Beauty and the Mob Boss

Chapter One

If she hadn’t been in so much pain, Bela would have just thought she was dreaming. This entire night had seemed like one bizarre dream. Except, every part of her hurt. Her head felt almost foggy with pain and the insistent stabbing in her chest and abdomen was making it hard to breathe. She was revisiting her earlier conclusion that her ribs had only been bruised. It had been much more bearable when she’d been running on pure adrenaline. She’d been thoroughly focused on saving her Giant at the time. And when she had been carted off in the back of a sleek-looking car, she’d been a bit too dazed at the surreality of her situation to focus on her pain.

But now, after being left in this gilded cage of a room, she didn’t have a choice. According to the clock ---she had almost gotten over the fact there was an honest-to-God grandfather clock sitting conspicuously to one side of the cream-colored walls--- she’d been there for little over an hour. One of the giants that had come to rescue her mystery patient had unceremoniously shoved her in the room without a word. The last thing Bela had heard was the distinctive turning of a key in the door. Sure enough, when she had gone to check, the door was locked. 

“To think, this is the thanks I get for saving someone’s life,” she muttered to herself as she carefully eased from her perch on the bed. No matter how slowly she moved, every breath in her body ached. She shuffled across the luxuriously padded floor to where she’d found a bathroom earlier. 

After being left on her own, and before her brain had fully registered her body’s condition, Bela had wandered around the room...it was more of a suite. The most outstanding thing there was the four-poster bed, the biggest one she’d ever seen, it dominated the room, the intricate carvings on the polished wood made her imagine it belonged in the pages of some interior designing magazine. The gossamer-like fabric that hung like curtains were pulled back to reveal snow-white sheets that held dual-intent; inviting anyone within range to dive and burrow into its softness yet at the same time gave off an air of perfection that warned everyone against any such frivolous act.  Except for the delicate-looking stands on either side of the bed and an empty vanity on the opposite side of the room, there was no other furniture. There was an oversized closet built into one side of a wall, opposite the door that led to the bathroom. That too was empty. There were no windows in either the room or the bathroom, which led her to believe the room was situated in the middle of the house. Her only route of escape,--- and she would start thinking of escape, just as soon as she was feeling better ---was through the door which was currently locked.

Inside the bathroom, which looked equally intimidating, with its overly-large shower and a separate bathtub, all she found was a first-aid kit. The bandages would be helpful if she’d been able to wrap it around her torso on her own. As it was, the only useful thing she found in the kit were packets of ibuprofen. She downed a total of four tablets and shuffled back into the room. She had briefly considered taking a bath ---warm water might help ease her aches--- but she threw that idea out as it occurred to her. She didn’t want to be caught in a vulnerable position, especially since she was unable to defend herself.

Bela was half asleep by the time she eased unto the bed, face down. She knew she ought to stay awake and figure out how she was gonna get out of here, she knew it was pretty ridiculous that she felt at ease enough to even fall asleep, but before she was pulled into unconsciousness, she acknowledged one thing. She felt safer under her kidnapper’s roof than she’d ever felt in the place she was supposed to call home.

                                                                                         ~

Mikhail prided himself on being a rational man. He appreciated math and the sciences because they represented logic and reason. Of course, he wasn’t narrow-minded enough to rule out anything that couldn’t be explained within the confines of these concepts. However, for the most part, he focused on facts, and whenever a problem arose, he believed there were a series of steps one had to follow to get to the solution. One had to consider all the data presented, outliers included. The normal protocol would involve first removing the outliers so that it wouldn’t throw off the rest of the data. 

This was what Mikhail was doing. At least, this was what he'd finally convinced himself he was doing. His insistence on directing his men to uncover every piece of information which existed about the strange woman now under his household. 

Say what she is. Captive. She's your captive. 

He shook off the thought. What she was at the moment hardly mattered. What mattered is who she was. 

Vlad, his right hand and sworn brother, had obviously disapproved of his decision if the tic in his left cheek was any indication, but he would carry out the order nonetheless. Mikhail knew what he thought. In any other situation, Mikhail would have attacked the obvious puzzle in front of him with the single-minded force he was famous for. Right now, the obvious puzzle --- who was involved in the attempt on his life --- involved pieces from the Triad. For years, despite the apparent truce between the two organizations, the Triad has been disrupting the flow of his operations. They had been careful about leaving any evidence of their involvement, and the slip-ups happened so infrequently, had it been anyone other than Mikhail, they undoubtedly wouldn't have found any connections. He'd found, however, that the few times he and Xia had been in the same room, the leader of the organization had barely been able to conceal his contempt. Mikhail hadn't been interested enough to consider the reason behind it,  he had only briefly thought the older man was being sloppy, having his emotions on display in such a fashion. 

He supposed, given his current condition, he would have to become interested. And he would be… as soon as he got the girl---the outlier---, out of the way.

The faint light filtering through the glass doors leading to his balcony caused a slight frown to disrupt his otherwise stoic features. He glanced over at the clock to see it was only a few minutes past 6. In truth, his body was exhausted, being shot twice, and then subsequently having those bullets dug out of you certainly made an impression. His mind, however, was furiously insistent on conjuring the same things over and over again...a recurring slideshow of features. White blonde hair almost the color of snow, large brown eyes, revealing everything --- she'd be a horrible liar. High cheekbones tinged pink from the cold. The smooth paleness of her skin was truly unreal, its only interruption, a single beauty mark just at the outer edge of her left eye. Pale pink lips, agitated by straight white teeth as slender fingers skittered nervously over his wounds. She'd resembled something out of a fairy tale. The innocence oozing from her pores had made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. A first for him for as long as he could remember.

Also a first? The erection which had come unbidden as the girl tended to his wounds. It had surprised him almost as much as it had annoyed him, as it had signaled a lack of control which was singularly uncommon to him. 

He'd yet to discover an area in his life where he had not been in complete control. s*x was no exception. Except now, even the thought of having her fingers gliding over his chest caused a stirring of desire in his gut.

Needless to say, he did not appreciate this distraction. The numbness he'd enjoyed since he was only a young boy was something necessary to survival for a man in his position. Unbridled emotion was a suicide at best.

He needed to get rid of this outlier and get back to the problem at hand...the real problem.

                                                                                                 ~

Three hours later, Mikhail became instantly awake at the sound of his bedroom door opening. He detested the fogginess in his head caused by the anesthetic, but having surgery wide awake wasn't something his doctor had been willing to do, no matter that he belonged to Bratva and so technically belonged to Mikhail. 

He knew it was Vlad before the man appeared. The other man was the only one with unrestricted access to his wing of the house. The concept of trust was ambiguous to him at best, but if he believed in it and had to apply it to anyone, he supposed, Vlad would be that one person. In any case, his cousin was much the same in that regard. They'd grown up together, had been pitted against each other since Mikhail had gone to live with the younger man's parents at the age of five. There had been many years of bitter competition and a lot of blood spilled...a lot of blood, but despite his parents' greatest efforts, Vlad had decided his cousin had been an opponent worthy of his admiration. Mikhail had been of a similar opinion. As teenagers, the young men had grown close...as close as two men of the Bratva could be. They were now sworn-brothers, and despite Mikhail's position of authority, the other man often ---when they were alone--- treated him just so... like a brother.

At the moment, Mikhail could tell the other man was still annoyed with his preoccupation. His face was as impassive as always, except for the tic in his jaw. Vladimir and Mikhail differed mostly in this, where Mikhail's nature veered towards cold precision, Vladimir had a temper. It was slow to rise but all the more destructive for it. 

Mikhail sat up and accepted the tablet Vlad handed over silently.

"Her name is Bela Kavek. Nineteen years old. The only child of Belinda and Joseph Kavek. Both parents migrated here when they were children. They've been together since they teenagers, there's never been a time since when they weren't involved in some form of drug or alcohol abuse. Needless to say, having a child wasn't enough incentive to clean up their act."

As Vlad went over a rundown of what he had found on the Kaveks, Mikhail scrolled through pictures and documents that corroborated the tale. The pictures were mostly of the parents in some unseemly state or another, obviously under the influence. A few were of Bela Kavek. Two of them when she'd been a child. How pitiful she looked, skinny to the point of emaciation, white-blonde hair drooping over her small face and tiny body. In another one, she looked about 13 or so, she still had too much hair for her small frame but she didn't look so much sickly as she did skinny. She was smiling directly into the camera, a small smile curving her lips. The last picture of her seemed more recent, she was standing next to another girl, their arms slung around each other, they were both wearing some kind of uniform. Both women wore irreverent grins, though Bela's was more restrained. 

The picture didn't do her justice. It didn't capture the flash of gold in the deep brown depths of her eyes. It didn't show the tiny mole in the left corner which wrinkled whenever she was thinking too hard. There was a lustrous, otherworldly glow of her skin...that he just knew would be just as soft as it looked…

Enough!

He angrily scrolled through the first set of documents, and swiftly felt his anger at himself being transferred to the people who had given birth to Bela Kavek.

The slow acidic churn in his gut was confusing him. He was self-aware enough to know it was a physical reaction to the anger which was swiftly rising. He simply didn't understand why he was angry. 

Both in Russia and here, in America, he'd been exposed to the circumstances of different people. Poverty wasn't a foreign concept to him, children being abused, even less so. Many of his more legitimate businesses made substantial donations regularly to many organizations responsible for protecting children and impoverished adults.

The motives behind those donations were less than honorable, but then he would never make such an outrageous claim in the first place. The point was, he never had any personal feelings about any of these circumstances, he'd simply accepted that they were apart of life. So this seething now was highly unlike anything he'd ever experienced.

Since the age of six to sixteen, there had been nine trips to the emergency room. The reasons ranged from second-degree burns to a fractured jaw to a broken rib, and one that had required surgery, a broken tibia. There were several doctors' reports which made note of "possible child abuse" and notes regarding CPS but nothing else seemed to come of the incidents. 

For a long time after going through the reports, Mikhail simply stared off into space, his dark brows borrowed in concentration. 

Vlad remained silent standing next to the door that opened to a balcony.

"Where is Li?"

If Vlad was surprised by his sudden change of topic, he didn't show it.

"On a business trip in Thailand, " Vlad responded, almost forcing the words through clenched teeth. 

"When is he due to return?" Mikhail continued, still too preoccupied with sorting out his feelings to be amused by his cousin's restraint.

"Officially? Next week. Unofficially? Two days ago."

Another round of silence followed.

"Invite Drova for dinner in two weeks. His family too."

Drova was in charge of Philadelphia. Vlad knew Mikhail didn't like the man one bit, but he knew better than to question Mikhail's train of thoughts. The man would only explain his plans when he was good and ready. 

Vlad waited for further instructions. 

"Ensure the girl is settled. She'll be here a while."

Vlad bit back the retort that automatically rose to his lips. Close they might be, but Mikhail had made an order, he hadn't asked for suggestions, he also wasn't fond of people volunteering them, even him.

Vlad didn't believe in coincidences, he wasn't sure why the girl had been where she had been at the time she had been there, but he would find out. He certainly wasn't going to allow his brother to be hurt again. For now, however, he would simply have to do as he was told. Until the girl proved she was a threat to Mikhail's safety, Vlad had no excuse to remove her.

"Get the doctor here. That's all."

Vlad nodded and left the room.

It was long minutes after the door closed that Mikhail came to a decision. 

It didn't have anything at all to do with the girl. Absolutely, f*****g nothing...but he was going to have to kill Belinda and Joseph Kavek.