Page 6 of Broken

Liam

My chef was a female named Amanda Kingsley. She had legs that went on forever, but the nastiest temper I’d ever seen. I had stolen her away from a restaurant in North Chicago. I wanted her to cook only for me. She was at my beck and call, and currently we were going over a menu for a party I was throwing.

The omelet she had cooked for me sat in front of me. Steam rose from the food and entered into my nostrils as my stomach growled. I heard someone enter the room and turned to be greeted by my cousin Valentin. In his hand he carried a newspaper, which he popped down in front of me. Valentin was tall like myself the moment he was clean shaven and his green eyes had a sparkle of mischief about them. He wore regular clothes, a hoodie and jeans instead of our usual daily attire of an Armani suit.

He eyed Amanda, who was busy speaking with her assistant and not worried about my business.

“You’ve been a busy boy,” my cousin had stated.

With a gentle ease I had began to slice my omelet up into bite sizes pieces. Cheese oozed out of it and onto the white of the plate. I stabbed at it with my fork and took the first bite of the morning. Val was probably going to cause me to lose my appetite.

Quirking an eyebrow at him, I pulled up the newspaper and saw that the store clerk had made a small section of the Chicago Gazette. Our eyes locked, and a smirk graced my face.

“It was an issue, and now it’s not. I was careful.”

“You have men at your beck and call,” Val kept his voice low, looking over his shoulder at my cook.

“I do but I wanted to take care of it,” I shrugged just wanting to finish my food.

“Fine,” he grunted. “What’s this I hear about you throwing some sort of party for the police here.”

“I am not throwing a party for them. Holly’s Heart is throwing a party,” I spoke mentioning the charity organization my mother had started before her death in a car crash.

“Is that wise?”

“Cousin,” I gave him a warning glance; but unlike many, Val wasn’t afraid of me.

He was however afraid of prison. Currently, his own father was residing there which was what taking care of the store clerk had been about.

“I just worry about you,” Val said and chanced another look at my chef.

“All is fine. Now will you be accompanying me to visit Uncle Viktor?”

My question seemed to hang in the air for forever. Valentin avoided his father like the plague. They had their own issues that I was never actually aware of, but I tried to stay out of it.

When my father had run the organization, he’d had enemies at every turn. Those enemies had even included our own blood. His brother Viktor was extremely cruel. He did not have a code that he lived by, unlike my father. They had been half-brothers that immigrated from Russia together. There had been a shared hatred there that had not carried over to their sons. I loved Valentin like he was my own brother, and he loved me the same. Our mothers had dressed us alike when we’d been babies and our features were so similar that you could barely tell us apart except for our eye color. My eyes were a deeper green that almost seemed to take on darker hues when depending on my clothing, whereas my cousin’s remained an emerald green.

“Was that Mina I saw slinking out of here the other morning?” my cousin asked as he poured himself a cup of orange juice.

I chuckled as he was clearly avoiding answering my question. “Yes. She spent the night…”

“She looked extremely tired…you must have worked her over good and hard,” he gave me a toast with his glass of juice before drinking from it.

I shook my head and finished off the omelet. I stood then and addressed Amanda. She promised she would email all the food items over to me before the morning was out. I, myself, wouldn’t be making an appearance at this party but the puppet I used to run the organization would do all of the hosting including handing out a heft donation check. I did all of these things to keep up the appearance of being just another businessman in this town.

Val and I walked out onto the porch of my house. It was much larger than the ones we’d grown up in. I pulled out a blunt that I had rolled up earlier in the morning and had in my pocket. I searched for my lighter and found it in one of my pockets.

“Still smoking,” Valentin said.

“Who’s going to drug test me?” I asked and handed the blunt off to him.

He rarely smoked. With him being an enforcer for the Bratva, he liked to keep his senses about him. He believed that it helped him to keep a steadier hand. I wondered if something was wrong as I watched him take a long pull, the cherry on the end of the blunt glowing red.

“Good point,” he replied and handed it back to me before jogging down the steps. “Tell my father hello from me.”

I didn’t try to argue with Val. I knew better than that. I would never press the issue of him seeing his father. If things went according to plan, they would probably be seeing each other sooner rather than later as it was.

Finishing off the blunt, I stabbed it out on the cement. The housekeeper would have the front porch scrubbed later on. The house needed to look spic and span because photographers from all over the city were coming for this event. My already spotless home was about to be splashed across every local newspaper and website in a thousand-mile radius.