Hidden Monsters (Volkov Bratva #4)(48)

Finished with this room, she moved on to the one directly across the hall, hitting the light switch on her way in. There were bookshelves built into the walls of the room, but not a single book adorned the shelves.

There were a number of milk crates around the room, all filled to the brim with books both old and new, but even they weren’t enough to hold all of them. More were placed in neat stacks along the wall. Some were novels, ranging from romance to classic literature, but what caught her attention was the number of books written in French, along with a dictionary. Not to mention the textbooks, a few on philosophy, others in psychology, and in a range of different subjects

Had Luka taught himself how to speak it? And if he had, why? She had never questioned how he knew the language, figured he was taught as Mishca had been, but now she wondered. She kneeled next to them, running her fingers over their spines, reading the titles.

She was surprised to find that many of them were her favorites, which brought a memory of its own back.

____

Laying on her stomach, Alex ignored the men who walked through the foyer of the Manor, oblivious to them as much as they were oblivious to her. She was engrossed in a story, taking a much-needed break from spending the day with her mother who, despite the years, hadn’t grown any less annoying.

Apparently, they were all preparing for Christmas dinner, a tradition that had been put on the back burner for the last few years, but this year was different if only because Mishca was bringing his girlfriend home to meet the family. Alex liked her well enough from her limited time in her presence, but that didn’t mean she understood why Mishca felt the need to introduce her, especially when she knew nothing about the life they were a part of.

“What’s that?”

Alex looked up, the butterflies that always laid dormant in her stomach until Luka came around fluttering to life as she heard his voice. There were men all around them, wearing suits despite the fact they were doing manual labor, carrying things in for Mikhail, and yet here Luka stood, wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt, always displaying the colorful ink that covered his arms.

He leaned over the side of the couch, his expression unreadable even though she did detect a note of curiosity in his tone. As she turned over to see him better, his eyes scanned over her, lingering in delicate places. Since the day she met him, she had found him interesting. Maybe it was because he was so different from the others who surrounded her family, or maybe it was just because he talked to her like she was someone.

For a single moment, she had thought she’d seen interest in his eyes when they met, but it soon became clear that he wasn’t interested since he avoided her like the plague. Other times, she noticed him watching her in that intense way of his, and maybe—and this was a very slim possibility—it was because of their age difference.

Alex didn’t know how old he was since he very rarely talked about himself, and anytime she tried to glean any info on him from Mishca, he either didn’t know or didn’t want to tell her.

Instead of answering, she held it up for him to see, moving her hands so he could read the gold lettering on the spine. “One of my favorite novels.”

He squinted, his lips moving wordlessly as he tried to pronounce the name. She did it for him.

“It’s one of my favorites.”

Plucking the book from her hands, he turned it over, his eyes scanning the pages. She smiled at his confusion. “It’s in French.”

“You speak French?”

“Yes,” she said flawlessly, smiling when his lit up as she spoke in the language she hadn’t used in the months since she had come back to New York. “But you would know this if you talked to me.”

The amusement in his eyes didn’t look condescending in the slightest, but then again, he always looked at her like that.

____

There was a book, however, one that was off to the side away from the others, its spine worn from age. The Little Prince. She’d often read that one as a kid, and she specifically remembered telling him about it. It was a reach, more than a reach if she really thought about it. Alex didn’t know how long he’d had these books—even if the majority of them looked moderately new—so there was no guarantee that he had learned the language recently.

But what were the odds that he hadn’t known it back when she had first met him?

Or that the only books he had in the language were all her favorites, favorites that she had mentioned to him at one time?

It was too much of a coincidence.

Leaving them be for the time being, she straightened up as much as she could, sweeping the floors and cleaning the shelves. When she was done with that room, she moved to the kitchen, then the living room, and practically everywhere else, but even after working for hours, exhausted after it was all done, she found herself drifting back to that room with the books, sitting on the floor beside one of the crates and pulling one out.

For a moment, as she sat there lost in the world depicted in the pages, she remembered what it was like to be carefree. She remembered how easy it was to get lost in a book, away from the blood and death that used to make up her world. She couldn’t escape it now though. She was knee deep in it.

____

When Luka wasn’t back a couple of hours later, Alex began to get a bit stir-crazy locked away in his house, especially since there was nothing more she could do. It wasn’t like there was anything to really clean besides the floors since he hardly owned any furniture.