Destruction - The Oasis Project Book 2 (Complete)

Forty-Three - Ira

"Robin, what is your name?" Yulian asked slowly, his accent thick.

"It's Stuart," he answered calmly, despite me thinking that it was the strangest question I'd heard in a while. Stuart looked at him in the rear-view mirror while taking us down an orange dirt road. "Either is fine though."

"Why Robin?" I finally asked the question I'd been dying to ask.

"Stuart against the Oasis Project would've been too obvious." It took a brief glance in my direction for him to figure out that it wasn't what I meant. He looked back at the road and smiled shyly. "It's my middle name, which nobody knows. Until now. Happy?"

"Very." I couldn't help but admire his side profile. The fact that Robin was his middle name just made him... cuter. I blinked at my own thoughts, cringing inwardly.

"Ira, what's that smile for?" Yulian asked me from the backseat. "What happened to Irina?"

I turned around to face Yulian, my smile turning into a mischievous grin which I hoped would hide the heat creeping up my cheeks. Laughing, I tried to jab Yulian's arm, but he was sitting too far away. "Shut up."

"Ira's in-"

"I can't tell if you two want to kill each other or are plotting to kill me," Stuart said coolly with raised eyebrows. He turned up the air conditioning and sighed.

"Sorry," I switched back to English. "You don't want to know."

"I don't?" Stuart's tone changed a bit and I couldn't quite place it. I was just glad that he didn't ask for a translation. He paused to steer the car onto another dirt road that looked exactly the same. "Yulian?"

"Yes, Stuart?" He looked at me and grinned, obviously thinking that Stuart was going to ask him to get to the bottom of our conversation.

"How..." It took Stuart a moment to find the right question. "How do you two know each other?"

"We are friends... from Oasis Russia." I heard the faint disappointment in his voice, but he answered the question dutifully. "You know about..." He trailed off when Stuart frowned.

"No, I thought you knew each other before that? And Ira was in China?"

I folded my arms across my chest and pressed my back into the seat, turning to the window and closing my eyes. This story was still too shocking, to raw, to think about, and I didn't want to be a part of it at all. I half-listened to Yulian struggling to explain how we were friends and how we got separated for so long, and I felt bad that I didn't help him once.

"Pretty much," I said at the end of it, not wanting to prolong the topic.

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Yulian fell asleep within five minutes of buckling up on the private jet. It did occur to me to question how we could afford to travel like this, but knowing Beiya's criminal past, I figured it had something to do with that.

'Oi," I said, snapping my fingers in his direction as we took off. Yulian's head rolled one way when the plane turned but that wasn't enough to wake him up.

"He's got earplugs in," Stuart pointed out.

"He's supposed to have great hearing," I said sarcastically. After a while, I admitted, "Fine. The last few days or however long haven't been very nice. I'll leave him alone."

Stuart was quiet as usual, looking a little annoyed after a long phone call earlier that made him take notes. As soon as we were cruising, he pulled out a laptop and started typing intensely. I left him alone too and stared out the window at the strange Australian landscape.