean, what choice do I have?”

She’s starting to get it

Vadik slaps his thigh and gets to his feet. “You’re right, baby. You really do have no choice,” he says, signaling the meeting is over.