Gilded Cage: A Russian Mafia Romance (Kovalyov Bratva Book 1) by Nicole Fox (best books for 20 year olds .txt) 📕

I refuse to let that happen.

“Where will you go?”

He hesitates.

“No, you’re right,” I say. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t say.”

“Safety first, you know? Just in case one of us gets caught. If we don’t know where the other one is at, can’t give up the location, right? Keeps us both safe. Lord knows your pain tolerance ain’t shit.”

I laugh. “Let’s just not get captured.”

“Deal.” Cillian leans back in his fold-out chair, his eyes fixed on the pool. “It’s fucking ironic,” he says in a quiet voice that’s weighed down with old memories.

“What is?”

“Just, you know… life,” he says with a shrug. “When I left Ireland, I resolved to leave this kind of shit behind. I figured it had screwed me over enough times, and cost me everything in the process. I told myself I was done.”

“And then you met me,” I chuckle.

Cillian smiles. “I gave fate the middle finger and boarded that plane to L.A., and I guess in a way, you were the middle finger that fate gave back to me.”

I roll my eyes. “Geez, fucking thanks for that.”

He laughs easily. “Hey, man, I’m not complaining. I know now—this is the only kind of life I could have lived.”

“You think?” I ask. “You don’t think things would have been simpler if you’d just taken some run of the mill, every day job, found a nice Irish girl, and settled down?”

“Oh, life would definitely have been simpler,” Cillian agrees. “But I’m not convinced I would have been happy.”

“You would have been bored out of your fucking mind.”

Cillian raises his beer to toast to that. “I was made for this life,” he says. “Just like you were.”

I’m not sure why, but his words make me feel strangely uneasy.

I sit with the feeling for a moment—before I realize it might have something to do with the brunette beauty sleeping on the other side of this wall.

“I spoke to my ma the other day,” Cillian tells me. “Patrick’s being groomed to take over.”

“Patrick?” I ask, in confusion. “I thought Sean was the older one?”

“He is,” Cillian nods. “He walked away.”

I whistle low. “Bet your old man had a fucking conniption.”

“That fucker,” Cillian says. His tone is light, but I can see the resentment in his eyes. “He’s used to being disappointed by his sons. I still remember the look on his face the night he bailed me out of jail.”

“Wasn’t a warm fatherly hug, I imagine.”

Cillian’s gone down memory lane. “‘A smart man knows his place.’ That’s what he told me through the bars of my jail cell,” Cillian tells me, his eyes far away. “‘A smart man knows not to fuck with men above his station.’”

“Fuck.”

He runs his hand over his face. “I didn’t even know that the fucker I fought with was some politician’s son,” he whispers. “All I saw was some entitled motherfucker who put his hands on my woman after she’d asked him not to. I told him once nicely—he flipped me off. The second time, I wasn’t so nice.”

I know the story. He told it to me once, about six months after we’d first met, but he had kept the details vague and I hadn’t pried.

He had been defending a girl he was involved with, but this is the first time I’ve heard him refer to her that way.

My woman, in that possessive tone that tells me she meant more to him than he had ever let on before.

“Fucker’s still alive to this day, you know,” Cillian says, turning to me.

“Yeah?”

“Still on a ventilator,” he tells me. “Still being fed through a tube. Way I see it, that’s a good thing. He’ll never be able to touch another woman without her permission again.”

“Did your old man know that?” I ask.

Cillian snorts. “‘Course he fucking did. He told me I should’ve just let him fuck Saoirse.”

“You’ve never told me her name before,” I say without looking at him.

He’s quiet for a second. “Yeah, well, I promised myself that I’d never say her fucking name again.”

I venture, “You loved her.”

He nods slowly. His eyes are unfocused like he’s seeing stuff that happened years ago, decades ago, instead of this crummy, empty motel pool. “There are days I think I still do.”

“What happened to her?”

Cillian shrugs. But I see how heavy his shoulders are, how tense they remain when they fall back down again.

“She didn’t want to deal with the fall out,” he replies. “I was the son of a small time don who turned a powerful politician’s son into a vegetable. There was too much politics for her to deal.”

“Politics?” I repeat. “It was personal.”

“Apparently not for her. After Da bailed me out and told me that I had to leave the country immediately, I went to see her before I went to the airport.”

My head jerks towards him. This part he’d definitely never told me about before.

I sit quietly, waiting for him to continue the story.

“When she opened the door and saw me standing there, she paled so much she looked like a fucking ghost,” Cillian says. “That should have been my first clue.”

“You went to say goodbye?”

“I went to ask her to come with me,” Cillian admits. “She looked right through me for a moment, and then she shook her head. That was it. She didn’t fucking say a word. Just shook her head. She’d told me she loved me the week before. I didn’t realize her love was fucking conditional. I didn’t realize her love was weak.”

I say nothing. I don’t think Cillian even knows I’m here anymore. He’s lost in his past.

“I turned and walked away from her. I wish I can say I didn’t look back,” Cillian sighs. “But I fucking did. She had wild red curls and the bluest eyes you ever saw. She stood at that doorway and watched me drive off.”

“Do you know what happened to her?” I ask.

“Lives in Dublin,” Cillian replies. “Married some fucker a few years after I left. Has a couple of red-headed brats