Page 1 of Ruthless Rustanovs

ALEXEI Rustanov hailed from a land where one could regularly spot ex, current, and future supermodels walking down the same busy Moscow streets. But in his opinion, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen was seated on the mattress they called their bed in his dumpy efficiency apartment.

That morning he walked out of his bathroom to find her in nothing but her yellow polka-dot bikini bottoms. She was leaning into the direct path of the nearby fan, blissfully receiving its lackluster breeze on day six of one of the worst heat waves on record in Dallas history.

Alexei ran a hand over the dark beard he’d considered removing because of the stifling heat and let his eyes roam over his girlfriend’s body in silent appreciation.

Eva’s ebony skin glistened with sweat, and her thick, natural hair lay in two chunky French braids that barely reached below her ears.

It wasn’t her most glamorous look but he still went instantly hard as he envisioned taking each of her sweat-beaded breasts into his mouth and lavishing them with the attention they deserved.

Though Alexei and Eva had lived together for almost three months, he could still hardly believe she was his. This beautiful and kind woman chose him despite his run-down, sweltering apartment and the two-digit state of his bank account. She made him feel like the luckiest guy in the world.

As if sensing his gaze, Eva’s eyes popped open and she unleashed her heart-stoppingly gorgeous smile on him.

“Hey, baby,” she said in her lively Texas twang. “I didn’t hear you come out of the bathroom. You know, for such a big fellow you move like a cat!”

“Let me replace the feminine-sounding ‘cat’ with ‘panther’ and I will agree,” he said moving his six-foot-six frame to stand close to the edge of the bed.

He wanted badly to join her in front of the fan but he still had to get in his daily workout and shower before his security guard shift at the School of Social Work began.

Eva made it difficult for him to stay focused on his plans when she gave him a sexy grin and asked, “Are all you Russians trained to move like panthers?”

Alexei paused. It was true that as the scion of the Rustanov crime family he had a number of skills that set him apart from his peers.

For instance, he was comfortable using a wide range of guns from the basic point-and-shoot to the more complex semi-automatic and automatic.

Thanks to the tutelage of his father and uncle, he also knew how to sell those same weapons to interested parties using his trademark mixture of charm, marketing savvy, and barely-subtle aggression.

As for why he moved so quietly…he had his uncle to thank for that. When Alexei turned 12, his father made him go with Uncle Sergei, their family’s main enforcer, to a number of retaliation killings.

“The secret is to value silence above all things,” his uncle once told him outside the flat of a man who’d sold valuable information about their organization’s inner-workings to another crime family. “Become the silence. People cannot prevent what they cannot hear.”

Five minutes later, Alexei watched in horror from a dark corner as Uncle Sergei snuck up behind the target in the man’s own kitchen and neatly slit his throat with the merest whisper of sound.

Afterward, he pulled out a GSh-18 with an attached silencer and shot the man—twice in the chest, once in each knee cap—as he desperately clutched his bleeding throat.

His uncle turned to Alexie and winked, “Pay attention, nephew. Our family has shot people like this since the early 1960s. Think of it as the Rustanov calling card.”

Alexei barely made it to the street below before losing his dinner on the sidewalk.

His uncle gave him a few hearty slaps on the back and congratulated him on vomiting outside the flat.

“No DNA for the police to find inside,” he explained.

As with most of his killings, Sergei wanted everyone to know who’d done it but he didn’t want to leave any evidence behind that might officially connect the Rustanovs to the crime.

Later, when Alexei was back in the relative safety of his home, his father told him he had also thrown up after seeing his first killing.

“I will tell you as your grandfather once told your uncle and I: if you are to carry out an execution, you must understand what you are doing. I will not have you turn into a spoiled prince who relies on others to do your dirty work. It is a serious business to take a life. You should never treat it as if you are simply asking someone to run out and pick up your dry cleaning.”

Six years later his own father was murdered by one of those spoiled princes, a young man named Igor Stavnof whose father had once been a friend to the Rustanovs.

Igor and Alexei attended the same private secondary school and even briefly shared a bodyguard when Igor’s fell sick.

But the Rustanov-Stavnof alliance ended abruptly when Igor had Alexei’s father gunned down outside a restaurant.

Igor likely meant this as a display of power, a warning to those who thought his relative youth might make him less of a force to be reckoned with.

But in the end, the incident only served to seal Igor’s fate as someone who would die young.

After putting his father in the ground, Alexei quietly hunted down the young crime lord. He slit his throat, and then shot him twice in the chest and once in each knee cap.

Uncle Sergei had been very proud of him.

But in order to avoid a full-out war with their former allies, Sergei took over as the family’s interim head and arranged for Alexei to go to university in America.

Sergei found the day-to-day affairs of running a criminal organization distasteful, so he wanted Alexei to get his business degree and return to Russia to take his uncle’s place.

It had been Alexei’s idea to stay on for grad school but his uncle had not approved.

Sergei withdrew all financial support and told Alexei to either come home and take his rightful place as head of the family, or starve in America.

After carefully considering his options, Alexei enrolled in the UT Dallas MBA program, vowing to use his education to legitimatize his family’s business and stop the killings that claimed the lives of his parents and many of those who worked for the Rustanov family.

But then he met Eva, and a new path opened up for him, one that would let him leave behind his crime family forever and go into business in America.

He could live a simple life here in Texas with the woman he loved most in the world.

“Lexie?”

Alexei returned to the present day with a start.

Only Eva called him by this nickname. No one else dared.

His size and general demeanor didn’t invite joking or teasing of any kind from most people.

But from the moment they met, Eva displayed a unique talent for doing things he would let no one else get away with.

“What were you thinking about just now?” she asked.

He pushed the thoughts of his past to the back of his mind. “I am thinking you deserve more than this shit apartment,” he said.

“Stop it!” she answered with a roll of her eyes. “Some of my clients would consider this place the lap of luxury. At least you have heat in winter.”

This was Eva’s answer to most of Alexei’s complaints about their living situation.

She would point out that at least they had it better than those she worked with in the field.

But he knew better. She’d grown up the pampered youngest daughter of the mayor of Drummond, a small Texas oil town about three hours away.

Before her father cut her off for dating Alexei, she’d lived in a two-bedroom apartment with air conditioning and hardwood floors in a building with an onsite gym and several other amenities she no longer had access to thanks to their relationship.

“I will pay landlord visit before I go to gym.”

“Why? He said the repairman can’t help us until the end of the week. This is a heat wave so it’s got to be hard to get anyone out here to fix one lil’ old window unit.”

“I will talk to landlord and he will fix window unit today. I do not like to see you suffer.”

“I’m not suffering, baby! The only reason I’m still here is I don’t have anything clean to wear except for a miniskirt and a couple of tank tops. I have no idea what I’m going to do for underwear.”

Alexei’s dick pulsed at the mental image of her in a miniskirt wearing nothing underneath.

As if sensing his desire, Eva crawled over to where he stood at the edge of the mattress and unwrapped the towel from around his waist. “Maybe instead of talking to the landlord, you could be my honey bee and do a couple loads of laundry for me before you leave for work?” She brought her face so close to his penis that he could feel the heat of her breath when she spoke.

Few people hated doing laundry more than his Eva, and after three months of living with her, he had learned to recognize the beginnings of a laundry negotiation.

“You don’t want me prancing around the School of Social Work in a miniskirt with no underwear, do you?” she asked, her Texas accent become even sweeter as her words got dirtier. “What if I forget I’m not wearing any panties and accidentally bend over in front of one of them horny security guards?”

Alexei shook his head in disbelief. “You are using sex to get me to do your laundry again?”

Eva shook her head, lightly grazing his dick with her cheek.

“No, darlin’! I’ll have sex with you even if you don’t do my laundry.

” She stuck out her tongue and ran it slowly over the sensitive ridge of his large penis, taking its bulbous head in her mouth for a moment before saying, “But if you agree to wash two loads of my clothes, I can promise you the sex will be even hotter.”