The Final Hour (Volkov Bratva #3)(75)

Instead of driving, he took a cab to a restaurant in the heart of Rio, one that was fairly crowded despite the hour. He paid his fare, waving the hostess off as she prepared to offer him a table. He didn't plan on staying long.

She, the woman he had come for, was sitting alone at an outdoor table, blueprints of a mansion resting in front of her. Too consumed by her task to notice, Mishca slipped to her side, refilling her glass of champagne with the bottle that the waiter had left in a bucket of melting ice.

She thanked him absently, still not bothering to look away, but Mishca knew why, even if he didn’t understand it.

Here, she thought she was safe and there had been no reason for her to doubt this assumption. Mishca had no business—that she had been aware of—to be in Rio, especially not for a weekend like this, especially when he wasn’t particularly friends with the Cortez family.

But Mishca knew her. He knew with the amount of jewels that Lucia would be selling, she wouldn’t have been able to resist.

Only thing he’d needed to do was wait for his contact to get the information back to him.

Placing the bottle back down on the table, Mishca circled around, taking the lone seat across from her. As she looked up at him, she tried to mask her look of surprise at his interruption, only making him smile wider.

“Naomi.”

She was as he remembered her the last time she had come to New York. Dyed blonde hair in loose waves, signature red lips, but instead of her usual figure-hugging dresses, she was in a pair of tiny jean shorts, tank top, and flip-flops. Now, she looked more like one of the natives rather than the cut-throat bitch she was.

Recovering smoothly, she tapped her claw-like nails against the table, a slow smile curling her scarlet lips. “You know how I’ve always loved surprises, Mishca, but I’m curious to know why you’re here.”

“I could ask you the same,” he responded, giving a pointed look to the prints she had rested her arms on.

He didn’t have to look over them to know they were for Lucia’s villa.

“Kind of looks like I’m spending time with an old friend. Reminds me of when we first met.”

It was nothing like the day they met and she knew that as well as he did. She just wanted him to remember a time he wished he could forget.

It was a cold, winter night, when Mishca found himself at the Manhattan Public Library, attempting to study for a Psychology test that he hadn’t bothered to work on until the night before. No one could ever accuse him of being a good student, but it did help that a couple of the girls in his course were helping him with everything else—though one didn’t know about the other.

It didn’t help, however, that he had been working on a bottle of Smirnoff for the better part of the last two hours, and the last bit in the bottle was making its way down his throat.

That was the only way he knew how to deal with his father and the demands he was making. Mishca didn’t revere the Bratva the way Mikhail did, and for that reason, Mikhail was always in a perpetual state of disappointment when it came to him.

Tossing the bottle he’d hidden in his bag, Mishca left his things at the table, going to search in the stacks for a book on Classical Conditioning, stumbling all the way.

It took him far longer to find it than necessary, in part to the words jumbling whenever he tried to read the titles, but it was there, as he tried scanning through the titles that he felt someone near him.

“I could help you with that,” she offered in a soft voice, leaning a hip against the stacks.

At the time, he hadn’t thought much about her offer—too drunk to realize that even if she didn’t know what he was looking for—just accepted it for what it was.

She was unlike any other girl he had met in his life. That wasn’t to say he had never encountered a pretty girl, but she exuded a sort of confidence, and later, after he had grown to know her better, a cunning sense that he was immediately attracted to.

With just a glance, she had his full undivided attention, even if he were probably too drunk to remember it the next day.

“What exactly are you trying to help me with?”

She ran her fingers lovingly over the spines of the books he’d been looking at though her eyes never left him.

“Anything you want,” she answered in Russian, the inflections in her words only slightly off.

She reached for him then, trailing her fingers down his chest the way she had done the books. Mishca tried to focus on her face, or at least appear to, but his dick was doing most of the thinking at the moment.

He leaned back against the case, allowing her to touch him, not sure where they were going with this, but he wasn’t about to stop her.

Pressing up against him, she whispered, “I know who you are…and who your family is.”

He chuckled. Even wasted he wasn’t too inebriated to recognize what she was hinting at. “And what’s that?”

“How about I take care of you,” she said as she dropped down onto her knees in front of him, tugging at his belt, “and we can work out the details later.”

And what had followed was a whirlwind of sex and drunken confessions that spanned the length of two years. While she had moved in with him some time later, he had never viewed them as more than companions—the term sounding better than f*ck-buddies.

He had never confessed any love for her, nor had he ever made any promises, and for the longest time, he thought they were in accord on this. Hell, most of his time was spent running useless errands for Mikhail, or drinking himself to sleep. He hadn’t bothered to change himself until a month or so before he met Klaus.