Hey, Daddy (Semyonov Bratva Book 2)

Feeling offended is a fucking choice. The moment you let somebody else’s words upset you, you’ve let them defeat you. And who the fuck wants to lose a battle of opinion?

—Haze to John

HAZE

“Where’s my chicken biscuit, motherfucker?”

John’s words had me glancing up, surprised to find that I’d made it the entire length of the lot without realizing.

“They stopped serving breakfast,” I lied.

They served breakfast until ten thirty, but he didn’t need to know that.

“Damn,” he grumbled. “I was really looking forward to it, too.”

I shrugged, hoping that he’d let it go.

If he wanted to, he could figure out what I’d just done in a matter of moments.

He knew the signs.

Hell, we’d been each other’s wingman more times than I could count.

He knew just as well as I did what the other looked like when they’d just hooked up with somebody.

Luckily, he didn’t push it.

He turned to the car and said, “How long do you think we should stay here?”

“Well, seeing as the stores just opened, I’m thinking they’ll be here any second,” I guessed.

“I hope so,” he muttered. “It’s fuckin’ cold, and now I’m hungry.”

It was fucking chilly.

That was why I’d been unable to comprehend how the woman I’d just fucked in the bathroom had been wearing a goddamn dress.

She had to have been freezing.

My gaze went beyond to the Whataburger, wondering if she was still there, and blinked in surprise when the blue polka dot dress came into view, much closer than I’d expected.

What the…

The woman from earlier was now walking toward us, a look of absolute horror on her face.

And with her was another woman and a man. A very familiar, pissed-off-looking man.

“Three o’clock,” I said to my partner.

My partner looked up and he hissed in a breath.

“Please tell me that’s not who I think it is,” he pleaded.

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the lawyer or Shasha Semyonov, but both were very bad.

The woman probably didn’t register on his radar, but she sure did register on mine.

“Fuck,” he grumbled. “That lawyer is a goddamn shark.”

She was.

Elianora Bates was known in these parts as the end all be all to police cases.

She had this weird sort of sixth sense that helped her get every single one of her clients out of tight binds.

And of course, she would be walking up with who I assumed owned the car that we’d just found a dead body in.

The three individuals came to a stop just outside of the police line.

My gaze went to the woman who should have on a fucking jacket and didn’t.

Forty fucking degrees out and she was in a t-shirt dress.

What the fuck?

“Gentlemen,” Elianora called. “What seems to be the problem here?”

“Is this your car?” John asked her.

“No, this is my client’s car,” she said. “What’s going on?”

As quickly as possible we gave her the bare minimum that her hatch had been open and it was investigated.

She’d find out eventually, and when she did, she wouldn’t be nearly as cooperative.noveldrama

“Whose car is this?” I asked, expecting it to be Shasha’s.

It, of course, wasn’t.

Because how else could my day get any worse but for the car to belong to the woman that I had just fucked in the bathroom thirty minutes ago?

“It’s mine,” she said in a quiet voice.

“And what’s your name, ma’am?” John asked carefully, trying to appear to be nice.

He wasn’t.

We were partnered together for a reason—no one else could stand working with us.

But since we were good at our jobs, they didn’t want to let us go because of our personalities.

However, that was the best thing they’d ever done, because the two of us had bonded.

Both of us fresh out of hell—i.e., Iraq—and neither one of us too certain on the civilian world now.

We’d bonded, albeit slowly, and now I couldn’t imagine my life without the grumpy bastard at my side.

But nice was something we’d never been accused of being, and John was usually the one that pretended because he was better at it than I was.

“Nastya Semyonov,” she answered, not falling for his fake nice act.

My stomach sank.

Of. Course.

She would be the sister of a criminal mastermind.

Though, if I were being honest, I’d always been quite impressed with how Shasha Semyonov kept his shit tight. There was nothing on him to be found, and that was how I liked it.

He could continue to do what he did—I wasn’t fucking stupid, I knew he’d killed, or been a part of killing, the man that’d hit his wife with a chair. I also knew that he’d taken out a hot-shit lawyer that liked to defend the dregs of society—abusers mostly.

But it still fucking sucked that she was the sister of Semyonov. That sort of made her off limits.

Right?

Then again, the murder investigation she was currently the prime suspect for should definitely keep her far away from me until we’d exonerated her.

And we would.

I was a damn good judge of character, and there was no way in hell she’d done this. But we, of course, had to jump through all the hoops.

“And that will be the last question she’s answering,” the lawyer said. “What’s going on? From the very beginning.”

“There seems to have been a body in your car, ma’am,” John replied.

We gave the three of them a quick rundown on what’d happened last night, and I knew she’d finally figured out why I’d left the bar so abruptly last night.

Last night I’d fully intended to take her home with me.

She knew it as well.

The connection we’d shared was one of those that you didn’t deny.

Which happened to be why I’d fucked her in a Whataburger bathroom less than an hour ago.

I couldn’t resist.

“I’m sorry, but I just picked up the ice maker…the box…last night from the Amazon Lockers,” she admitted. “I…”

“Let me confer with my client.” Elianora held up her hand.

I nodded, and the three of them stepped farther away from us.

The lawyer and Shasha listened to everything that the woman—Nastya—had to say before the lawyer nodded and gestured to us.

She came back and said, “She can tell you what happened.”

My gaze flicked to Nastya, who looked a little bit green now.

“Okay, so the ice maker Amazon delivered to me—I’m an Amazon Reviewer, people send me free stuff to review—didn’t work. So I wanted to get this review out by the end of today because that’s how I get paid, you know? Anyway, so I ordered another ice maker and had it one-hour delivery shipped to me, but the only place they would deliver to was the Amazon Lockers. When the package said delivered, I decided to come by and get it before I met up with my sisters for a drink.” She looked away from me as she said that, as if she didn’t want to remind me about seeing her last night. “I usually carry this cart thing with me for big stuff like this. I buy a lot of stuff. I’m also a mystery shopper as well. So anyway…”

She tells us how she got the box in the car. About how she’d had to use everything she had to get the box into her vehicle and ended up with it lying face down in the back of her car.

“My sister came by just as I’d finished, and I closed the hatch and got into her car with her,” she finished.

“Did you make sure the gate was closed all the way on your vehicle?” I questioned.

She winced. “No. I just assumed it was.”

“She’s pretty bad about that,” Shasha admitted. “She’s left her car doors open and back hatch open since she started driving at sixteen.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and John said, “We’d like you to come down to the station so we can get this recorded. From there, we’d like to ask you a few more questions.”

“As long as my lawyer is present,” Shasha interjected.

“Yes, that’s no problem,” I confirmed.

The next few hours went exactly how I expected it to.

Last night, after watching the footage, all of Nastya’s recounting of the night lined up with what we’d seen on the tapes.

About halfway through the interview, we got word that the other camera angles from the other businesses also corroborated her story.

An obnoxious beep had John, the lawyer, and me looking over at the two Semyonov siblings.

Shasha looked at his sister and said, “Check it.”

“No phones.” John shook his head. “Once we’re done we…”

“She has no choice but to check it. Unless you want to be blocking her medical emergency from being taken care of,” Shasha barked.

John blinked. “What?”

“It’s fine,” Nastya lied.

That’s when I noticed the fine sheen of sweat on her face.

Was she nervous?

What was…

“It’s not fine. Fucking check it,” he barked.

Nastya sighed and reached for her purse.

“What…” John started to stand up but it was Shasha who said, “She’s diabetic. Terrible at managing it, diabetic. If she doesn’t check it, she could go into shock. Fuckin’ don’t say a word until she’s finished.”

All the while Nastya grumbled under her breath.

“What type?” I asked.

“One,” Nastya grumbled as she pulled out insulin, a syringe, and her phone. She immediately tucked the insulin and syringe back into the little pouch she’d pulled it out of after checking her phone.

She sighed, long and loud. “I don’t have any stupid food.”

“What do you need?” I asked, already standing up.

“Fast carbs. Juice first. Whatever you have after that is fine.” Shasha looked at his sister in concern. “Thought you had alerts set up so that you would know if you needed to deal with it before it got this low.”

“I might’ve turned them off.” She shrugged. “They’re loud and obnoxious.”

Shasha shook his head, murder in his eyes.

I headed out of the room to the vending machine and got an apple juice out of it before taking it back.

When I twisted the top off and handed it to her, she grimaced. “Hate apple juice.”

“Only juice in the vending machine,” I apologized before heading back out for the candy bar.

There was this vicious thing inside of my chest that was telling me that I needed to fix her, and fast. I didn’t like the idea of her sick in any way, and I was too up in my own feelings to diagnose why I felt that way.

After inserting five bucks, I got her a Snickers and a package of Muddie Buddies and came back to her.

Her eyes rounded and she reached for the Muddie Buddies, which were my favorite as well.

John groaned under his breath as he said, “You were hoping that she wouldn’t want those and you could eat them, weren’t you?”

I shrugged.

I might or might not have felt that way.

But I tried to force myself not to eat them.

The only reason they were there was because the boss liked to carry our favorite snacks, even if he refused to just give them to us. There was only so far his niceness would extend.

“They’re my favorite, too,” Nastya said. “I’m surprised to see these in a vending machine.”

“They’re there because the big boss wants to keep his detectives happy. He does make us pay for them, though,” John admitted.

Only after she’d finished half of the juice and half of the powdered sugary peanut butter Chex Mix-covered goodness did she gesture for me to keep going.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now, we ask you not to leave town, and let us do a little more investigating,” John answered for the both of us.

“If you have need of her answering any more questions, please call me first,” Elianora ordered.

Doubtful.

But we’d see.

“Yes, ma’am,” I lied.

The three of them left without another word, and I was left standing there, looking at the half-eaten bag of Muddie Buddies she’d left at the table where I’d just been sitting. She did grab the Snickers bar, though.

“What do you think?” John asked.

“I think she didn’t do it,” I said.

“Same.”

“Gentlemen.”

We both looked up to find the big boss, also known as Sergeant Daniels, in the doorway.

“Yes?”

“My office,” he ordered.