Page 131 of Ruthless Rustanovs

THREE MONTHS LATER

I’D rather die than share another minute breathing the same air as you.

The words rang in his ears as he fended off the punches and kicks of his opponent.

This was his sixth match of the night in the Turkish basement—the same one where he’d been stabbed twelve years ago.

But he was much older now. It had been over a decade since he received “his scratch,” and he was starting to get tired.

That meant he was almost evenly matched in this fight, but not nearly.

The boy was good and younger, but he didn’t have a Siberian tiger’s blood running through his veins. Or a woman who would never again be his, screaming in his ear that she wanted nothing to do with him.

“You fucking psycho!”

The insult burned in his mind, and he tried to defend himself the way he had after he’d found her diary. I’m a psycho? Well, you’re a…

But he couldn’t bring himself to repeat the old litany. Every time the words began to form in his mind, the memory of her would tug him down for a determined kiss.

“This is happening, Beast.”

Five minutes later, his opponent lay on the floor, face mottled and at least one or two bones broken.

Bair merely dead-eyed the battered fighter before calling out, “Next,” in Turkish.

“That is enough, Boris!” a voice called out behind him. “You will come with me now.”

Bair looked up and sneered. Alexei was now standing among the crowd that had encircled him. His height and lack of enthusiasm for the fight easily distinguishing him from the other Turkish spectators.

Of course. Only his older brother would manage to track him down here in Turkey at an underground fight only a little bit removed from the one Alexei had to clean up for him eleven years ago.

“I am on vacation,” he reminded the older man. He’d purposefully filed for time off, so that his brother wouldn’t seek him out after their short call about the break up.

“Yes, and I took time from my wife and children to fly over here to find you. This visit is an inconvenience for us both. Now come, Brother.”

He walked away, splitting the crowd easily with his sheer size, and expecting Bair to follow. Bair did, but only because he knew it was the only way to get his brother to leave so he could get back to his fights.

“What?” he growled when they were further away from the crowd, in a dark corner of the cold basement.

“Do you still have eyes on Sirena?”

I’m Thel now. I’ll never be her again. Especially not for you.

“No,” Bair answered, nose flaring. “She and I are done. I already told you this on the phone. I will no longer interfere in her life.”

Alexei nodded. “I know what you told me, and I tried to tell her the same when I called her about a part in a possible Pittsburgh production of Chrysanthemum my associate Nathan Sinclair is offering to co-finance with me. But she told me she could not take the part.”

“She can. I will not—” Bair broke off, swallowing his pride. “I will not stop her this time. I meant what I told you. I am done with her. I am letting her go.”

“I told her you would not interfere, and she said she still could not take the part.”

Bair frowned, and not just because two other fighters had replaced him in the circle on the other side of the room. “Why not?”

“I do not know. That is why I am here. But her exact words were, ‘I can’t,’ which struck me as odd given what you told me about her cancer.”

Bair’s heart froze in his chest at the thought of the brave woman who’d faced him down on more than one occasion, once again being visited by that wretched disease.

But then he shook his head. It could also be a baby. Another man’s baby that she’d had some doctor put inside of her.

“I have to fight,” he said to his brother. “Do not bother me with such thing again.”

“Boris…” his brother started.

Bair didn’t hear the rest. He was already slamming his fists together and heading back toward the fight circle, before his brother even had a chance to finish the thought.

Thel was almost done mopping the floor of Hanno’s Carpet showroom, when she heard the unmistakable click of a camera phone.

She looked up to see her boss, Jimmy Hanno, standing between the carpet samples and the hanging area rugs.

“Lead opera singer cleaning Jimmy Hanno’s Floors,” he said. “Wonder how much I could get for this pic? Might as well get something out of this arrangement, seeing as how you tricked me into hiring you.”

She rolled her eyes. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised Jimmy—“the other Greek,” as she’d taken to calling him in her head—had found out who she really was.

She’d stayed on in Santa Fe and really, it had only been a matter of time before one of the flooring company’s customers recognized her from the Summer Opera series.

“Dunno,” she answered, keeping her voice deliberately casual. “Only opera blogs would care, and I’m pretty sure they don’t pay money to scumbags looking to skirt equal opportunity laws.”

Jimmy pointed two fingers at her. “Keep it up, Okeanos. You just got one strike for insubordination. Two more and I won’t have to skirt any laws to fire your ass. Then where you will be?”

Without insurance again, which she really couldn’t afford right now, given the hospital bills she had coming up.

“You need this job,” she reminded herself, biting her tongue.

Just like she’d been doing at cleaning jobs for years now. Sometimes it was hard for even her to believe, that she’d once been bold and fierce. A tough girl, with the kind of reputation that had made most of the kids at her 99.9% white school think twice before crossing her.

Save for those couple of episodes with Bair, it’d seemed like she’d spent most of her adult life holding her tongue, she thought driving home.

And by the time she pulled into her parking space, she’d definitely had enough of dealing with assholes for the day.

Which was why she sighed with true irritation when Bair’s name lit up her phone just as she was pulling into her space.

She’d known her charmed life—living rent free in the condo he’d bought for his pet, Sirena—would come to an end soon. She also didn’t feel great about the fact that she was still using the car he’d given her as her main mode of transportation.

But, desperate times… And she’d been hoping to finagle a few more weeks out of the situation before she had to return home to get her mother and sister’s help. Again.

“I just need a couple more weeks and I’ll be out of your condo,” she told him when she answered the phone.

“Why did you tell Alexei you cannot do opera?”

“None of your business, that’s why,” she answered as she heaved her tired body out of the copper-colored Audi.

“Are you sick again? Has the cancer come back?”

“What? No?” she answered, unable to stop a bittersweet pang from going off inside her heart in that moment. When, oh when would her heart to stop melting every time he said or did something nice for her, she wondered. “I just…can’t.”

Pause. “You say ‘can’t.’ I ask why not?”

“I meant, I don’t want to,” she quickly amended, realizing her mistake. “I’m settling back into being Thel and I don’t want to fuck with that.”

“I see,” he said on the other side of the line.

“Anything else?” she asked. “How are things in Russia or wherever you are these days?”

He hung up on her.

So she guessed that was her answer.

Whatever, she thought. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she ever wanted to see him again.

She was just tired, she told herself as she climbed up the steps to the condo. Crazy tired after a long day of cleaning. That was the only reason like three albums worth of sad Adele songs were chewing up her chest—

The Adele montage came to an abrupt stop and Thel froze on the top step…

Blinking at the person standing at her door, she now realized how her sister must have felt all those years ago when she discovered Thel waiting for her outside her apartment in Germany.

Except instead of her sister, it was Bair waiting by her door, phone gripped in hand. His eyes glued to her now very swollen belly.

“You are pregnant,” he said, his voice little more than a choked whisper.