But he’d only gotten one kiss. A kiss so unexpectedly earth shattering, he was still thinking about it three days later.
“Have you been able to find her?”
“Who?” Nikolai asked, even though he knew exactly who his cousin was talking about.
“The woman in the green dress,” Alexei answered in English, his eyes highly amused.
“Your visit for my last game has been very nice, but you are eager to get back to your family, yes? When will you go to your plane?” Nikolai asked in Russian.
Alexei just smirked, and continued to speak in English. “The car won’t be here for another five minutes. Until then you can answer my questions about this woman. I assume you still have not found her.”
“No,” Nikolai, answered, making a terse switch back to English. “Isaac is still checking. But nothing so far. We think she gave fake name to guard at gate.”
“Hunh,” Alexei said with a thoughtful raise of his eyebrows. “It sounds like you have a mystery woman on your hands. It must be killing you, cousin. She was very attractive, and I know you do not like loose ends.”
This was true. Nikolai wasn’t one to let challenges go unanswered, whether it be from an opposing team’s player or their team’s former spendthrift owner. And though getting turned down by a strange woman who maybe was or wasn’t supposed to be at his party shouldn’t have qualified as a thing that disturbed him, he’d found himself visited a few times over the past few days by mental images of him “eating her for breakfast.” An idea she’d unintentionally put in his head. Even now, his body stirred in response to the mere thought of having her in this way, the flesh between his legs tightening as he imagined his tongue inside of her, her hands in his hair as she submitted to his mouth. He could almost taste her, hear her moaning cries as she came for him—
“Mr. Rustanov! Mr. Rustanov!”
Isaac’s voice shattered the erotic vision. Both he and his cousin turned to see his assistant running around the edge of the rink wall toward them.
“Sorry,” he said to Alexei, when he reached them. “I meant Nikolai.”
“Da, what is it, Isaac?” Nikolai asked, not knowing whether to be irritated or grateful that the smaller man had snapped him out of his waking dream.
“Maybe it would be better if we talked privately?” Isaac suggested with a glance towards Alexei.
Nikolai shook his head. “Whatever you say to me, you can say in front of Alexei.”
“Okay,” Isaac said. Yet he still lowered his voice to whisper level when he let Nikolai know, “Indy PD is on the line. They say it’s about your brother.”
Isaac held the phone out to him.
And Nikolai sighed. “Tell the Indiana police department you will come down to the station after our practice is finished to bail him out. Whatever the trouble is that he has brought upon himself this time, he can wait until then.”
Isaac nodded in agreement. “Yes, I offered to take care of whatever assistance your brother needed, but they’re insisting on talking to you.”
Nikolai’s brow knitted. This was highly unusual. Back when Isaac had first come to work for him as his personal assistant, before Nikolai had cut Fedya off, Indy PD hadn’t had any problem letting his assistant handle his brother’s bail and the subsequent charges—the least egregious of which were dropped in deference to a generous on-the-spot donation from Nikolai to the policeman’s ball.
Isaac gave him an apologetic grimace. “They say it’s important.”
He took the phone from Isaac with a frown. “Da, this is Nikolai Rustanov.”
8
Years later, Nikolai could still remember the call as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. It came in the early hours of the morning, startling him from a deep sleep.
“I am sorry to wake you,” his cousin had said in careful Russian. “But I must throw a party for your father.”
Code for kill. His cousin had given him a courtesy call to tell him he planned to have Sergei executed. Later he would find out the very good reason Alexei decided to do this, but at the time, it wouldn’t have been wise to ask over an insecure line.
“I understand,” he’d said, not really needing to know the reasons why.
“I have a man ready to host a party for Uncle Sergei, but our way is to let the son host, so I am calling you…”
One of the stranger Rustanov traditions. Every once in a while it became necessary to kill a member of your own family. But in a morbid bid to honor, the option of killing the family member was always given to the killee’s son.
Sergei had described this time-honored tradition to Nikolai with pride.
“If it ever happens to me, I want you to do it,” he’d told his only son. “I am Rustanov until end.”
The tradition and the conversation about it had been incredibly surreal and Nikolai had quickly put it out of his head. Especially after Alexei made the Rustanov family a legitimate business. Yet here was his cousin now, putting out a hit on his uncle, Nikolai’s father.
Sergei would still want his son to do the deed, Nikolai knew. To fly all the way to Russia to put a bullet in his own father’s head. Sergei would actually consider that an honorable way to go.
So, of course, Nikolai had said, “Thank you, but I do not wish to host this party. I trust your man to do a good job.”
And the next time Nikolai had seen Sergei, he’d been dead on a slab. Just like Fedya was lying dead in front him right now, his face a bluish gray, with a bullet wound between his open eyes.
“If anything ever happens to me. If your father ever does as he threatens, you must take care of your brother. He is weak. Not strong like you. You are your father’s son, and he is his. You must protect him. Take care of him.”
His mother’s words rang in his ears as he stared into his brother’s lifeless eyes.
“That him?” a voice asked from somewhere behind him. Probably the detective who’d escorted him in.
Nikolai nodded, unable to look away from his dead brother’s face.
“Sorry, but we need a spoken yes. You gotta say it out loud. Sorry, Mount Nik,” the voice said.
A hockey fan, Nikolai noted with a grim disinterest. During his decade plus in Indiana, he’d found that fans of America’s fourth favorite professional sport were everywhere. If Fedya were alive, he would have been thrilled at the recognition. During the years when he and Nikolai had still been talking, Fedya had often taken in Nikolai the pride he couldn’t take for himself.