Stolen from the Hitman: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (13 page)

The Bratva. I remember vaguely a voice saying those words coarsely in the backseat of the car while I was being kidnapped. I drifted in and out of consciousness, unable to move or find my bearings, but that word appears to me now out of the clearing mist.

Did the darker path he walk used to involve taking girls like me?

T
he horror
I see in her gaze doesn’t land on blind eyes. I can only imagine the terrible thoughts running through her mind, and it’s inexpressibly painful to keep eye contact with her. I see her on the cusp of asking, was I once a part of the slavers who subjected her and Maggie to this fate? Have I done still more wretched things? Are the two of them just some form of penance for myself, a saved couple of girls among countless slaves I’d condemned?

I was never a slaver, but I wouldn’t have been able to say ‘no’ to all of those questions written on her face.

“That life is far behind me, Liv,” I say with some finality, but I can tell she doesn’t fully believe me. “I burned that bridge when I burned the tattoo from my skin. What I do now has no ties to those men and the evil they conduct. I hope my actions speak for themselves.”

The look on her face is pained, and I frown, letting my head hang a moment. “I understand if this is difficult for you. I don’t expect you to believe me.” I cross the room with a set of clothes and let my towel fall to the ground out of her sight, donning a tight and thin black t-shirt, jeans, and shoes. She needs time to digest what I just confessed to her, or else needs time to run from me.

I’ve been foolish, and let my guard down. For a few hours, there was a lingering question in the back of my mind if I could actually be worthy of a woman’s love and respect. I’d written it off so long ago, accepted my fate as a life-long bachelor, until she came into my life.

Even then, I pushed those thoughts away, and was prepared to be professional with her, just like all my students. But fate had other plans for us. It gave me hope that there might be a future for me, outside of pain and death and work.

I had to be reminded that I am unredeemable, and that no one outside the Bratva will ever accept the true me. Especially not a woman so beautiful and delicate as Olivia.

When I return to the bathroom a few moments later, I’m earnestly surprised to see her still there. I almost thought she would have fled the room and my home, taking her chances away from anyone who’s had any affiliation from the mafia.

I fear I’m her only hope in all this, and she knows this. Of course she won’t run, if she thinks her friend’s life is on the line.

But that’s no basis for a relationship, so I turn back to the cold professional I should’ve been all along.

“For now, Liv, I must press on,” I say, crossing the room and picking up my cellphone from the nightstand. For the first time since the revelation, I see her look up at me with a furrowed brow, as if watching me through a dream.

“What do you mean?”

“There are some things I must do on my own to help find Maggie,” I explain, knowing she isn’t going to like that explanation, but as she nods absently, I realize she’s lost in thought over what she’s learned about me.

Perhaps I should not have revealed my past so early to her. Hell, I never should’ve revealed anything to her. I was a fool to think that she’d accept me as I am. The things I’ve done...

But a hopeful voice within me reminds me that I would rather her be in shock now than lie to her and face my dishonesty later. I want her to trust me, even still.

“But don’t worry,” I say, a bit of reluctance in my voice as I thumb through my recent contacts on my phone. “The man I’m leaving you in care of is...capable, if nothing else. And a touch less frightening than me.”

And perhaps a little time away from me is precisely what she needs,
I think to myself with a heavier heart than I want to admit. I brace myself as I hear the phone ringing after I call my contact.

* * *

“
F
irst of all
,” says Felix, pacing around the room and running his fingers through his curly hair and pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose, “thanks for letting me know you’re
alive
after yesterday, asshole.”

I roll my eyes, leaning against the back of the room with my arms crossed as I watch him, my eyes occasionally flitting back to Liv, who’s sitting on the couch. She hasn’t said much since I called Felix, and I’m becoming more concerned about her by the minute. Her being afraid of me at a time like this is potentially dangerous. If anything happens, I need her to know she can count on me.

But it may yet be helpful, if only to keep her out of danger. If she doesn’t want to be around me, then I can pull off this rescue mission on Maggie without her interference, and that’s safer for all of us.

“You would have known eventually, Felix,” I say, sounding bored. “We’ve had more than a few other things on our minds.”

“Okay, sure, fine, but you can’t go into an apartment building armed to the teeth with guns and knives and then expect me to be able to sleep at night, alright?”

I smile. “Here I thought you knew about my past.”

“It’s one thing to read about someone,” says Felix in a fluster, “but to see him charging into a building like some kind of American cowboy, fuck! No offense,” he adds offhandedly to Liv, who just raises her eyebrows a little.

“Anyway,” I change the subject, “like I said on the phone, we have more tracking to do. As you can see,” I say with a gesture to Liv, “we have one student somewhere safe, but we’re missing one more. Her name is Maggie. I have her number here. Can you work your magic again?”

“Um duh?” he says, glancing to Liv as if asking if his use of the expression in English is correct. He speaks it heavily accented, but we converse in English to make sure she doesn’t feel excluded. Particularly considering the circumstances. “Are we going on another car ride?”

“No,” I say quickly, “I can’t leave Liv alone. And I know she damn well doesn’t want to be. If you can get me a location, I will take care of what needs to be done.”

Felix gives me an incredulous look, and I know what he’s thinking: am I seriously leaving
him
on guard duty? But I shoot him a meaningful look back, meaning that yes, indeed, I am.

“This place is safe, Felix,” I affirm. “We took no car here, and the mafia hasn’t known about my location for years. This apartment is just another face in the crowd.”

“Well then, yeah, I can uh, do that,” he says, pushing his glasses up again before he moves over to his bag and takes his laptop out, taking it over to the little excuse for a dining table and plugging it in before opening it. “But you saw about how long it took me to get an exact location last time. So, y’know, give me a few minutes to let me ‘work my magic.’ You know, magic that you could learn in like twenty minutes if you cared to.”

“Sure,” I indulge him, “give me a tutorial on triangulating — I’m sure the slavers will put things on hold for us while we educate ourselves.”

Felix rolls his eyes and starts typing on his computer after I slide my phone to him on the table with Maggie’s number pulled up.

I spend a few minutes just pacing around the room while I wait on Felix, but before long, Liv gets up and heads into my room, flicking on the bathroom light and heading inside. I look after her a moment before Felix gets my attention with a click of his tongue.

He nods in her direction, raising an eyebrow at me. “She okay?” he says in a low tone.

I take a few long moments before responding. “She will be okay. She’s... taken in quite a lot in the past day and a half.” And though that much is true, what I’m really worried about is that I’m the one whose traumatized her most of all. Not long ago, just a few hours, she said I was a hero, and for that brief window of time, I felt something I never had before.

But now she knows the truth. I’ve never been a hero, and no matter what I do to atone for my past, it will never be enough. Not for her, and certainly not for me.

Frowning, Felix nods curtly and gets back to his work. As he does, I stand up and head into my room after Liv, waiting by my bed for her to get out.

The door opens, and she stops short as soon as she sees me, standing in the doorway to the bathroom and looking away from me, unsure what to do with herself as I turn my gaze up to her.

There are a few moments of awkward silence between us before either of us says anything, but something feels so...wrong about leaving her here without a word between us, without some closure.

“Liv, I…” I start, closing my mouth and frowning as words fail me momentarily. “I can’t change anything about my past. I wish to god that I could, but…”

She isn’t looking at me, just standing in the doorway with her gaze at the ground. I can feel the pain in her heart. She desperately wants to look back up at me, but after everything we shared last night, after everything she’s been through, I can’t blame her for her reticence.

“When I was growing up,” I start slowly, “I had no parents. In America, such a start is incomparable. In my home city of Yakutsk, it is a near death sentence. The winters are harsher than anywhere else in the world, and the people can be just as cold to each other. I knew so little warmth in my life that I could never even begin to imagine what it might be like to share a bond with another person. In the orphanage where I spent my early boyhood, we were always in competition.” I almost smile at the memory, though most of them feel so distant now, after I’ve come through so much.

“We fought against one another, we raced each other, we stole from the administrators and compared our loot with one another. It felt like that was expected of us. We had to compete to be the best, in hopes that we would one day be adopted by some kind soul. I had only one person who I could call ‘friend’ during that part of my life.” I take a deep breath. I haven’t spoken of this in a very long time. I can feel Liv’s quiet gaze on me, but I keep my eyes on the wall.

“His name was Andrei. He was tall and sturdy, not unlike myself. Through all the cutthroat competition of the boys’ pecking order, we had each other’s backs, no matter what. We fought together. We survived together. And when we passed into adolescence without a single prospect of adoption, we were ejected out into the cold Russian winters together.” I pause, Andrei’s face clear in my mind that day that we were discharged from the only home they’d ever known. “I felt so betrayed by the world by then. With so many families out there, not a single one would adopt us, give us the warmth every child should know? One more birthday rolled around, and I remember being so angry I wanted to flee the orphanage and starve to death out in the snow rather than face the icy shoulder of prospective parents.” I pause, looking up and meeting Liv’s gaze.

“That day, Andrei spoke to me. He said, ‘Max, we humans, we find our greatest strengths in the bonds we forge with one another that we
can
choose, not in our families that we can’t. We will do what we must to get by, you and I, because we know that we can work together to do what we have to.” I squeeze my fists tight a moment, the memories quieting me despite myself. “That thought was in my mind when we left the orphanage together. And that was what kept me going when I started working for the Bratva to survive after my time in the military. None of us were truly free,” I say, more fire in my voice than I had realized as I stand up, “but together, we
survived
.”

I step to the doorway and pause, looking back at her. “I understand if you don’t wish to speak to me, and I won’t blame you. No matter what. But I will keep you safe, and I will save Maggie. I promise.”

With that, I move back into the main room and look to Felix, who’s still at the computer, but the look on his face tells me he has something.

“Progress?” I ask him hopefully. I could use a distraction. I’m not a man who usually retreats into memory like that, and it puts me in a strange funk.

“Progress,” Felix affirms with a smile, tapping something on his screen before turning the laptop around to face me. I see an address on the screen, as well as a map of the location the phone was traced to.

“That’s quite a manor,” I say, “on the outskirts of the city.” I grimace, my fists flexing. “Liv said the bastards already have a buyer for Maggie. If they’re at an estate like that…” I trail off, knowing that the answer may be that she’s part of the entertainment for the night, and Felix looks concerned by my face.

“A manor is gonna have one hell of a security force, Max,” Felix warns, but I’m not fazed as I cross the room and pick up the same weapons I used to storm the apartment the first time, strapping some to my legs and some into a leather jacket that I draw over my shoulders.

“Yes, but you forget, this is the Bratva,” I say, rolling my shoulders. “I still have a few connections there — I only pissed off the ones tied to the slave trade, and most parties like this are mixed company. I am highly skilled, Felix,” I say with a smile, glancing back at him to enjoy his perturbed expression. “More than a few high-ranking members will jump at the chance of having me back. Even if that means my crashing a party under friendly pretenses.”

“So you’re just gonna...waltz in there?”

“I’m more of a tango man myself, but yes,” I reply candidly.

Felix opens his mouth a few times to protest, but sighs, taking a drink of the beer he’s helped himself to from my fridge. “Well, shit. You know what? Okay. I’m not even gonna say anything. You go do your scary murderer thing, and I’ll just uh, sit here with my spreadsheets and make sure your girlfriend doesn’t go chasing after you.”