Chapter Fourteen
Sarah
My mind blanked for a moment, slow to process his words because they wereinsane.Dmitri had just barged into my home, which was hard to believe in the first place, and demanded I leave with him.
He had to be out of his mind. And probably dangerous. After what happened in the parking lot of the grocery store, I knew he didn’t actually kill Mr. Moss, but that didn’t mean the DA was wrong about his ties to the mafia.
Maybe he was trying to intimidate me like the men in the parking lot. They wanted me to testify that Dmitri killed my boss, and he probably wanted me to say I saw nothing at all, that I didn’t see his associates threatening Mr. Moss just days before he died.
“You need to leave,” I said, my chest tight. My voice was high and frightened. There was no hiding that. “Just g-get out of here. Or I’ll call the police.”
“Did you call the police about the men in the grocery store parking lot?”
His words created a gut-wrenching jolt, and I felt like the world shifted under my feet.
“How do you know about that?” I asked, my hand shooting out to steady myself on the back of a chair.
“I have my ways.”
That was when I remembered the man I saw in the store. I’d forgotten about him when the men in the ski masksaccosted me, but now I had to wonder if I was right in my initial assumption that he was watching me. Did Dmitri send him?
Yeah, he was definitely insane.
But he still wasn’t my biggest concern.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, grabbing his arm and trying to drag him back to the door. He didn’t budge, and it was impossible for me to makehim. He was huge. Panic made my body feel jittery, adrenaline rushing through me. My voice reflected my anxiety. “If you know what happened in the parking lot, then you know you can’t be here. They said they’d be watching me.”
“That’s why you need to come with me,” Dmitri said, sounding infuriatingly calm. “I can keep you safe.”
The laugh that escaped me had no humor in it. “Safe? Am I really supposed to believe that?”
“I didn’t kill your boss.”
“I know,” I admitted. “The men in the parking lot, they did it. They told me as much. But that doesn’t mean I can trust you. The DA says you head the Russian mafia.”
“We call it the Bratva.”
Was that a confirmation? My jaw went slack, and I stumbled back a step, almost tripping on a toy that Alexis left on the floor.
“I don’t care what you call it!” Hysteria threatened to overwhelm me, and my voice got louder. “This has nothing to do with me. I can’t be involved in this mess. It’s not my life.”
“Do you really think you have a choice in the matter?” His calm reserve cracked just a little, frustration bleeding through. “You’re caught up in all of this whether you like it or not.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong!”
To my horror, the urge to cry again swelled inside me. I turned away from Dmitri, not wanting him to see the tears in my eyes as I tried to blink them away, forcing back the emotion that would make me look weaker than I already did.
“No, you didn’t. But that doesn’t always matter.” I heard him step closer to me, and my body tensed up, but I didn’t move away. I should have, I knew that, but I didn’t. “I can’t change the past, can’t make it so that you didn’t find his body or end up as a witness in the case. I can’t make it so that my enemies don’t know about you. But I can help you now.”
He was right behind me now, his warmth seeping into my back and his breath on my neck. When his hands came to my arms, I told myself to move away, but the feeling of his skin on mine again after all of these years felt too good. I gave myself just a moment to enjoy it, knowing that it couldn’t last.
“Mommy?” Alexis’s voice snapped me out of it, and I jerked away from Dmitri as I looked at the hallway leading to her bedroom. She stood there in her lavender pajamas with her favorite stuffed bunny tucked under one arm. Her eyes were wide.
Shit.We must have been too loud and woken her up.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I said, taking a step toward her, but she’d already spotted Dmitri and was heading his way.
I would have expected her to be afraid of a big stranger in the house at night, but she walked right up to him, looking up at him with a cute smile on her face.