Lost Bastard Page 6

  “Deva, is your friend involved in underground fighting? Please answer with a no.”

  Another silence and Sasha cursed on the line. “Cousin, I don’t know what you’re up to, but the last time we had this conversation… let’s say I don’t want you to be involved in that stuff anymore. Ever again for that matter.”

  Deva’s heart tightened in her chest, but she pushed the memory aside. “I know Sasha. But I have to do something. It’s complicated, and I promise to tell you everything, but not on the phone. Not now. Please help me. I have enough on my plate without reaching out to other people who might tell my father I’m in Chicago.”

  “Chicago? You are in Chicago? Are you insane?”

  “I told you, it’s complicated. Please, please, Sasha.”

  Another string of curses in English and French, but Deva knew then that her cousin and closest friend wouldn’t deny her.

  “How long before the fight?”

  “Three days.”

  “Well, you have your job cut out for you. Check your emails. I’m gonna send you a list of drugs and instructions. Follow everything to the dot. Don’t go to the same drugstore for everything. I’ll give you three different places that you can get what you need. None of their computer networks are linked yet. It should give you time. Because if they ever see the final dosage, I might lose my license.”

  “I owe you, Sasha.”

  “Ma belle, you owe me big, with explanations first chance I see you. Keep me apprised of the situation. I’ll plan a flight to Chicago as soon as I can. Either to help you with that dickhead of a fighter again, whoever he is, or to take care of a corpse after he steps into that cage again.”

  Chapter 9

  Deva hated stepping away from Aleksei for so long, but she didn’t have any choice but to go herself to the three different drugstores Sasha had instructed in her email. Adding in two other stops at hardware stores for other supplies on her list, and she had been gone for almost three hours.

  The sun had set, and Deva was glad to be back in the cool temperature of Aleksei’s condo. Not that she wasn’t used to heat, Texas could be extremely hot, but somehow her body didn’t remember the torture of Chicago’s humidity. Wiping her forehead as she let out a sigh of relief, she returned to the task at hand. First was to sort out the various medications and drugs Sasha had prescribed, the dosage and order to be administered, neatly lined up on the kitchen counter.

  Time for the treatment to start. Peeking in his bedroom, Deva felt bad for waking Aleksei up. For the treatment to work, there was no time to lose. He appeared so peaceful. It was tempting to let him sleep some more. The Aleksei she saw appeared almost harmless. But she wasn’t a fool. What spurred her into action was how she noticed that some of the bruises on his cheek and shoulder had spread. Time for turning his life into hell.

  Gently, she woke Aleksei up for the first round of medicine and let him go back to sleep for an hour. It gave her the time to prepare an ice bath. Deva had bought enough bags of ice to fill half the bath.

  Just as the hour was up, she woke up the poor man again and helped him to the bathroom. Deva forced herself to ignore his nakedness, after all, there was nothing there she hadn’t already seen. Or touched. When he arrived in the bathroom, and the tub filled with ice, he seemed to brace himself, and climbed in. Once he was settled, Deva returned to his room to set up his bed with the two queen-size electric blankets she had bought. Making a quick detour by the kitchen, she grabbed one of the one-liter bottles she had prepared and returned to the bathroom.

  Aleksei was immersed in the ice bath, leaning back with only his head above the frigid water and bobbing ice cubes. She could see how tense he was, fighting the cold, his jaw tight and lips in a thin line. Deva had set up the timer and would stick to the program, even if it meant sitting on him in the icy water.

  Unscrewing the bottle, she handed it to him. “Drink.”

  He looked at her for a minute and took the bottle in his hand. As she expected, the man grimaced at the first sip. “Are you sure you know what you are doing?”

  “You mean treating an underground fighter in so little time so he can get hurt even more when he jumps back in the cage, with the ultimate outcome that he leaves it alive? Sadly, yes. Drink. All of it.”

  Aleksei’s glare turned questioning, but he complied and gulped the mixture as she checked her timer. It took some time, but he completely drank the bottle. Leaning back once more, Aleksei was shivering badly when finally, the timer beeped.

  Still silent, she grabbed a towel as he stumbled to an unstable standing position, his body shivering uncontrollably. Clinging as best she could to his cold skin, she rubbed him off quickly before helping him back to his bedroom.

  Lips almost blue, his body jerking, Aleksei slid between the steaming hot blankets with a sound close to a whimper coming from deep in his chest. Going back in the kitchen, she grabbed another bottle and a small pile of sorted pills.

  Color had returned to his face, and he wasn’t shivering anymore. On the contrary, his face had a sheen of sweat, and his cheekbones were turning pink. “It’s too hot. You have to turn it down.”

  Deva stood beside him and grabbed the electric blanket before he could push it away from his body. “Not until the timer beeps, Aleksei. You follow the drill to get better, or I walk out, and you live with the pain.”

  Annoyance had returned to his eyes, which was better than glassy indifference, or numbing pain.

  His body relaxed, but the slight sheen of sweat started pouring from his face. Deva encouraged him to take the pills and drink before making her way back to the kitchen once more. She grabbed a tube of medicated lotion, bandages and her massage oil and returned to the bedroom.

  She started by applying ointment on his knuckles before bandaging them. Many of the scratches she had seen over his body didn’t require her intervention. When the timer beeped, she pulled the blankets completely off the bed. His exhaled sigh almost made her smile. “Can you roll to the other side of the bed, face down.”

  He complied with slow difficulty, and she switched the blankets off. Rounding the bed, she squeezed a good amount of ointment and mixed it up with the oils before warming it in her hands. For his benefit, her first touch was very gentle. Slowly, she started by spreading the oil over his skin in a light, circular motion. No pressure yet. Maybe tomorrow, if his body reacted well to the medication. Once satisfied, she made him turn on his back and repeated the treatment. Even in its battered state, his body reacted to her touch as it had a few days before, but she ignored his swollen cock. Too bad her treacherous body didn’t.

  Working on his calf, then his thigh, covering his bruised ribs and tense shoulders, she was finishing his second arm when finally, he spoke. “Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”

  Deva didn’t stop at his question, didn’t even look at him. “Does there have to be a reason? Never heard of compassion for the suffering souls?”

  Aleksei seemed to assess her question but then shook his head. “No, that doesn’t exist. It only hides something else. Profit, greed, opportunism…”

  She put his arm on the bed and covered his body with a thin cotton sheet. The fever still a hold, so she added a blanket.

  “You better sleep, the next round will come soon enough.”

  “Deva. Tell me. Please, solnyshka.”

  His voice was so soft, so unlike the man she had first encountered. And in his eyes, she only saw a sincere plea. Turning from the door, she wasn’t sure how to answer. “I don’t need what you have, your money or connections. Let’s just say that you remind me of someone who was once in the same situation. I helped him then, as I’m helping you now. Sleep.”

  Without waiting for his answer, Deva turned the light off and closed the door.

  She had no intention of revisiting ghosts from her past tonight and decided that sleeping would do her more good than reminiscing on what-might-have-been until the second round of treatment started.

  R
esetting the timer on her phone, she lay down on the oversized couch and prayed for sleep to take her before the memories did.

  Chapter 10

  Deva couldn’t feel her arms anymore, nor her back and a headache was starting to make it difficult to concentrate. The night had passed and the second day vanished with such speed, it made her dizzy. And the treatment prescribed by Sasha continued into the second night.

  Deva had spoken to her cousin twice in that period, when she was sure Aleksei was sleeping soundly, to give her a heads up. He was doing better. The fever died down the night before, and the last time she woke him up for his ice bath, he could stand without her help and didn’t sway once.

  When Aleksei was finally tucked in bed after another round of massage, she fell like a corpse on the couch, trying to remember the last time she had slept more than an hour or eaten for that matter. Eat! Damn it.

  Groaning, she pushed herself up and dragged her sorry ass to the kitchen. On Sasha’s list, the next round of medication had to be taken with protein; first a shake, and then a meal. That would be in one hour. Opening the cupboards, she finally found shake containers that she could use to make the mix. The fridge was well stocked. She was grateful beyond words as she didn’t know if she had the strength to leave the condo to get food.

  She tried her best to keep the noise to a minimum while she thawed chicken and searched for a pan. A stir-fry would do to start. Aleksei hadn’t had solid food in 24 hours and needed some fuel now that the pain had ceased. In the fridge, she chose onions, mushrooms, and a bell pepper. In the pantry, she found everything she needed for seasoning, another surprise, the annoying Russian could cook.

  As she finished cutting every ingredient into bite-sized pieces, she turned to get some cooking oil and backed into a solid wall. Deva gasped and reached for the knife she had laid on the counter when an arm stopped her.

  “Easy Deva, it’s only me.” It took her a moment to realize that it was Aleksei and that she was way too tense. Tiredness tended to do that to her, messing with her guard, returning her to a messy and dangerous place.

  “You make less noise than a cat. And you shouldn’t be out of bed. What are you doing out of bed, Voronov?”

  Only when she turned to look at him that he released his hold. “I’ve slept more than I did for years. I’m not tired and was restless. I need to move a little. And I’m hungry.”

  Deva nodded, putting a couple of steps between them. In her state, hormones flared at the man before her. At least he had slid a pair of loose sweatpants on, although it didn’t hide much. And as her brain started popping images of him naked, she decided to return to the business at hand.

  “I’ll give you your next massage after you eat. Best start with the protein shake I’ve prepared. It’s in the fridge. I’m making you a chicken stir-fry. I didn’t know what you like, but you had all the ingredients.”

  “If I have it, I like it. I’m used to doing my own cooking, so having someone preparing something for me is a treat. Thank you, Deva.”

  Not knowing what to say at his unexpected gratitude, she gestured for him to sit across the island on one of the stools. “Better stay out of my way while I finish this. How do you feel? How’s the pain?”

  Aleksei drowned the brownish liquid as he slid onto the stool. The way he moved was fluid but calculated, probably meaning that he wasn’t sore but was still careful about it.

  “I don’t feel much pain anymore, not when I lie down, and very little when I move. But I haven’t tested my body yet.”

  She pointed at him with a spatula. “No testing. Not yet. You have to be careful about that. After you eat, we’re going to do some stretching and then a massage.”

  “No more ice baths?”

  Deva looked up at him as he smiled, clear delight in his voice. She simply shook her head. “Any more ice baths would be for your comfort only if you ever felt comfortable feeling cold.”

  Her words shifted his mood somehow. “There are discomforts in life. You just have to live with them.”

  Did he speak from personal experience? “Well, I don’t think I would ever feel good lying naked in ice. For that, you have my admiration.”

  As she busied herself around in the kitchen, starting to put his meal together, Deva sensed all his attention on her. She frowned when she looked up and noticed his stare. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

  He shrugged, but his smug smile never left his face. “You are an unusual woman, that’s all.”

  Deva rolled her eyes. “I’m normal. Maybe that’s what you’re not used to. Your style is probably weird women traipsing around your house, half-naked sipping martinis, giggling at your jokes as you swat their asses and screw them on your lovely coffee table…”

  Aleksei finished his shake and licked his lips. “Ah, that’s the difference. Well, sorry to disappoint, but I don’t bring women here to fuck, not on the coffee table, not in my bed. This is my personal space. I fuck elsewhere.”

  “Charming.” Tempted to roll her eyes again, Deva finished seasoning the stir-fry before turning to find a plate. “At least I won’t have to wonder if the counter is clean or if there are still traces of your last conquest on the marble floor. I didn’t think to bring disinfectant.”

  Deva handed him a heaping plate of food, but instead of taking it, he crossed his arms. “You’re eating with me.”

  “I’m not…”

  “Prepare yourself a plate and eat. Here.”

  There was the option of a showdown, but clearly, the compliant patient was turning into a stubborn fighter again, and she didn’t have the stamina. “Okay. I will. But that’s too much food for me. Take it, and I’ll prepare myself another one. Deal?”

  Aleksei uncrossed his arm and nodded, clearly satisfied. “Deal, solnyshka.”

  Deva shook her head. “You’ll have to tell me what it means. I don’t like not understanding what you are saying.”

  “One day. Now, sit. Eat.”

  Groaning, she filled herself a plate and went to sit beside him. They ate in companionable silence for a while, him, wolfing down food as if there was no tomorrow, her, eating a few bites and moving the remaining pieces around on her plate.

  “It’s good. Why aren’t you eating? Eat!”

  Being ordered around was starting to get on her nerves. It was something her father did, and the more she allowed, the more insufferable he became. “I’m not that hungry.” She looked at his empty plate. “Do you want more, I have at least two other portions for you.”

  As she got to her feet, he put a hand on her arm to stop her. She was about to shrug him off when unexpected concern gleamed in his eyes. “Why aren’t you hungry? You must eat. Why do I believe you haven’t eaten since you arrived here?”

  Deva sighed and patted his hand. “Don’t worry about that. When I’m tired, I don’t feel hungry. If you are done, I’ll prepare your bed for your next massage session, but first, we’ll do some stretching.”

  Again, he waited a long moment before opening his fingers to release her. That man was pushy and sweet, a strange mix she thought, placing her plate in the sink.

  Without another word, Deva went into the master bedroom and replaced the sheet and comforter as Aleksei walked in. “Lie down. We’re going to test how your muscles react to strain.”

  Once more he complied to her command, stretching on the bed, his hands on his well-defined stomach. One by one, taking first his arms and then his legs, she put pressure on the ligaments, testing them a little, focusing on his face, trying to see if she was causing any pain.

  “How do you feel? Tell me if you feel discomfort, you have too much of a poker face for me to tell, Aleksei. And I’m not that fond of the guessing game.”

  “I don’t feel any pain. You’ve done a great job. And I’m not the only one with a great poker face.”

  Deva blinked, and she was about to tell him to roll on his stomach, when Aleksei grabbed her weight, pulling her under his body as he rolled on th
e bed. Pressed hard to the mattress, her first instinct was to fight him, but the faint bruises on his bulging shoulders and arms as he supported his upper body over hers, with his knees between her legs, made her decide against it.

  “What are you doing? I’m not done with you! There’s your massage, and you have your medication to take…”

  “You are a strange woman.” He said again, but this time, the tone was less friendly.

  “Get off me.”

  Ignoring her, he continued pinning her down.

  “Who are you?”

  At the soft-spoken words, it took all her control and might not to flinch. “Get. Off. Me.”

  He was still as stone, and his face set in ways that made her think of a dangerous predator. “I don’t like to be played, Deva. If that’s your real name.”

  Her heart pounded. “I’m not playing. I’m a physical therapist if you haven’t realized by now. And you’re pissing me off right now, Voronov.”

  “Is that so? I believe you are a physical therapist, and one of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s what I don’t see that makes me question you.”

  “Voronov, what are you talking about?”

  “Of all the questions you’ve asked me, it’s the two questions you didn’t that revealed the most about you. You never asked about my tattoos, but I know you see them as a Bratva emblem. You couldn’t disguise the knowledge in your gaze. When you saw me naked, at the gym, on your table, you never asked a single question about them as so many others would. And earlier, when you learned that I was in an illegal fight ring, you didn’t even blink. There is nobody on earth who wouldn’t have asked at least one question about it. And despite what you saw, you never demanded that I back out of my next fight.”

  Damn, her knowledge of that world was smacking her right behind the head when she least expected it.

  “I was being discreet. You wouldn’t have liked me prying.”

  His gray eyes turned into a slit, not believing her explanation. “You’re a woman. It’s in your genes to be indiscreet. Only someone already privy to that information, already knowledgeable of that world would act the way you did. So, I’m asking you one last time, solnyshka, who are you?”