The Enforcer (Chicago Bratva 3)

In one dream, Story walks out of the Kremlin while I’m asleep, and the bearded asshole from Rue’s guns her down in cold blood.

In another, Skal’pel’ operates on her, removing her tongue, too, so she can never sing again.

Then he’s here in my bedroom with a gun on her. I jerk awake, a hoarse cry coming from my lips. I lunge for my gun in my nightstand.

“Hey.” Story’s voice cuts across the room. “Are you okay?” She’s curled up in a chair by the big windows, her guitar across her thighs.

I release my grip on the gun before she can see it, my pulse racing. Blyad’. What if I’d pointed it at her before I got my head on straight? The thought does nothing to calm my pounding heart.

Story puts the guitar down and comes to the bed. She has a way of moving that’s more childlike than sultry-woman. She skips steps. Leaps onto the bed with a bounce instead of crawling. It’s part of what makes her so fascinating to me. She yanks the covers back and tucks her legs into the bed to sit with me then shoves the iPad Dima brought me under my nose.

I stare at it for a moment, remembering what I’m supposed to be doing with it.

I had a bad dream, I type. The Australian mudak speaks the words to her.

“What about?” she asks.

I point at her. I dreamed he cut your tongue out, too.

Fuck. I feel so raw and exposed giving voice to my nightmare, but Story’s been demanding communication from me.

“Scalpel?” she asks.

I nod.

“What was he to you?” Her brown eyes search my face.

Damn. I haven’t told this story before, not that I ever talk about my past. But Story, of course, deserves to know. I frown over the letters, using both index fingers to hunt and peck.

When I was fourteen, my mother took a housekeeping job with a wealthy plastic surgeon named Andrusha Orlov. I sometimes helped my mother after school, and the doctor took a liking to me. He paid me to do odd jobs for him and took a fatherly role with me.

“Did you have a father?” Story asks, folding her slender legs underneath her to sit cross-legged.

I shake my head. I never knew him. He left when I was young.

“I’m sorry.”

I shrug. When I was seventeen, Dr. Orlov asked me if I wanted a job as his personal bodyguard. I was already almost this size. He had a security team, and the head of it was former military. He trained me to shoot a gun. To fight with my hands. He taught me seventy-two ways to kill a man.

I didn’t know why Orlov needed protection, but I didn’t care. I was getting paid more money than my mom made as his housekeeper and feeling like a man. As time continued, he took me to meetings he held with people in public restaurants or bars. I sat in on meetings where large sums of cash changed hands. Over the next five years, I witnessed more and more of Orlov’s identity-changing business.

Then things got too hot. The St. Petersburg bratva came after him when they got word he’d performed surgery on a man they wanted dead. I killed three men who showed up at his residence. It scared me.

I tried to quit. He persuaded me to stay just until he closed out his operation, changed his own identity and disappeared.

I stop typing. The rest of the story isn’t worth telling.

Story slips her hand in mine. “And he cut out your tongue to thank you.”

I rub my aching head and nod.

“Where’s your mom?” Story asks.

Pain stabs through my chest. My sweet, honest, hard-working mother. She lost her job and her son when Skal’pel’ left, I type.

“Does she know you’re alive?”

I rub my head again.

“Oleg?” Story leans her head forward to peek at my face.

I was too ashamed to see her again. I went straight from prison to Chicago. I needed a new start.

Story leans her head on my shoulder, curling her body against mine, her knees folding over the top of my thighs. “I hate what happened to you.” She sounds choked up.

I stroke her cheek, brushing her hair back over her ear. Dredging up my shitty past sucked, but now that it’s out—now that Story knows it and Ravil and Maxim know part of it—something that’s been blocked all these years has moved. I used my pain as a wall to keep everyone out. To keep myself out. I was half a man, barely living half a life.

I was missing far more than my tongue.

But now that wall is down. The path isn’t clear—far from it. There’s fucking rubble everywhere. But I’m willing to pick through it.

“You should contact your mom,” Story says, threading her fingers through mine. “I’ll bet she’s dying not knowing about you.”