“How did you get this?” I asked, no longer thinking about anything except why I was looking at a picture of Rurik, his brother, and one of his cousins entering a building, all of them wielding guns and looking ready to use them.
Guns? Long ones, scary ones, the kind that shot multiple bullets at a time, though any type would have been shocking to see in Rurik’s gentle hands. Well, not so gentle all the time. There were those bruises.
Skeet shooting, I tried to remind myself. Yeah, in a building. With automatic rifles.
“I’ve been following him,” Jordie said. “His whole family is in on it. Some kind of major crime family. He’s been lying to you because I know you’d never marry someone like that.”
“You don’t know me at all,” I hissed, still unable to tear my eyes from the picture. “Or him. You need to go home and leave me alone.”
He shook his head, desperation flaring from his bloodshot eyes. “I love you, I can’t leave if you’re in danger. He’s a freak. Weren’t you supposed to move? And then for some reason there was an emergency, and you were out on the street?”
It wasn’t worth my time to ask him how he knew any of that. I already suspected he’d been following me for some time. But… “What does that have to do with anything?”
“That apartment building is owned by his family. He set it up. He setyouup.”
My phone dinged again. I couldn’t let my ride leave and be stuck in the same vicinity as my crazed ex. He had built up some kind of conspiracy in his deranged mind and was trying to convince me I was better off with him.
“Leave me alone,” I told him, loud enough that anyone in the next aisle could hear. “Don’t follow me, and get out of LA.”
“Or what?” he called after me as I hurtled away from him. “Your mafia king husband will put a hit on me?”
His mocking voice almost made me wish it was true, and I flung myself into the waiting car, telling the driver to hurry. I braced myself for Jordie to try to tear open the door and drag me out, but he stayed inside the pharmacy as the car pulled away from the curb.
My heart was pounding hard enough to make it difficult to breathe. The kindly driver told me there was a cooler with drinks on the floor, and I snapped open a bottle of water, chugging it down. My head spun, and my hands shook as Jordie’s words taunted me.
He was off his rocker, but that picture sure did look real. And Rurik sure looked comfortable wielding a gun, with a look of harsh determination on his face that I had never seen before. If I didn’t know him so well, I would have thought he was the one to be frightened of, not Jordie.
Did I really know him? I did think something was fishy about my apartment suddenly being pulled out from under me on the same day all my stuff was moved out of my old place. Moved out by a company that Rurik arranged.
He did that to be nice. So I could focus on the Koboyashi deal. What had Jordie said about the apartment? Certain he wasn’t right—praying he wasn’t right, I searched for property records. It only took a few clicks to find out the apartment building was owned by a company that traced back to the Fokins. It wasn’t a secret, I just hadn’t known about it.
Thinking back, I tried to remember the timeline. I was sick of my old apartment with its shady drug deals always going down in the courtyard, but there was a waiting list for the other ones I could afford. Then all of a sudden, I got pushed to the top of the list and could move.
After that, the apartment had been destroyed by the previous tenant, but wouldn’t they have already known that when they called me to say I could move in the following week?
None of it made sense, but it could be explained by any number of things. Rurik being in the mafia wasn’t even on the list. Except…
What about those burly men hanging around the old apartment? Always there when I got home from work, always there when I left again in the morning? I thought I was being paranoid due to my experience with Jordie, but what if…
Was it Rurik who sent them? Were they there before I started working at Gavrik Imports or after? Now I couldn’t remember, and when we came to a sudden stop, and the driver laid on his horn at the idiot in front of us who cut him off, I shrieked.
“Sorry,” I said when he gave me an odd look in the rearview mirror. “Long day.”
“Not getting shorter with that pileup,” he said in the long-suffering tone of someone who was used to driving in Los Angeles.
“I’m not in any hurry,” I told him, my mind still reeling and trying to shove puzzle pieces together to make a picture I could understand.
I didn’t trust Jordie as far as I could throw him, but some of the things he said raised questions I didn’t have answers to. Questions I had been shoving aside because I felt it didn’t have anything to do with me. Those times Rurik rushed out for late-night emergencies that supposedly had to do with his family’s business. Maybe they did, after all.
But what kind of business involved storming a building with semi-automatic weapons?
Shaking that off, I went back to the timeline. Okay, I was pretty certain the burly dudes didn’t show up outside my apartment until after I started working for Rurik. And the moving mix-up was shady, especially since it seemed so perfectly orchestrated.
But to what end? Why would Rurik need me to be homeless? I was going to move in with him anyway to keep up the ruse that we were married. And he didn’t trick me into getting married like Jordie said—okay, sure, the fact it was actually legal was something I didn’t exactly jump for joy over, but that could be explained as well.
We only got married because of the Koboyashi deal.
The car lurched forward as traffic started up again, and it was like the sudden movement jolted a memory free. That busy day that Rurik had me sign all those papers, making sure I’d never have enough time to read them thoroughly. Why did he do that before he even knew about the Koboyashis being so conservative?