Chapter 31

Hannah

Cool air from the open window blew through my hair causing it to tickle gently around my face. I was also gradually wearing away at my drunken stupor. I lifted my head off the head rest, but it felt like it weighed two hundred pounds. So did my eyelids when I tried to open them.
I swung my head around to look at Nikolai as he drove. I appreciated the ropes of muscle on his forearms, having seen first-hand tonight how strong he is. Jeff had never stood a chance. I felt a swelling of gratitude for the twentieth time of the night. I was grateful that Nikolai had not only protected me, but had seen to it that I had an amazing time, although I knew a lot of those people were probably only being nice because he was standing next to me like a foreboding statue, almost daring them to step out of line. Eventually, I was going to have start handling things myself, without his stabilizing presence next to me, but for tonight it was so relaxing to depend on him for support.
“Are you just going to sit there and stare at me?”
I gasped and jumped slightly at the unexpected sound of his voice. “How did you even know I was looking at you?”
Nikolai smirked, but there wasn’t much humor in his expression. “I was trained to notice shit like that.”
I frowned. “Trained? By who?”
He shot me a deadpan look. “Hannah, you know what my family is like. Who do you think I was trained by?”
His father. The mob.
I frowned again. “Is it normal to start training you for that kind of thing before you even graduate high school?”
Nikolai sighed and was silent for a long enough time that I thought he wasn’t going to answer the question. “My family is…fucked up. When you’re part of the Bratva, there is no normal. I’ve been aware of what my dad is almost my whole life. He’s so heavily guarded, you couldn’t not know something was going on. You see people showing up at all hours of the night, maybe covered in blood. You sometimes hear people screaming. Sometimes you ended up at the funeral for the guy who had been guarding you only the day before.” He stopped abruptly. “All that shit—it makes you different. Makes you tough. Makes you always prepared.”
I wasn’t sure if it was the sadness of his story, revelations about what his childhood must have been like, or the residual effects of the liquor I had drunk, but I felt my eyes filling with tears of compassion. I bit my lip so he wouldn’t hear me.
Of course, because he has these freaky heightened senses, he must have known something was happening. He looked at me and his expression became alarmed. “You’re not crying, are you? Don’t. Stop crying, Hannah. Jesus.”
I quickly pulled it together. “I’m not crying. It’s the booze, I swear. I am not the crying type.” I rubbed my face vigorously to erase any trace of tears. I didn’t want him to think he couldn’t confide in me for fear I would break down all the time. I cleared my throat. “I’m not crying,” I reasserted, “But I am sorry you had to grow up like that. I never really knew my father. He left for the last time was when Emmy was one. I was four.”
Nikolai frowned. “The last time?”
I was silent for a second. I never really talked about my father because the only people I’d talk about him with were my mother and my sister. For my mother, he was a painful memory she never really recovered from. For my sister, he was practically a figment of her imagination.
“When I was little, he would come home for a couple of weeks, giving us presents, swearing he was back for good. My mom would be so happy to finally have him home, she would ignore the fact that this was how he was. She would believe him. The last couple of times, I would question him when he came home. Ask him where he went, why he left, if he was sure he was staying this time. He would lie to me about all of it and eventually take off. My mother would be inconsolable, but she tried to justify it to me. He was busy, he had a lot going on, he had an important job, that kind of thing. All bullshit. He was just a lousy alcoholic and drug addict. He would come home, steal her cash and go buy drugs. He came home one last time, but my mother never even let him inside the house. He never came back.”
I looked over at Nikolai, feeling a weird sort of embarrassment about what I’d shared. His expression gave away nothing, and now I know why he’d been so unsettled by my tears. If he had been crying, I would have freaked out. His stoic, non-judgmental face felt reassuring.
“That sucks, Hannah,” he said, compassion leaching into his tone.
“Yeah.”
Nikolai sighed and chuckled a little. “This conversation is not shining a good light on fatherhood. Yours is a deadbeat and mine stuck around but is a psychopathic asshole.”
I huffed out a laugh. “Seriously. We should start writing poetry together, channel our inner emo.”
Nikolai laughed out loud. “Definitely.”
We pulled up to my house, and Nikolai turned off the car. We sat there awkwardly for a couple of seconds, then looked at each other. My buzz was still just strong enough to override my common sense, so I lunged forward and started kissing him.