Dead By Sundown

Chapter Thirteen: Pancakes

Chapter Thirteen

  The city lights winked at her through the open curtains, taunting her, casting shadows over the room that danced along her skin as she watched. She thought of each light, each life out there, and wondered how long it had been since the moon and her shared a silent moment such as this.

  Mikey shifted in his sleep next to her, the sheets rustling as he moved. His grip around her waist tightened for a moment before it softened enough for her to carefully slip through his grasp and make her way closer to the city that lay beyond. Nadia smiled softly to herself as she took in his sleeping form, his soft hair just begging to be pushed away from his gentle face.

  The familiarity of him surrounded her, his clothes, his warmth, his scent.

It hurt being so close to him yet feeling so far away. She felt like an intruder in his life. Someone not welcome to the peace that he had finally created for himself.

Once upon a time, she would have reveled to be in his arms, but with the threat of Ivan drawing nearer each day, his arms no longer felt like the safest place in the world. It didn't seem fair to drag him back into her never-ending shit.

Pulling one of his t-shirts over her shoulders, Nadia lifted herself carefully onto the windowsill overlooking the streets below, lighting a cigarette as she went.

Drag after drag, she ended up hating her self deeper with each moment she spent near him. It was a mistake, coming back to him when she could have gone back to Victor. Now, he would be caught in the inevitable war that loomed over her and followed her with every step she took.

She was selfish, and she knew it, but Nadia couldn't help coming back to him. She shouldn't have driven herself here, she shouldn't have bought wine and Chinese food like old times, she shouldn't have stayed. It was only ever intended as a thank you, but one look into his eyes and she felt like an eighteen-year-old again.

So she stayed, ate the Chinese food, drank the wine and, eventually, found her way back into that damned bed, Michael by her side.

Somehow it felt like her only escape from Ivan, running to her past to avoid her past. Michael was the one point from her past that she didn't wish to erase. Yet there she was risking it all for a taste of nostalgia.

A few days had passed since Nadia had discovered the mafia boss on his bedroom floor, and over that time a kind of civility had settled between them.

She still didn't trust them. The feeling was certainly mutual, however, they had settled on a plan of action. A stupid plan of action, which Nadia pointed out on several separate occasions over the hour-long meeting held about the matter at hand, but it really didn't matter to Lorenzo and she really didn't get a choice in the matter.

He wanted her to go back to her old haunts, to show her face around the city again, leave big and obvious clues for Ivan to follow and track her until he came out of hiding long enough for them to attack.

It was idiotic. It was immature and filled with issues. The main one being that Ivan wasn't stupid. Chances were he already knew exactly where she was and he was simply biding his time before striking.

Even if he didn't know where she was, leaving big and obvious clues of her whereabouts would clearly alert Ivan to the trap they were trying to create. But no matter how Nadia tried to explain this to Lorenzo, he was having none of it.

She knew why. He wanted to make it obvious. He wanted Ivan to know that he had her, that Nadia belonged to the Italians, that she was no longer Ivans property.