Her Russian Beast: 50 Loving States, New Mexico (29 page)

S
AM had
to give herself credit. She didn’t freak out. Not while arranging to stay with Nikolai, not while being questioned by the police, and not while talking to Marco. In fact, she not only got Pavel and herself packed up in record time, but she also called for another, larger pizza from her second favorite pizza joint and stopped to get it on their way to Nikolai’s house.

“It’s probably a good thing your uncle had to go back to the rink to finish up some work,” she told Pavel after they’d used the code Nikolai had given her to get into his colonial-style mansion. “Not to judge, but he just doesn’t come across like the kind of guy who can appreciate a good pizza.”

If Pavel sensed the false cheer in her voice he didn’t let on. In fact, he seemed more at home sitting at the tea-stained oak top island in Nikolai’s oversized kitchen than he had in her small cottage. As she ate across from him, she remembered the dirty little boy who had originally snuck into this grand house. Pavel had been showering regularly for the last few days, and she’d escorted him to a barber downtown to cut off the unruly mess on top of his head. So he’d cleaned up and he’d settled in well at her cottage. But that was nothing in comparison to finding out his uncle was his favorite hockey star and moving into his house.

If she’d been a Hollywood producer, Sam imagined she might turn the story into a Great Expectations reboot. Judging from the way Pavel looked all around him as he ate, this was a dream come true for the boy. Even if his uncle was a total jerk who didn’t believe in love or little boys crying.

“What kind of food do you think Uncle Nik eats?” Pavel asked her as they hunted through the cabinets for some kind of Ziploc bag to put the remaining pizza in.

She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. Raw eggs, lots of protein, maybe wheat germ.”

“What’s wheat germ?” Pavel asked, wrinkling his own nose as he checked another one of the lower cabinets.

Sam laughed. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough.”

“I don’t want to find out!” Pavel said. “Please don’t let him feed me wheat germ. It sounds disgusting!”

Pavel had a truly terrified look on his face as he proclaimed this, but his accompanying giggles proved him to be nothing less than thrilled to be living with a possible wheat germ drinker. Anything was better than living with an addict, she guessed.

Eventually Pavel found some tin foil and they chatted as they packed up the pizza and climbed the steps to the large suite at the top of the stairs, one of five bedrooms on the second floor. Pavel’s new room was an homage to lavish taste, with crimson damask walls and heavy ebony wood furniture that looked like it was either antique or had been commissioned to look like it belonged in a home owned by Russian nobility. It was way too much for a boy Pavel’s age. Even Back Up seemed intimidated, sniffing suspiciously at what looked like a hand knotted red-and-gold Aubusson rug as Sam tucked Pavel into the room’s California king-sized bed.

Yet Pavel seemed perfectly at peace as she smoothed the heavy down comforter over him, like he didn’t have a care in the world, even though a man had come after him with a gun just a few hours earlier.

“Do you want to talk about what happened today?” she asked, taking a seat at the side of his bed. “If you’re afraid, you can come sleep with me.”

Her temporary room, Sam suspected, had probably originally been intended for live-in help. It also had damask wallpaper and a comforter she suspected might cost more than most people’s rents. But it was on a much smaller scale since the room was maybe 100 square feet, 200 at most. Just large enough for a full-sized bed, a closet, and an overly intricate chest of drawers.

However, Pavel just shook his head, like Sam was being silly to think he might be afraid to sleep alone tonight.

“I’m not scared. Uncle Nik will make sure nobody tries to hurt us again. He said so.”

Wow. Sam silently whistled inside her head. It must be nice to truly believe your sports heroes are gods. But if believing Uncle Nik was his ultimate protector was what got him through, who was she to argue?

“Okay, well, if you need anything, I’ll be right across the hallway,” she told him.

“May Back Up sleep in bed with me, please?” he asked in that overly polite way of his.

“No, honey, we’ve talked about this. Back Up isn’t exactly going to help you get a good night’s sleep. That’s why we put her doggie bed downstairs.”

As usual, Pavel didn’t argue with her and she wondered what his life had been like that he didn’t seem to have a child’s natural inclination to whine or keep asking for things over and over again.

Instead, he just turned over and asked, “Will you rub my back until I fall asleep, Mama?”

This request she could grant. She rubbed his back in a circular motion for a little while before bringing up a tough subject.

“Pavel, I know this is difficult for you, because both of your parents have been taken away in really cruel ways. But you know I’m not your mother, right? I’m your friend and I’ll always be your friend. I’m going to do my best to stay here and help you as long as Nikolai lets me, because I’m your friend. But I’m not your mother.”

Pavel looked over his shoulder at her, a frown very much like Nikolai’s on his face. “Uncle is going to let you stay forever. You don’t have to worry about that.” He sounded so sure of this that she stopped rubbing his back.

“Pavel I think we should have a conversation about managing expectations—”

Pavel turned all the way back over and squeezed his eyes shut. “Thank you very much for rubbing my back until I fall asleep, Mama,” he said.

Sam sighed, more than a little worried about the secret thrill that went through her every time Pavel called her mama. Obviously she needed to take her own advice about managing expectations. One court order for custody, and Nikolai would be able to kick her out of his ridiculous house, no questions asked.

But she and Pavel were together now. Pavel was safe—and she had enough time to teach him some mindfulness strategies for navigating his emotions and also get him started on a regular morning yoga routine. Kids were resilient and not easily broken. The little time they had left together might be enough to set Pavel firmly on a path towards healing. She hoped.

As promised, Sam rubbed his back until he fell into a heavy sleep.

Then she whistled for Back Up who’d also fallen asleep while waiting for her. Apparently the fancy carpet wasn’t so intimidating that Back Up couldn’t use it to get in a quick nap.

Sam escorted her bullie downstairs before retiring to her own room, where she unpacked her clothes into the dresser drawer and changed into an Indiana U t-shirt. Then with a shake of her head, she turned to face the room’s absurd bed. As if to make up for the room’s small size, the small bed was even more sumptuous than Pavel’s. A four-poster number, covered in shimmering gold pillows and a crimson comforter. Both the head and foot boards were intricately carved and overlaid with gold paint, and the whole spectacle was surrounded by red gauze curtains that made words like “sheik” and “harem” come to mind.

Feeling like a country mouse who’d somehow ended up in the lap of ostentatious luxury, she pushed through the gauze barrier and climbed into the bed, which seemed like it was more suited to a tsarina than little ol’ Sam McKinley from Detroit. But maybe some of Pavel’s newfound inner peace had rubbed off on her, because soon after laying her head down on the golden silk pillow, she fell fast asleep.

Or maybe she was just in denial. Because today she’d come uncomfortably close to losing someone she couldn’t keep herself from loving. Someone who felt like family, even if they had no blood connection.

And she should have known her stepfather would be paying her a visit.

Sam woke only a few hours later to the sound of Pavel’s terrified voice.

“Mama! Mama!” he cried. “The bad guy got me. Mama, please help me!”

She’d jolted awake immediately, sitting up fully when she saw her stepfather, standing at the foot of the ornate bed. His eyes were gleaming with madness, and he held a switchblade in his hand. The gleaming edge dripping with her mother’s red blood. And he was holding it to a terrified Pavel’s neck.

“Mama! Mama! Please help me!” Pavel cried again.

“Let him go,” Sam screamed at the mad man at the end of her bed, the one who’d already killed her mother and was now threatening the boy she’d taken into her heart.

But her stepfather just grinned at her. Like she was a long lost friend. “Hey, Samantha, girl,” he said. “I sure did you miss you.”

“
R
EMEMBER
, son, before you kill someone, you must always know why you are doing it.”

Sergei said these words to Nikolai, voice calm, eyes flat, as if dragging the man beside him, the one thrashing underneath Sergei’s death grip, struggling to get out of the duct tape Sergei had wrapped around his wrists, caused him no exertion whatsoever. Nikolai’s father barely even registered the desperate man’s muffled screams behind the duct tape placed over his mouth.

As the Rustanov family’s main enforcer, Sergei was well-acquainted with the disposal of bodies—dead or alive.

However, the poor fellow his father held wasn’t an enemy of the Rustanov family. He was only a lowly maintenance man for the apartment building Nikolai, his mother, and Fedya lived in. The maintenance man who had been keeping Nikolai’s mother company ever since Sergei had started ignoring her for a younger, more nubile woman. This wasn’t the first time Sergei had done this. Nikolai had sensed from a very young age that his mother, Natasha, was more a prized possession than someone his father loved.

She was very beautiful, but from a simple shop family, one that used to pay graft to the Rustanovs to do business in their neighborhood unimpeded. She’d also gotten pregnant in high school with Fedya, only to have the boy’s father move away, wanting nothing to do with a baby. So though she possessed exquisite beauty, many of her prospects were limited as a result of class and her status as a young, unwed mother.

But Sergei had taken a liking to Natasha, had magnanimously told her family they’d no longer have to pay him graft or support Natasha and Fedya with their meager earnings, before setting her up in an apartment of her own.

Natasha had told Nikolai the story of how she and his father met one night after drinking too much cheap wine.

“I was a stupid girl,” she told him, her face lined with bitter shadows. “I thought he was saving me from a dull life at my father’s shop. But in truth, he was putting me in a cage so he could get to me more easily. I thought I was special but I was only the first of your father’s many women.”

But Natasha was special in a way. Sergei had never married his mother, but he’d never let her go either. Nikolai had grown up thinking of a father as someone who spent the night in your mother’s bedroom, maybe once or twice a week, for limited time periods—but then disappeared for months before coming back with flowers, jewelry, and gifts for the boys.

However this last time, Sergei had been gone for over eighteen months and Natasha had taken to saying things to Nikolai. Things like, “It looks like your father has finally forgotten about us. At least he owns the building, so we will never have to pay rent.”

But Nikolai had known better. Sergei always came back, and when his mother—who was still very pretty, even with the lines of bitterness that had formed between her eyebrows and around the corners of her mouth—had begun inviting the building’s maintenance man to dinner and eventually to spend the night, it had felt to Nikolai that she was putting the simple man with the simple job in grave danger.

His gut feeling had been validated when Sergei burst through the apartment door earlier that night, his arms filled with a fur coat for Natasha and top of the line hockey sticks for Nikolai and Fedya. He’d dropped it all when found the maintenance man eating at their dinner table.

It hadn’t taken long after that for the rest of Nikolai’s prediction to play out. The only thing he hadn’t anticipated was that after tying the man up (ignoring Natasha’s desperate pleas for his life) he’d commanded Nikolai to come with him.

“It is time you learned,” was the only explanation he gave.

Nikolai could still see his mother at the top of the stairway, both of Fedya’s hands around her wrist, trying to pull her back into the apartment as she screamed at Sergei that Nikolai was only a little boy, too young to see such things.

Sergei had ignored those pleas, too, and Nikolai had ended up walking behind his father as he dragged the maintenance man toward the end of the wharf.

Sergei sounded much like Nikolai’s primary school teacher as he lectured on his favorite subject.

“There are many reasons to kill a man. Maybe he has hurt a member of your family. Then you must kill him in retaliation. Maybe he is talking to someone about your business—someone he shouldn’t be talking to about your business. Then you must kill him to silence him. There are many scenarios and many reasons to kill. Too many to name. Remember, you never have to explain to others why you are killing the man you are killing. You only have to explain it to yourself. You cannot pull the trigger in good conscience until your reason is clear. That is what separates me from the young hotheads who get their families in trouble when they are out at clubs and do stupid things like shooting a bartender who got the drink order wrong. Shooting without purpose is no good and will kill you before your time.”

They came to a stop at the end of the wharf and Nikolai instinctively looked over both shoulders to see if anyone else was about. But they were alone except for a few small, empty skiffs swaying from side to side, and the quiet skittering of rats lurking in unknown places. The night sky was inky black, no moon or stars in sight, as if even they did not want any part of what his father would do tonight under the dock’s dim yellow lights.

“Normally I would not be so sloppy, I would take more time to do it correctly in the Rustanov way. But in this case, I kill to teach your mother a lesson,” his father told him. “This means I do not have to kill this man in the usual Rustanov way. Nikolai, come stand beside me, right here.”

He nodded his head, indicating where Nikolai should go, and when Nikolai was in place, Sergei released the maintenance man from inside his arm.

“You may run now,” he told the smaller male.

The man, perhaps believing his fate had unexpectedly changed, that Sergei Rustanov had only meant to scare him and hadn’t truly intended to kill him in front of his child, ran.

He ran as fast as he could, given that his hands were taped together in front of him. More proof that this man was either stupid or did not truly know Sergei Rustanov.

Sergei watched him run for a bit before calmly pulling a Glock 19 from his jacket holster and shooting a hole in the back of the man’s head. The maintenance man dropped dead less than twenty feet from where Sergei and Nikolai stood.

“You see,” he told Nikolai with a grin as the sound of the gunshot reverberated though the night sky. “In this case, it is okay to be sloppy.”

“It is one in the morning,”
Alexei said in lieu of a greeting when he answered his phone.

“I would not call,” Nikolai answered in Russian. “But I threw a party tonight. Do you still have the maid service in Miami?”

“Lexie, is everything all right?” a tired voice asked in the background.

“It is nothing, Eva,” Alexei answered. “An associate, calling about an important business matter.”

Not a direct lie, Nikolai noted. For men who had been raised like he and his cousins, calls like these were a matter of business. But not the exact truth either.

Nikolai listened to the sounds of rustling on the other side of the phone. He imagined Alexei getting out of the bed he shared with his wife, and going to another part of the house to finish the call out of earshot.

“I do still work with that service,” Alexei answered. “But it’s based in Chicago now.”

So Alexei’s hit man had moved to Chicago, it seemed.

“It is fine. Chicago is closer to my party,” Nikolai answered.

“Also, the service no longer caters. Family obligations.”

That gave Nikolai some pause. He’d only met Tetsuro Nakamura once, when he’d handed him the audio recording of Sergei’s death. But the emotionless Asian man hadn’t struck him as the type of guy who would ever had “family obligations.”

But then, Nikolai had never planned to have children himself and look at him now. Making arrangements to clean up this mess before he went home to his nephew… and his nephew’s current guardian, the girlfriend of a police officer.

In this case, though, whether Nakamura was still willing to kill was neither here nor there.

“That is not problem. The party was already thrown,” Nikolai answered. “But it was very messy. I need your maid service.”

“How long did this party last?”

Nikolai surveyed the basement room, a less than classy affair, with carpet on both the floors and the walls. Not like his own home, which he had designed as one big fuck you to Sergei, who’d been from one of the richest crime families in Russia but had forced his girlfriend and child to live in a small, grey two-bedroom apartment.

That small apartment was luxury accommodations compared to this room, located below a strip club called Jiggles. Every piece of furniture looked to have been either hauled from a sidewalk or bought at a discount store’s clearance sale. So cheap, it was no wonder it had only taken Nikolai fifteen minutes of “questioning” the guy who’d been sent to take out Pavel before he’d sung like a bird and gave him an address.

The drug outfit that had killed his brother was fairly new with a boss who’d come to Indiana with just a few East Coast connections and a family of thick-necked brothers and cousins. According to the hit man Nikolai had interrogated, they only had the one strip club and apparently not enough money or taste to redecorate.

Either way, it wasn’t something they’d have to worry about now. The man who’d attempted to kill a defenseless woman and child earlier that evening was dead on the carpeted floor, along with his boss and other family members, after having been used as a human shield when Nikolai had kicked in the door and come into the room shooting. The only thing the hideout had to recommend it was that, thanks to all the tacky carpeting and music blasting from the club above, the short gunfight went completely unnoticed.

But there was still the not-so-small matter of clean up. Nikolai counted eight bodies in all, and in this case, he had admittedly been a little sloppy. All of the men had been killed quietly and efficiently, but there was a strip club full of people upstairs and no way for him to sneak out fully undetected.

“Eight hours,” he answered his cousin.

“The party went on for eight hours,” Alexei repeated. “You are not serious.”

“Eight hours,” Nikolai repeated, “And there are many people here who weren’t invited. This is not my house, so I need the maid service as a courtesy to the owner.”

Nikolai could almost hear his cousin frowning as he said, “I will now ask you why you did not invite me to help you with set up. I would have flown back if I had known you were planning a party.”

“There wasn’t time,” Nikolai answered. “Someone tried to invite my nephew to this party on the same night, so I had to throw the party myself. Quickly.”

They’d only texted briefly about Fedya’s newly discovered son after Nikolai left the police station, but Alexei cursed upon hearing the coded news of the attempt on Pavel’s life.

“I understand. Hold on…”

Some shuffling and then Nikolai could hear Alexei having a muffled conversation with someone else—probably on another phone reserved for the messier aspects of his business dealings. The conversation was conducted with rapid efficiency on Alexei’s part, until he broke off to ask Nikolai for an address.

Nikolai coded his answer as best he could given he lived in a city Alexei had only visited occasionally, most recently just a few days ago to assist Nikolai with some business dealings. But Nikolai’s vague description clearly got the job done because after a few more rapid exchanges, Alexei came back with, “The maid service says they can clean up your party. Lock the door behind you when you leave. The service will take care of the rest.”

“Thank you,” Nikolai said, meaning it. There were few people he trusted in this world and his cousin was among that very small number.

“Do not thank me. We are family. Of course I will do this for you,” Alexei answered. “And I would have thrown the same party if it had been either of my children.”

Of course he would have.

To everyone’s surprise, Alexei, who’d garnered a reputation as a ruthless businessman prior to his marriage to a spitfire from Texas, had turned out to be a dedicated and loving father. He truly seemed to enjoy his role as a parent, even more so than his role as an international oligarch. The few times Nikolai had observed him with his family, he’d been doting with just enough firmness to command his son’s respect. As of late, though, he seemed be going even further into softy territory now that his wife had given birth to a little girl they’d named Layla. Nikolai had yet to meet the newest member of Alexei’s family in person, but he’d been forced to listen to Alexei refer to her by the most syrupy Russian pet names, and it was obvious the baby already had Alexei completely wrapped around her finger.

His love for his family didn’t make him any less commanding, though. Nikolai did as his cousin said, locking the basement door and piling the cheap furniture in front of it in order to barricade the room from the inside, so no employees with keys could stumble in on the grisly scene. Luckily there was a basement window, one he could crawl out of with the aid of a plywood chair.

He thought of his own nephew being forced to crawl at out of a small window earlier that night and felt no remorse for what he’d done to his would be killers. But he also felt no sense of relief after he made it back to his car. Because now it was time to go home and face what he could already tell would be a much bigger challenge than killing eight men.

He’d never had any interactions with children. Had never wanted them—how could he after the way he’d grown up? But now he had a ward, one he’d have to raise in Fedya’s stead. And his ward had brought a woman into his house. The same one he’d been thinking about near obsessively ever since the first party he’d thrown as owner of the Polar. But she belonged to another.

He didn’t know what bothered him more at this point. That he now had a child to raise, or that Sam, the woman in the green dress, would be sleeping under his roof and he wouldn’t be able to touch her.