After that? It’s anybody’s guess.
“Roger that, Jones. Help is on the way.” Hutchinson sounds smug, the bastard. If it gets me out of this cold and somewhere to treat the head wound I know I have, he can be as smug as he wants to be.
“Only you, brother,”Konrad crows. New laugh lines crinkle the corners of his eyes. They were never there before he met Blu and Grey, but his shit-eating grin never changes.
“Shut up, asshole,” I gripe back across the secure video connection. It’s an act, mostly.
I would never have expected it, and I’ll deny it with my dying breath, but I miss the guy. I miss all of them, really. Even Jax’s prickish snarkiness and Cameron’s condescending scowl. I thought leaving would feel right and keep me busy enough to ignore the loneliness of watching everyone else around me find love.
It didn’t, though. Konrad and I used to thrive on the gray-hat world of off-books missions, but everything about stepping back into them has felt wrong from the start. Part of me wants to ask him if it felt like that for him after we went home to raise Ace and form the club.
I don’t ask. I know, deep down, nothing changed for him until he found Grey and Blu. Asking would only bring attention to the real reason I regret leaving. The same reason I can’t go home, even though the snowmobile wreck damaged my leg, and the organization I just contracted with has no use for me any longer.
“Seriously, though, who successfully completes a mission only to get wiped out by a falling tree limb during egress? What are the chances? Like, lottery win level of odds.”
Konrad rambles on, laughing at my misfortune in a way stemming from his relief I survived. That’s the thing about being battle buddies and lifelong friends. We can read between the lines. I worried him, and now, he’ll be a dick about it instead of showing his relief. If the roles were reversed, I’d do the same.
“Laugh it up. Go ahead. Show your own prez no respect. You’re lucky I’m four hours away and immobile with this leg.” Two days post surgery and the damn thing’s swelling has finally gonedown enough for the Aircast. Still, I’ll be on crutches for months. Likely, a cane for even longer. Maybe, forever. The doctor said I’m lucky I kept the leg, and that’s good enough for me.
Lie. Stop lying to yourself, Shaw.The injury means no more field work, which makes me useless in this line of work. Ergo, I have no excuse when Konrad changes the subject to my coming home.
“The girls miss you, brother. Grey misses you. Shit, I think even Gunner misses the way you glare at him when he tames Ace’s bratty ass in the ways you never could.”
“That’s just because Ace is obsessed with the way the motherfucker daddies him. I never tried being his damn father. That would have been gross,” I argue.
Ace was broken and feral by the time we learned what was going on back home. For a decade, Kon and I had been sending money back, believing it was being used to help care for the guys from the group home. Only to find the home had shut down, Ace was on the verge of being farmed out into foster care, and though Jax was getting out of prison, there was zero chance he’d be able to become the kid’s guardian. Not with his record.
Starting the club and bringing my brothers back home was the right thing to do. The only way we could help the kid. But even after he grew up and worked through some of the shit he’d gone through, there was no reaching all the way inside where the worst of it was. Until he met Gunner. His Papa.
So no, I never tamed him. He needed a Daddy, and that was never, ever going to be me.Someone else needs a Daddy, my unhelpful brain supplies.And you could make her Daddy’s little princess.
“Things settled down for good, now that all that business with Carmen’s people is handled?” Secure line or not, I minimalize the references to the murder and mayhem necessary to knock down the trafficking ring that was operating in Darrow.
“Yup. The king finished securing his kingdom and came by days ago to reclaim his princess, too. You’d have died laughing, man. The look on his face when she strolled down the stairs with that fresh ink on her wrist for the whole world to spot. Linework wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty fuckin’ good for an untrained scratcher.” Konrad casually drops that atom bomb into conversation and continues as if he didn’t just nuke my universe.
“She went with him?” I croak.
“Yeah, I mean, what else was she gonna do? The wedding’s in three weeks. Balakin said her mom’s already in panic mode about all the dress fittings and shit they got to get done.”
Yup. Nuclear explosion of my entire world.
CHAPTER 8
LEELEE
“You should smile, Amaliya. Zinovy will make a fine husband to you. He is a proud man.Avtorityetfor your father since he was almost just a boy,” Mother simpers, her excitement over the wedding, which Father insists take place before the month is done, overtaking logic.
She, of anyone, knows how bitter resignation tastes. Before Dedushka, my grandfather, arranged her marriage to my father, my mother was a cellist of national renown. All of Russia knew of her. My father, of course, most of all. As powerful men around the world are wont to do, he petitioned her father for her hand, so he could cage her talent and hoard it.
“Yes, Mama. I will smile.” I bare my teeth. In the mirror over the dressmaker’s shoulder, I see myself. Swathed in white satin and beadwork, my smile is very clearly a snarl. Mama pretends not to notice.
Irina Balakin has long made peace with her lot. To hear her tell it now, it was always her desire to be a wife and mother. Whatever. Maybe, it was. I don’t judge. But I know, with bonedeep certainty, I’ll never be happy with life as an incubator for the next generation of soldiers.
Zinovy is not a bad choice, I remind myself. He’s far better than Bogdan or Gregor, the two I’d assumed he’d choose between. My father controls many, for want of a better word, cells of loyal groups. Each led by a trustedAvtorityet, which for anybody who ever watched that mafia series on cable television, is like the Russian version of aCaporegime. A lieutenant, for all intents and purposes.
Gregor and Bogdan are my father’s age. They came up alongside him, emigrating from Russia to the United States as young men. As my father rose, they knelt at his feet and served him. As many times as the pakhan praised Bogdan’s ability to sire strong sons, I’d thought he was priming me for an arrangement with the guy.
When he proposed marrying Zinovy, who is barely thirty-five, it seemed like a boon I’d be a fool to reject. Do I want to marry him? No. Am I willing to pass up the chance to marry a man I can tolerate and risk the pakhan choosing a man whom I cannot? Also no.
