Page 68 of Sexting the Bratva Beast

“But Tamara hurt her ankle when we jumped out of the window. They caught us before we could get away.”

What the fuck!

“What happened?” It comes out as a hoarse rasping question.

“We fought them, but they were too strong. I think I killed one. I stole a knife from the kitchen. Aimed it at his heart. He tried to strangle me, and I remember Tamara screaming at him to let me go before I blacked out.”

She pauses, but I still don’t look at her.

“When I woke up, we were in a shipping container. It stunk of piss and shit. There were other people. Girls mostly. But Tamara was with me, and I didn’t care about anyone else. We found a corner and stayed there until Leonid found us.”

“Leonid found you?” I raise my eyes to meet hers, and she shrugs as if she’d bumped into him in Macy’s one day while he was running some errands.

“The others were dead.”

Shit!

“But you survived…”

I can’t even bear to think about how they must’ve felt. Two young girls, alone in a shipping container surrounded by corpses, scared to death of what would happen to them when they reached their destination.

“Leonid didn’t ask any questions. He took us home, bathed us, gave us clean clothes and food and a bed to sleep in. Then, a couple of days later, he told us that the bad men would never hurt anyone else.”

“He took care of them,” I whisper to myself.

Andrej said that he killed people who deserved it. Bad men. Men who hurt little girls like Ivana and Tamara.

“He trained us to work for him.” She steps out from behind the Christmas tree.

There is still no emotion in her expression, and perhaps it’s my imagination, but she looks lighter, as though sharing her story has shed a load from her shoulders.

The door opens then. Andrej enters, and her eyes sparkle, her whole body coming alive.

That’s when I understand why Ivana wanted to stop me from seeing him.

She is in love with Andrej Ivanov.

18

ANDREJ

I feel like a kid again.

Or rather I feel like a kid. Period.

A kid with a normal childhood getting to do all the fun stuff that regular kids do in the winter.

The house is covered with twinkling fairy lights—Cartier asked Ivana to go out and buy more once she’d finished decorating the den. And Ivana didn’t question it. It’s like stepping inside a grotto; the only thing missing is the Santa lookalike and his elves in bobble hats and curly-toed shoes.

I should want to get back to Chicago. I should feel guilty about leaving Leonid to cover my side of our business affairs when his babies are so young, especially while Yuri Asimov and his bunch of goons are lying low.

But I don’t.

I’m exactly where I should be: keeping Cartier safe.

“We need a carrot for the nose.”

Cartier is standing back and studying the life-sized snowman that we’ve spent the last couple hours building, clapping her gloved hands together to free the snow that’s clinging to the padded, fur-lined fingers in stubborn clumps.