Page 21 of Drowning in the Deep
Before we got ready to move out, I brought the whole group together. Visions of Yuri danced before my eyes. Some of these guys were young. Others, like Nico, had lived long successful lives. At the moment, it didn’t matter. “We need to be safe out there,” I told them all. “Everyone be on high alert. Be careful. Take care of one another. When this raid is over, I want to see every single one of you back here for a celebration. We aren’t losing anyone else, got it?”
The crowd whooped in agreement, nodding their heads.
Then, I lifted my fist into the air. “For Yuri!”
“For Yuri!” they all yelled. We all missed the guy. I just hoped none of us would be seeing him any time soon.
CHAPTER15
ELISA
My eyes continued to flicker to the clock at the top of my computer screen as I finished working on one of the lame projects I’d been assigned that wasn’t even important at all. Another day had passed, and Mr. Williams hadn’t called me into his office to discuss the work my father had mentioned to me. Part of me hoped that meant someone had changed their mind. Either Father thought better of having me handle something so important or Mr. Williams assigned the task to someone else.
While part of me would be disappointed not to get to work on it because I was hoping to use that information to help Daemon, the rest of me would be relieved not to have to work on anything for my father. So far, nothing I’d ever done had been good enough for him, so why would this be any different? Even if I did exactly what he asked me to do, I would still be told it was all wrong and that I was a fucking moron.
Thirty more minutes, and I could go home, not having to worry about any of this bullshit again until tomorrow morning. I could make it thirty more minutes.
My desk phone rang, startling me. I jumped a little, and Jerry chuckled under his breath next to me. He had his earbuds in but probably knew what had happened because I almost always jumped when the phone rang. It was like being at home and having my father shout my name up the stairs. Nothing good could come of it.
Glancing down at the caller ID, I saw that it was Jason Williams calling. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath. I had celebrated too soon. Picking up the receiver, I took a deep breath. “Yes, Mr. Williams?”
“Elisa, can you come to the conference room near my office, please? And bring something to take notes on. Either a laptop or a pad of paper and a pen.”
“Of course,” I said before hanging up the receiver, a little confused. Why did he feel it was necessary to tell me what sort of options I might need to take notes? Did he think I was a fucking moron too?
Shaking my head, I grabbed a notepad and a pen and headed to his office, wishing this could’ve waited until the next day. My brain never worked quite as well this late in the afternoon as it did before lunch.
The conference room door was open, but I knocked anyway. Mr. Williams turned and smiled at me, waving me inside. We exchanged some pleasantries as I sat in a chair across from him before he got to the files on his table. There were stacks and stacks of paperwork and other documentation, which made me wonder exactly what it was my father was trying to purchase—half of Chicago?
“Your father has asked for you specifically to work on these acquisitions,” he said. “An acquisition is when a company or an individual buys, or acquires, something else—like another company, or in this case, a piece of property.”
I stared at him dumbly for several seconds, not sure what was happening. Finally, I managed to say, “Yes, sir. I know.”
“Good, good.” He gave me a reassuring nod and continued to explain what I would need to do—as if I were a kindergartner on my first day of school.
Naturally, I began to tune him out after I grasped the gist of what the assignment would be. My father wanted to purchase twelve properties all in the same block in a part of Chicago I wasn’t familiar with at all. He told me we’d have to do title searches, make sure everything was clean, then move on to negotiations and transferring the properties to my father’s dummy corporation.
I knew how all of this worked. In fact, I had no idea why we were even going over it at all. Anyone who’d had even a few months of law school would know how to do this. Granted, it was time-consuming, but not complicated.
Still, looking at all of these properties worried me. As Mr. Williams went on about how to clear titles, I thought about what this must mean for my father. Why would he be buying so much property in Chicago? Was he planning on moving here full-time? What about everything he had back in Boston? He couldn’t just pick up and move here, not when he’d worked so hard to establish himself as the crime lord of Bean Town. Surely, he didn’t think that Alex was ready to take over for him so that he could concentrate on taking over Chicago, did he?
Frustrated, I tried to keep my mind from going down that path and listened to Mr. Williams instead. “Once you’ve secured the title, it’s very important to use your negotiation skills to convince the current owners to come down in price.” He was still using that voice like I was a toddler, so I quickly found myself tuning him out again, my mind racing back to what my father’s true intentions might be.
My entire life, I’d wanted nothing more than to get away from him. Back when my mother was still alive, things had been easier. She shielded me the best she could. It wasn’t easy for her because my father was so overbearing. Even Mom couldn’t always get him to see reason when he was angry. Sadness welled up inside of me as I pictured her face. It had been five years, but the wound of losing her was still fresh. Everything had been better for our family when she was alive.
Losing her made my father even more of a lunatic than he had been before. Now, who knew what the fuck he was up to? He was no longer able to see reason, and it seemed I was never going to be able to escape him. Only I would be unlucky enough to arbitrarily pick the only other town in America he would have an interest in taking over.
Then again, Daemon was also here in the city, and being with him might be worth enduring my father’s demands.
Was it possible losing Mom had made my father actually want to leave Boston? Being at home, in the house I’d grown up with, brought back so many memories of her for me. I had to wonder if it wasn’t the same for him. Maybe this whole marriage to Lillian and moving down here was his way of trying to escape her ghost.
She had been the calm to his storm, the anchor to his ship lost at sea. As hard and evil as he could be, she was just as soft and loving. I could see why he would want to leave that town to get away from those memories. What I couldn’t see was why he would pick the wife of his archenemy to marry and move on with. That part I was still trying to make sense of. Unless he’d only seduced Lillian to try to take over her family’s business, which was certainly possible. My father had certainly done worse things in his life.
But Mom was nothing like Lillian. Sure, Daemon’s mother had tried to make me feel welcome in her home and she had gone out of her way to be kind to me on a few occasions when I was staying in her son’s room, but she wasn’t my mother. Honestly, they were nothing alike. Mom was just the sort of woman I’d always aspired to be—intelligent, kind, beautiful, loving. Lillian would never meet the mark in my mind.
Having my father setting up camp in the Petrov family territory made everything more complicated. Granted, I never would’ve found my dark angel again if my father hadn’t married his mother, but what he was trying to do now made it nearly impossible for me to navigate a relationship with Daemon.
Not that we had a relationship. I’d be a fool to think that we were actually a couple. Fuck, he couldn’t even take me out on a date without it becoming a business meeting.
