Nine Months to Bear By Nicole Fox - 5

5

The Glock comes apart easily, same as it always has. Pin. Slide. Spring. The familiar click and settle of metal against my palm.

It’s a ritual that should quiet my mind the way it has hundreds of times before. It ought to burn away thoughts of soft skin and bright eyes filled with too much pride.

It doesn’t.

Fucking pathetic.

For four hours, I’ve been down here in the basement range beneath my Beacon Hill brownstone, trying to shoot the memory of Olivia Aster out of my head. All I have to show for it is a cloud of gunsmoke.

Every single one of those four hours has been spent smelling Olivia’s perfume on every breeze, in my shirt collar, my fingertips.

She’s in my fucking skin.

You’re insane if you think I’ll ⁠ —

Oh, you’ll come.

It wasn’t a line; it was the truth. I knew she wouldn’t be able to resist. I felt it in her. When my finger brushed across the delicate inside of her wrist, her pulse jumped. Dead giveaway.

Snarling, I reassemble the gun at light speed, muscle memory doing what it does, and fire downrange.

The target’s head explodes into paper confetti. The bullet buries itself in the back wall, the sound like bones snapping.

This should calm me. It should be fucking relaxing.

It isn’t.

“You missed the left ventricle,” drawls the shadow materializing at my side. “Very unlike you. Distracted, pakhan ?”

I don’t turn to look. I don’t need to. No one else would be brave enough to surprise me when I have a gun in my hand. That’s why Mikayla Santos is my head of security and resident sociopath. She moves like a cat and dresses like a funeral. Which is fitting, considering how many she’s caused.

I found her years ago in a Vladivostok fighting pit. She was a filthy slip of a girl breaking arms and necks for pocket change. There was a brief moment where I considered a different relationship, where I thought the violence in her eyes could be a fun night of bloody bed making.

Then I saw her stop an assassination attempt by garroting the hitman with her own hair ribbon, and I realized she could be of more use to me than one night of entertainment.

I hired her on the spot.

I grimace as I once again disassemble the gun and start laying out the parts on the velvet cloth. “If I wanted your psychoanalysis, I’d hire a fucking shrink. What do you have for me?”

Mikayla would laugh, if that was the kind of thing she ever did. Since it’s not, she just arches a silent brow. “Straight to business it is, then.”

I pay her obscene amounts of money to know everything about everyone. As she sets a stack of photographs down in front of me, I see that today’s surveillance package includes Frederick Carson writhing in his Mass General hospital bed. The son of a bitch has three broken ribs and a fractured jaw after a “fall down some stairs,” per the report.

Poor guy. Those pesky stairs can get anyone, just when they least expect it.

But after the way he cornered Olivia, he should be lucky the “stairs” didn’t rip his intestines out through his asshole and hang him with them.

A rage I haven’t felt in years threatens to yawn open inside of me, hungry for blood. But it snaps its jaws shut when I see the next photo.

Olivia. Pages of her. Getting coffee. Meeting patients. Arranging white orchids in her office window, sunlight catching in her hair.

I stare at that last one longer than the others.

But only because I’m observing. Cataloging. Gathering intelligence on an imminent business decision.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

“Her clinic is bleeding money,” Mikayla adds, tapping one photo where Olivia’s shoulders are tight with tension as she speaks to a supplier. “She’s three months behind on rent and the building owner is getting antsy. And that security system…” She makes a disgusted sound in the back of her throat, like Olivia’s lackluster self-protection has personally offended her. “Two cameras from 2010 and not a single fucking alarm. Even her file cabinet is a plastic hunk of junk from IKEA. Anyone could walk in and⁠—”

“I get the idea.” I start to hand the whole stack of photos back to her, but then I stop. I retain the last one, of Olivia with the orchids, and give up the rest. “Burn these.”

Mikayla snorts when she sees the one I’ve kept. “I’ve never seen you sentimental. It’s cute.”

I tuck the photo in my pocket and rack the Glock’s slide. “Do you have any more commentary? If so, go down-range and stand in front of the paper target before you deliver it.”

Even the death threat doesn’t earn me more than another eyebrow raise. “You might want to know that someone has been asking questions about her clinic,” says Mikayla. “Not our people. Not sure who, though.”

My blood turns to ice water. “Find out.”

If Mikayla thinks I’m being sentimental again, she doesn’t mention it. She gives one sharp nod and leaves as silently as she arrived.

Alone, I take the photo back out and stare at it again. My gaze keeps wandering back to Olivia’s delicate fingers arranging those white orchids into perfect order. I recognize the impulse because I do the same thing.

She and I have different methods, but they disguise the same madness.

Which is how I know that, behind that immaculate facade, Olivia Aster is a chaos of contradictions.

Proud but desperate.

Refined but raw.

Prim in public, but that wild, rabbit-fast pulse when I touched her wrist tells a different story.

Prey recognize their predators. That’s all this is. Chemistry . Biology. Pure fucking natural instinct.

I’m still staring at the photo when Taras Vasiliev, my other second-in-command, arrives in a cloud of cigarette smoke. That’s rarely good news—he only smokes when he’s nervous.

Taras has the charm of a rabid bear and the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but he’s been my best friend since our days running guns in Grozny. Back then, we were foolish teenagers playing at war.

Then the real thing found us.

I still remember the night we swore brotherhood in a bombed-out church, reeking of blood and vodka while mortars painted the sky in shades of hell.

“Mornin’ to ya, Stef.” He punctuates the greeting by tossing a file on top of the loose gun parts, scattering my neat organization. He takes a sick pride in pissing me off like that.

But I ignore the jab, because something else has my attention. The name IAKOV ZAKHAROV looms up at me from where it’s stamped on top of the file.

I start to readjust the messed-up rows of tiny springs, then stop myself, not wanting to show signs of my inner turmoil to anyone, not even Taras.

“You could just tell me the news instead of hurling it at me,” I remark. “Some might even prefer that.”

“Where would be the fun in that?” Taras taps the printed name again. IAKOV ZAKHAROV. Then he slumps into a nearby seat and lights up another cigarette. “Iakov’s pushing into the docks. Our mole in the Bureau thinks he’s feeding intel to the feds, trying to clean out the city so he can run it how he wants.”

He’s trying to take my house to the fucking ground, is what he’s trying to do. He wants to reveal my dirty secrets to the feds and wipe me out as competition. All because his daddy ended up six feet under and he blames me for the death.

But, in a roundabout way, I ought to thank him. If it weren’t for Iakov trying to one-up me, I never would’ve gone to that gala. And I never would’ve set up today’s meeting.

One look at Olivia Aster last night, trembling with vulnerability, and I knew she was my girl.

Mostly because she doesn’t have the strength to resist what I have planned for her.

Taras’s eyes narrow at the way my jaw thrums. “You’re doing that twitchy control thing, boss. This isn’t a big deal. All we have to do is get our shit above board.”

“What the fuck do you think I’m doing?” The picture of Olivia flutters to the ground between us and it’s like being caught with my dick in my hand. I squash it beneath my boot before he can see.

But Taras is a dog with a bone. He sees it and instantly understands. “I think we have other options for legitimizing the business. Cleaner ones. Dr. Aster’s clinic is⁠—”

“Keep the surveillance on her facility.” I clear my throat. “It’s the only way to move forward.”

“Oh, c’mon, man,” he spits. “You want legitimacy? Buy a fucking casino, Stefan. Hell, go old school and get yourself a fleet of laundromats. We’ll wash all our dirty money right up. But this clinic scheme reeks of you chasing a⁠—”

I slam my fist down on the table. Gun parts go flying. A cut opens on the side of my hand, blood trickling down to dot my cuff. “You question my judgment again and I’ll ship your tongue to your mother in a jewelry box.”

Taras chuckles, completely unfazed. “Ah. So it’s like that?”

I breathe through my nose. In. Out. My control is slipping, and I hate it.

“Yes. It’s like that.” I turn away so he can’t see my face. “So if you have anything actually useful to say, say it now.” I start to organize the parts again. “Because if you’re still here by the time this gun is ready to fire, I’m using it on you.”

I catch his eye roll in my peripherals. He’s been my best friend long enough to be familiar with my temper.

“I have other stuff, but nothing worth my life.” He snorts. “Just a mid-level employee missing from the office. Not picking up his phone, no one has seen him in a while.”

“A snitch?”

He shrugs. “Could be. Smells like it. Doubt he knows anything important, though.”

“Keep looking for him,” I order. “And when you catch him, feed him to Koshka.” The cat in our Dorchester warehouse has a taste for traitors. “Now, leave, and take the stressed-out cigarette smoke with you.”

“Fuckin’ pot calling the fuckin’ kettle black, talking to me about stress…” he mumbles under his breath as if I can’t hear him. But he rises and crushes the cigarette beneath his heel. “For a man who claims this is all business, you’re awfully touchy today. Could it be because of who you’re meeting with in just a few⁠—?”

I click the final piece into place and turn, my gun pointed at Taras.

My best friend holds up his hands even as he smirks, slowly retreating towards the entrance. “Got it. I’ll just see myself out then.”

When the door mercifully clicks shut, I grip the edge of the shooting stall.

Inhale. Exhale.

I look down at the items arranged before me—vodka, a Bersa .380, and the stolen photo of Olivia with her orchids, crumpled on the floor.

Her smile is soft in the grainy image. Unguarded. Dangerous.

Her laugh from the gala echoes in my head. It wasn’t crystalline bullshit, fake and fancy, filtered through money and manners like the rest of them. It was raw. It was real.

My fingers twitch, the way they always do before a kill. The urge to grab, to keep, to own her radiates through me.

I should probably worry about that impulse. But I don’t have time for that.

I glance at my watch. Oliva has sixty seconds before she’s late, but I’m not worried. She’ll be prompt. I know her. Control recognizes control.

As the seconds tick down— five, four, three, two… —there’s a knock at the door. A member of my household staff, too scared to barge in the way each of my seconds just did, pokes his nose through the door.

“Mr. Safonov? Dr. Aster is here.”

I nod and rack the gun slide. “Send her in.”