My heart dropped when I saw the two guards on either side of my door.
He ordered them.
Things are back to the way they were, great!
But, as much as I tried to be nonchalant about it, I couldn’t hide the fact that I was hurt. I felt like I had been pushed out of a house I once lived in. Like I had just come upon a stark reminder of the fact that I was a stranger. I came here because of circumstances. The same circumstances might be responsible for sending me out.
“Hey, Mrs. Lobanov,” Mila greeted from the sitting room.
“Alina, please,” I corrected tiredly.
“I don’t think Mr. Konstantin would agree to that,” she pointed out, chuckling.
I took the couch beside hers.
“I think things got awkward,” she remarked.
“You bet,” I replied, sarcasm clear in my tone.
“I’m sorry I put it that way. I really didn’t know there was some underlying matter,” she apologized.
“Oh, no. It has nothing to do with you, Mila,” I clarified. “So…this Vitya Morozov guy is someone I used to date.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah,” I uttered, nodding. “So, until the driver guy's discovery, I had insisted I didn’t know anything about his deals. And I really didn’t. He never told me those things. But I just didn’t know something as little as one of his drivers could be important.”
“I understand,” she answered. “For all it’s worth, though, I think you should know that his reaction was by default. As you said, it wasn’t just about you.”
I chuckled.
“Really, Alina,” she persisted. “Men like him find it hard to branch off the road of what should be done. You know what they were born into.”
“Trust is non-negotiable,” I said, shaking my head from side to side.
“I think he trusts you,” she disclosed. “You didn’t see him when you left; I did. Just…give it time.”
“It’s not like I have somewhere to be,” I answered, shrugging. “We really should catch up. When you’re done with your work here, obviously.”
She nodded in affirmation. “If I were to imagine we’d meet again, I would have said that would be in Russia,” she revealed, grinning.
“Right. I would have thought the same thing. And you’re an accountant now, you always said you wanted to be a doctor.”
She laughed. “It only took a few preliminary courses to cure me of that idea. I love working with numbers. No more, no less.”
“Well, that’s wonderful.”
Mila soon had to go back into the office, and I went back upstairs, where I had dinner.
The smell of dust and gunpowder filled the air as I ran towards the front of the warehouse. People were running away from the building, but I kept going in the opposite direction. The closer I got to the building, the louder the sounds got.
When I finally got to the front of the building, I saw different bodies on the floor, most of them in pools of their blood. Fear gripped me, but I took more steps to the metal doors of the entrance.
“Siroc!” I shouted, the chaos around me swallowing my voice.
I yelled even louder. “Siroc!”
Men were falling around me, and I couldn’t tell where exactly the shots were coming from. I took another step further, and that was when I saw him.
