Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 89090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89090 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Instead of answering his question, I ask one of my own. “Where do guys like him exit once the deed is done?”
He looks queasy over me using “deed” for sex, but he doesn’t shut down my interrogation. “Out the same door the dancers exit.” His lower lip drops into a pout. “Say it isn’t so? You truly don’t remember me?”
As my brow arches, I ask, “We’ve met before?”
“Not officially, but since you seem more like a protective detail than a robber, I stopped trailing Ana the instant you picked her up.”
I take a step back before slinging my eyes around my location. I could slap my forehead when features register as familiar. Cut me some slack. It is a completely different experience entering a strip club from the front than it is when you’re mingling at the back, waiting for someone. Ana also only worked here for one night.
I lock eyes with the blond when he asks, “How is Ana? She hardly calls me anymore.”
“She’s good,” I answer. “I think.”
I’ve not been the best company for the past six months.
I have pushed away more people than I’ve let in.
Needing to leave before my grief makes itself known, I say, “Thanks for your help.”
I make it halfway to the entrance before the blond interrupts, “If you’re going to wait, I suggest doing it somewhere comfortable. He pays in three hourly blocks.”
His reply burns the back of my throat with bile, but I keep my expression neutral while lifting my chin in thanks.
When I enter the packed sidewalk, I toss up between storming the room Vasily entered to gather proof of his cheating ways firsthand or using the evidence I have stored on my phone.
Polina is the only one who could have swapped our phones back, so she’d know any charges placed on there between our fuck and the following morning weren’t made by me.
Deciding to save my eyes from irreparable damage, I settle on the latter.
Since Polina’s apartment is attached to her clothing store, the streets during my drive are isolated. No one comes to these parts of Kronstadt at this hour.
I knew Polina was acting earlier when she said she was sick. Ill women don’t sit on their windowsills, eating ice cream out of the tub. Her hair is wet and combed back, and her face is without a snick of makeup, but I’d be a lying fuck if I said I wasn’t contemplating how delicious it would be to lick ice cream off her smooth thighs.
The thought pisses me off more than I already am.
Where is that ball-crashing woman who laughed in my face when I demanded she crawl to me for the first time? The one who sniffed out the cheaters within seconds of them entering her boutique? She could read people, so how come she hasn’t read Vasily as the cheating scumbag he is?
I’m disappointed, but not all the blame belongs on Polina’s shoulders. All the people she relied on left her at the same time. Alek and I, and from what I’ve heard on the streets, her foster father returned to the States not long after us.
In the silence of the night, I take a few minutes to settle my agitation.
The quiet isn’t as calming as expected. It can’t muzzle the sound of a droning tick. It replicates the click of the paparazzi cameras Tomosso’s family regularly endured in Sicily, except there aren’t a dozen cameras snapping at once. Just one.
When I stray my eyes in the direction the clicks are coming from, a spasm hits my jaw. A blacked-out sedan is parked a couple of spots up from where I’m hiding. A long-range camera is stretched from the driver’s seat to the passenger window.
Even if I wanted to pretend the lens isn’t facing Polina’s apartment, I can’t act ignorant to who they’re monitoring when Polina’s slightest movement causes the camera’s clicker to go mental.
She isn’t doing something as bland as eating ice cream anymore. She’s racing for the front door of her apartment, her expression as stunned as mine when she pulls open her door to discover Vasily on the other side.
Unless he drives twenty over the limit like me, he had to have left Spanks before me.
“You fuckin’ rat,” I mutter under my breath when the truth smacks into me.
I thought I was going to rat him out.
Turns out I’m the mouse of our duo.
When Vasily moves to close the drapes, the corners of his lips tug high.
Anyone would swear he could see me.
I realize my error when a deep voice on my left says, “Smug fucking prick.”
I sprint for the car with surveillance equipment more expensive than its showroom price tag when its engine kicks over. It whizzes out of the parking spot before I can take in any details of the driver.
Vasily exits Polina’s apartment just as fast.