CHAPTER TWENTY
Nadya
“The French toast is gonna burn,” Tank mumbled, his lips still on mine.
What I wanted to say was ‘fuck the French toast.’ I could have cared less about food right then. The only thing I wanted to do was stay wrapped up in that man all day and that was seriously fucked up.
I was at war with myself, my emotions all over the place and I couldn’t hold one down long enough to close myself back off. As much as I should have pushed him away and kicked him out, I just couldn’t. I found that I wanted him there and as the seconds ticked on, that want started to turn into need. Which was completely crazy and wrong.
“Fine,” I said, pulling back to look into his beautiful steel eyes only to find a softness there. I had no idea what to do with that and I would be lying if I said it didn’t cause some sort of weird flutter in my belly. As reluctant as I was to let him go, I needed to. I needed a moment, or a lifetime, to catch my breath.
Not long after that, we were sitting on the floor with plates full of steaming, hot French toast set in front of us on the coffee table. We ate in silence, the relaxed posture of Noah wasn’t lost on me for a second. He seemed lighter and a little bit more full of life. Now, I wasn’t going to go as far as to say I had a magical pussy, but I didn’t doubt that some of that was due to me.
The weird thing was, I kinda found myself liking it. This giant of a man sitting in front of me made me fucking smile. One that I couldn’t hold back either and I could tell by the way he was watching my face with his own lips tipped up, that he liked seeing it on me.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off of him. He was rough and yet a bit soft. An odd combination but one that I found I very much liked. He wasn’t one to shield his emotions and he didn’t hold things back. I’d seen it plenty, not only when he was alone and I was watching but also when he was with me. He’d been through Hell, part of him was still living in it, and he showed his broken pieces on the outside.
Then there was last night when he didn’t hesitate after he came out of the bathroom and wrapped his arms around me. It wasn’t awkward or forced for him. It may have been a bit for me only because I wasn’t used to such intimacy. I wasn’t used to letting someone get that close to me and while I wanted to fight it, the moment he touched me I just couldn’t.
“Tell me something,” he said after he swallowed the big mouthful of food he’d been working on. Okay, it might have been big for me, but I was sure for him it was normal sized.
I chewed my bite slowly, thinking of what I should share with him. There were things I definitely could not tell him. Things that I hoped I would never have to. However, I was a smart girl, I knew that secrets only destroyed in the end and that nothing ever stayed secret for long. It was only a matter of time before whatever crazy thing was going on with us would end and I wished more than anything, that he would walk away a better man and clueless as to how I’d come into his life.
So, what was there that I could tell him? I wasn’t a fan of talking about myself. I didn’t ever talk about growing up and my family. I certainly couldn’t talk about what happened to me after I’d left said family. That pretty much left nothing. He already knew the good parts anyway. Why was I so bad at this? This was the exact reason I didn’t get close to anyone, I didn’t let anyone in, because my life was just one big ball of things I couldn’t talk about.
“What was it like growing up? Traveling around so much? Was it like it is in the movies?” He let out a low laugh and something in his face told me he knew better than to believe what he’d seen. But I had no idea because I wasn’t a big fan of movies or TV, so I didn’t have the first clue. But I did know how outsiders saw my people. It was often talked about as a way to get the younger generation to understand how we were viewed.
“We were always on the go. We would settle in a town for maybe a week or two at a time,” I said leaving off the reason it was always such a short stay.
You see, we were always chasing after and running from the next con. Get in, get done, and get out before anyone figured out what happened. That was the way we lived, drifting in and out of towns and people’s lives as fast as possible. That was all I’d ever known and it was clear that in all the running I tried to do from my past, that was one thing I couldn’t escape. The unsettled feeling I’d had all my life was like the world’s softest blanket to me. The freedom of it all was in my blood and it kept my heart beating at a steady rhythm. That was the only explanation that I could give when it came to how uneasy I was becoming.
Thinking about how long I’d been in this place, in this town, doing the same thing day in and day out made my skin crawl. I did my best to hide that all away. Noah didn’t need to know any of that. Really, I didn’t think he needed to know anything at all about me, but it seemed he thought differently. And as I took in his wide, hopeful eyes and the deep-set smile lines at the corners that were obviously there because this man at one time in his life had been a happy, cheerful man, I told him everything.
We spent the next hour, him asking question after question like a curious little kid. I did my best to answer them all. And I did the only thing I could think of, I started at the beginning.
“In my culture, women are cherished. However, my father wasn’t all that happy that my mom gave birth to a girl. He saw it as a burden and for that, my grandmother hated him. Eventually, my kumpanias divided, the younger generation tired of the new ways of doing things. So, when I was five, we said goodbye to my grandmother and headed off in a different direction with a different kris, or leader. I hated it. My father became even more cruel to me since the new elders were more lenient with the rules.” I took a deep breath. It was weird for me to say all of this out loud.
Then I told him how we’d moved to older ways of doing things. That was when the cons started to take priority over everything else. Greed plagued the men in the tribe and every con seemed to get bigger and more dangerous. We were always doing something, whether it be going to a crowded mall and doing simple pickpocketing or tricking some old lady into giving money for a nonexistent cause. I was taught at an early age how to handle things. Being that I was so young, I was always used as a distraction but that didn’t mean that I hadn’t mastered the art of sleight of hand.
And to this day I still had those great skills. I could pick a normal lock in twenty seconds, my ears and fingers attuned to the perfect sounds and feelings. I could hotwire a car in my sleep. I could beat you at poker without even trying, not only because I could switch cards with the stealth of a ninja, but because I was able to read people like the lifeline on my palm. Many of those skills I still used to this day, but I didn’t tell him that. That part I was going to have to keep to myself.
“I was to be married when I turned sixteen. My father had it all set up. The guy, he was alright, I guess. My father was all happy to, in a sense, get rid of me and he never stopped telling me that. When I wasn’t helping out my father, I was with my mother doing the women things. Learning how to cook and clean. All that bullshit that I hated and I wasn’t one to keep my mouth shut about it. That was probably where I went wrong.” I paused, getting lost in the memories of my childhood.
“So, what happened then? Are you…married?” he asked tentatively.
“Oh, fuck no!” I said with a choked out laugh.
The smile that slyly slid across his face made my cheeks heat, which was something that didn’t happen, like ever. I knew what he was thinking and not because I could read people so well. No, he was screaming his thoughts at me right then. And those thoughts were that he was fucking beyond elated that I wasn’t married. And I would put money on that he was even thinking about marrying me himself. Fucking weird, right? But I shit you not, that was what that man was envisioning. For a second, I wished I could have been in his head to see what that all looked like.
“When I was fifteen,” I continued on, “I was helping my father at an underground poker game. He wasn’t as good at reading people as I was, so I stood back and gave him slight signals helping him out. The place was disgusting as fuck. Like, no one even raised a brow at the fact a fifteen-year-old girl was there, hanging around. And I wasn’t the only young girl there. Before you ask, no they weren’t the men’s daughters. Like I said, disgusting. Well, pops was doing his thing and I was over in the corner, being as invisible as I could. One of the guys kept looking over at me and since I knew he was watching, I made sure not to signal my father until the man’s eyes were off of me. I was fucking sly like that.
“But then he figured it out. Next thing I knew, there was a gun aimed at me and before I could run or even breathe, three shots were fired, hitting me here.” I held my palm against my stomach. He’d already seen the scars left behind from that night, so I knew he knew what I was talking about. I figured he could put the rest of the pieces together—why I couldn’t have any children. The sadness that washed over his eyes almost made me feel bad about that fact for the first time ever.
When it had happened, I was really too young to think about kids. I didn’t want them at that point because I was practically a kid myself, so not having the ability to do so didn’t make me worry any. Then, as I grew older, I simply didn’t think about it. My life wasn’t one that allowed things like relationships and future and what have you, so, I never even pictured anything of the sort.
“Well, I was pretty much considered damaged material by my father at that point. He was more determined to get rid of me after that. So much so, that he offered a hefty amount of money for the marriage to go on. Two months after the incident, I fled. I took what I could and ran and didn’t stop moving.”
Six months I was able to get by okay. Then I began to struggle, the simple cons not pulling in enough money for me to survive on. I was hungry and my body was failing from exhaustion because I was sleeping in drafty, abandoned buildings and in alleyways. Six fucking months and I hit the lowest point in my life.
I was in an alley, down on my knees, ready to do whatever I had to do just to survive. Offering up the only thing I had left for just a few dollars so I could eat. Yeah, never said my past wasn’t colored in gray.
But I never got the chance to stoop that low, because a dark, mysterious man stopped it all. At first, I had thought he wanted to get some of the action, but then he said the most unexpected thing as he held out his opened hand to me.
“There is only one way to go from here.”
I would never forget those words as long as I lived.
And so, I took his hand and got up off of my knees and let him lead me out of that dark alley.
He took me to his home, which happened to be out in the middle of fucking nowhere with not a neighbor around for miles. After a while, he began to pass on everything that he knew to me. That happened to be…you guessed it…how to kill a man without anyone knowing. You see, this dark stranger was a contract killer and a fucking good one at that. So, I learned everything from him that I now use to make a living.
And let me make this clear, there was never anything weird between us. He never once made me feel uncomfortable or tried anything with me. I believed we were kindred spirits, like in another life he could have been my brother. That was exactly how I felt about him and I knew it was the same for him. He was the first man in my life that treated me like a person and showed me respect as much as he demanded it from me. When the time came, he encouraged me to spread my wings and fly.
But all of that I kept to myself. Noah had learned enough about me for now. More than enough, but it wasn’t like I could take it back.
So when he realized that I was all talked out, he lifted me up and took me to bed.
This time was different than the first. It was unhurried and sweet, something I was not used to at all but somehow found myself craving as much as my next breath. He loved every inch of me before tasting me. His tongue worked expertly around my clit and the feeling of his beard against my thighs only made it impossible to hold back my orgasm.