ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (129 page)

She immediately shifted from the warm, languorous mood that being naked with Maks induced to a state of alertness.  She rolled over until she was looking sideways at him; she had to see his face.  At first, she said nothing.  Then she asked.

“How?”

His uncle would sponsor him, he told her, blue eyes excited.  He’d get him the papers he needed, the ones that would say he already had relatives in America.  He had raised enough seed money with his two buddies, Roman and Anton, to start up a food market.  He would bring his mother along; in this, Nastya did not question him.  She knew her mother believed you should die where you were born and would never move.  But she did catch on one detail of the plan, the one that was nearest and dearest to her heart.

“A food market?” she asked softly, tracing a finger across his chest.

“Imagine it, Nastush, a food market!  With a little restoranchik up front where you can make the best dishes fresh, and people can sit and eat.  I can sell the kielbasa, you can slice it. I can order the fresh fish, you can fold it into all four corners of the kuliebaika.”   When he spoke, Maks unconsciously grabbed her hand in his, as if they were one and the same body and soul, and she knew that anything he did for himself, he did for her.

She said yes.

Standing in the kitchen of that food market now, she recalls those first few weeks in America, when life seemed to be going so fast it almost slipped right through your fingers.  She takes the plate of blini and puts it on top of the glass top display of all the soft cheeses; they are as soft and fragrant as her own creations. Whoever wishes to can add it to the blini, wrap the slightly crisp edges around them into delicious flutes, and cut them open or chew on them while holding them with the bareness of their fingertips.  The back door bell rings, and Anastasia knows who it is straight away.  It is Roman, and he has this week’s flour, a necessary staple of her store.

It was Roman, her husband’s best friend, who brought him the news.  She came across them arguing in the back amidst the latest shipment of sardine cans, and she hid behind the racks of pickle jars to listen.

“I won’t pay him that much for the watermelon,” Maks was saying, and she knew he was angry.

“Why not?” Roman asked, but he looked like he already knew.

“Because we pickle them ourselves.  He’s asking for top dollar for the product, plus the cost of brining and the containers.  I won’t have it.  I don’t care if he IS someone important here.”

“Maks, please understand… I can’t take that message back to him.  It looks like you have no respect for him.”

“I don’t have any respect for him.”

Nastya knew they were talking about Boris Isakovich, who went by Gosha, locally.  He essentially controlled all the associated Eastern European food markets in their area, and had thug-like underlings who would go and collect what Gosha felt was his due.  In return, he paid off the local police to look sideways when the goods that would come into the businesses would either have to be smuggled in—how else were you going to get caviar by the pound if you weren’t going to go to the dock warehouses—or if a worker’s papers weren’t exactly, well, presentable.  Cheap labor and rare goods were accessible to all—for a price.

If you happened to be like Maks, in the states legally with your green card, and you weren’t looking to buy through Gosha’s distributors, it did not mean in any way that you were safe from having to pay off krusha, literally translated, meaning “roof,” but in fact referred to protection from the local cops.  Because Gosha’s men might trash your place, steal the sardines you were importing from your uncle back in Omsk.  Maks told her he was not afraid, and as brave as she’d like to have believed her husband to be, she knew that he was thinking about the promise he made to his mother.

“Why go to the land of the free,” she had said, “if you have to belong to someone else?”

It wasn’t so much that Roman and Anton, who had helped Maks with the seed money for his business wanted to belong to Gosha.  It was more that they had not brought their mothers overseas with them and being with Gosha involved a certain lifestyle that Anastasia imagined was quite seductive.  And they were so young when it all started—who isn’t seducible when they’re young?  Young men with fast cars, access to all sorts of goods, and power.  Young men in America were addicted to power the way that the middle-aged were addicted to alcohol back where they came from.  And so Roman went to work as one of Gosha’s distributors, and when she came across them arguing, she saw that there was concern in the young brunette’s eyes.  He was genuinely concerned that if Maks did not start purchasing from Gosha, Gosha would make trouble for him.

If Maks was concerned about this, he did not show it.  Those were golden days, at the start.  It was all the way that Maks had promised her it would be—the food market with the apples in brine, buckwheat sold by the scoopful, sweet Turkish delight and Strela chocolates, cones in their bright gold foil wrappers.  A small kitchen in front for Nastya, for her blini, manti filled with meat, and pirogies of stewed cabbage and potatoes.  She rolled everything out by hand, mixed all the dough recipes from scratch.  They built up a steady customer base, which was unsurprising since they lived in an area where immigrants from their hometowns lived and were brimming over with nostalgia for a taste of the old country. Many of these were men who were trying to raise enough money to bring their wives and children to meet them in the states.  No matter where they found their pleasure at night—it was assumed that men had roving eyes—there was still nobody to prepare them the homemade meals they were used to.  Word got out around fast that Nastya’s blini were the best to be had.   But the best thing was a separate apartment from Maks’s mother, where Anastasia did not have to fear being overheard through paper thin walls when she and Maks were making love.

Anastasia pauses for a moment before heading to the back to meet Roman.  It is painful to remember those nights with Maks, because it is this that she thinks she misses the most—being touched, being stroked and parted by a man’s hand.  She has not felt it since Maks has been gone, one month already.  She has noticed the way that Roman has been looking at her, like she is a new car that he would like to acquire and take for a ride.  What she hates most of all is how this makes her feel, sickeningly as if she might just not mind.  She shakes it off, trying to convince herself that she has simply grown lonely in Maks’s absence.

“How much for the flour, Roma?” she asks the tall, light-brown haired guy hauling in a huge sack of flour.  He looks up at her, eyes twinkling mischievously even as they are full of feeling, one that Anastasia is familiar with, but would not like to admit.

“For you, Nastush?” he asks, his voice and accent bringing her straight back to where it had all started; Roman was a native Belarusian, just like she was, gone off to Moscow for university, where he met Maks.  Those sharp gs made her think of her mother.  “For you, a mere pittance.”  And then he named the price.  It was, as he had promised, a mere pittance.  It was lower even than Gosha’s price, and Nastya has a feeling it has more to do with the appreciative way he is eyeing the top of her apron than anything else.

“I can’t accept that,” she tells him, refusing to acknowledge the way he is looking at her.  “I never took charity and never will.”

Now the look on his face is one of pain, and he momentarily looks away from her.  “It’s not charity.  You’re barely scraping by as it is.”

It was true.  Maks had always been the one to handle the finances, and now that he was gone, it was all left up to her, and she had never had much of a head for figures.  What does she know, she, a simple blini fryer?  Roman is right, and she would have to concede to him; she knows she couldn’t afford the flour she needed without his special concession.  And for just a moment, she understands that she is not the only one who misses Maks.  Because he works for Gosha, Roman feels partly responsible for what happened, all those long weeks ago.

She had been scared when he refused to join Gosha’s team, but Maks assured her that they did not have to play by those rules to really make it in America.  He conceded to ordering the basics from Gosha, because flour was flour, and for all the doughy goodies that Anastasia made, they didn’t need a specific kind of flour.  Besides, he told her, tickling her nose as the first rays of morning sunlight filtered in through their tiny bedroom window and she trapped him underneath one of her long, smooth legs to trap him, just for a few more stolen moments, in their bed before he rushed off to receive more shipments, he liked the way native American flour looked on her.

“Like a vision in white,” he would say, then lower his mouth to hers and kiss her, warmly and tenderly, his tongue probing her lips without any questions between them.  What questions could there be between husband and wife?

First it was Roman, then it was Anton who came to see Maks and tell him that Gosha was displeased with this display of rebellion.  Every other food market in town belonged to him and rumors had spread about what Maks was doing.  It was a show of disrespect, they told him, and Maks laughed at them, asking them when grown men had managed to turn into such cowards.

“Anyway, I’m not disrespecting him.  I just want nothing to do with him.”

“That’s exactly what he means,” Roman complained.

“Isn’t it enough that I’m paying for krusha?” Maks asked him, the heat rising in his tone.  It had been news to Anastasia, but he assured her that this small discretion was necessary to keep Gosha from troubling them too much.  He hoped it would prove to be enough, but as the months went by, it became appallingly clear that Gosha wanted to control their tiny little store from the inside out.

It began with a case of spoiled kefir, the buttermilk having been taken out of the cooling case and left out for the night.  It curdled, and ruined their fried sour grits for the week; Nastya had needed to think fast on her feet, and even though she managed to stir up some fish soup, it worried her that somebody had managed to breech the backdoor security of their little shop.

Next came the splintered window of their storefront.  Maks had called in the police, but the police listened to Gosha as much as Roman did, and they could offer Maks no compensation, no real assistance.  They claimed it must have been a neighborhood trick, some boys being rowdy, but as she watched Maks’s face darken, she knew who the real culprit must have been, and he had not been an innocently playing little boy for a very long time.

She recognized the final warning even when Maksim had not.  It should have been most clear to him, as he was the pinpoint of the attack, but he was so lost in his hopes and dreams that he denied it vehemently.  As he was walking home from his mother’s apartment, just a few blocks away one night, two thugs caught up with him, entrapping him between them and beat him almost to a pulp.  When he arrived home, Nastya had to bite her lip to keep from crying out at the split eyelids and blackened nose and eyes, knowing how much Maks hated any kind of fuss or drama.

“Oni tebya ubyut!” she couldn’t help but cry, “They’re going to kill you.”

“Nonsense, he had croaked out hoarsely, allowing her to minister to the worst of his injuries.  “He just wants to show that he’s in charge.  And when everyone sees me, there’ll be no doubt that he IS in charge, and he will leave me alone.”

Anastasia closes her eyes and starts lifting the sack of flour where Roman has abandoned it on the floor.  Maks was so young, so foolish.

She remembers it well, that day that had begun like any other.  Maks often left bed long before she did, needing to check his orders and set up shop before her services in the kitchen were needed.  She rolled out, pulling her cotton robe over the length of her body and belting it at the waist.  It was eight in the morning, and since it was early fall, the sun had made its strong presence known in the room not twenty minutes before.

The store waited quietly.  Too quietly, she realized as she entered it, dragging out bowls and spoons, and filling a huge canteen with water for the day’s mixings.  Usually Maks made an incredible ruckus in the back, except on those mornings when he wanted to surprise her in the front with a few minutes of languorous kissing before customers came in for their breakfast.  She had smiled, excepting at any moment to feel his warm arms sliding around her, but the clock ticked, and minutes came and went.  There was no rush of secretive footsteps, no scrapes of accidental sounds.  That was when she had realized that it was much too quiet, that not even the refrigerators were humming, and a sickening dread seeped in down her throat and her heart began to beat out a rapid tattoo. 

She pushed her way past the cases of jelly-filled cookies that stood by the entryway to the storeroom, and unlocked the huge double doors.  The back was silent, and she called out in fear, “Maks?  Maksik, where are you?”

The morning was as quiet as ever.

Something urged her forward, an unknown but tangible force, towards the entryway to the back, and as she unlatched the door, she felt a prayer begin on her breath, a prayer that had no words but was spilling out from her mouth nevertheless, a helpless
please please please pozhaslto
that she could not staunch and worded mindlessly.  But when she discovered his broken body on the trash bags by the Dumpster, she knew that there was no God, not anymore.

They had broken his body, bone by bone.  The bruises of his earlier beating had yet to fade, and she could trace their faint outlines underneath the caked blood on his face and body that had congealed overnight.  By the time she had figured out how to call the ambulance, hope had diminished to a tiny spark, burning low, and when the EMTs pronounced him dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Nastya felt herself tumble down into a despair so deep she had no idea where to find the ladder to get herself out again.