The Lion in Russia Read online

  “Dude, you really are a throwback. Nobody thinks like that anymore,” she said.

  “I do.”

  Vries sighed. “So this is a relationship.” Despite herself she felt a bit of relief at that notion. Totally crazy really, because there was a good chance one or both of them would be dead before the week was out. Still it felt good to know where she stood with him.

  “What did you think it was?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “For one thing, I thought you were pissed at me because I didn’t tell you I was hired to protect you. And you think I’m a whore.”

  “I am pissed with you about that, but apparently not angry enough to keep you out of my life, or my bed. I’ve never thought you were a whore. If I did, you wouldn’t be in my bed.”

  Vries rolled her eyes, but decided to set his obstinacy aside for the moment.

  “You know what I’d really like?”

  “Another blini?”

  “Hmmm, maybe after…” she said with a smile.

  He grinned as he leaned over her for a kiss. “Long after.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Time seemed to telescope and suddenly it was time for the trial. There had been no more attempts on Leo’s life, but then for the most part they’d stayed at his home. Vries wasn’t sure if he chose to stay at home as a security measure or because he preferred to, but she didn’t really care, especially since they spent most of their time in bed. Each night she clung to him as tightly as she could wishing away the upcoming trial. But now the day was here. They’d flown down two days before on Leo’s private jet, taking up residency at another one of his homes. This one was a spacious apartment as when in Russia, St. Petersburg was the center of his operations. Moscow was a satellite office. Pushka was with them as were two other security guards, but Vries knew that Leo placed the onus of his security on her. The trial had started earlier in the week, but Leo was expected to testify for two days. As Vries sat in the courtroom listening to the questioning, she was surprised at how banal it all seemed. Her Russian had improved greatly and she probably understood every third word or so. Enough to follow the proceedings such as they were. Given the subject matter and the typical Russian temperament, she’d expected a lot more fireworks. There were no dramatics as the attorneys presented their arguments with as much passion as they would reading a phone book, perhaps even less.

  Leo had spent the past two days in the witness box while she sat in the gallery. He wasn’t that far away, but she was still uncomfortable with the distance between them. Fortunately her discomfort helped her maintain her vigilance through the impossibly dry proceedings. Several of the jurors had to be prodded awake. Even with her limited grasp of the Russian language she realized almost immediately that the guilt of the Russian official being tried was a foregone conclusion. It was only as the trial continued that she finally understood why it had been allowed to go forth in the first place; it was obvious that either the man had run afoul of Putilin in some fashion and was being thrown to the wolves, or he was being used as a distraction. The protests against Putilin were growing larger and larger each week. The obvious rigging of the latest election had left the Russian people angry. Tired of the continued corruption, they were finally in the mood to “throw the bums out,” or the equivalent Russian expression.

  Finally it was over, but Vries knew she wouldn’t be able to relax until they were safely ensconced back in Milan. She and Leo were arm and arm leaving the administrative building where the trial had taken place. Though Moscow was at least as cold as St. Petersburg, she was wearing her puffer coat instead of the furs he’d so generously bought her. It wasn’t totally impossible that a paparazzo might be lurking about the capital and she really didn’t want any grief from PETA. Leo was wearing a heavy coat as well, but was hatless, she turned to comment on this fact and the reflection off a telescopic lens from atop one of the surrounding buildings flashed in her peripheral vision. The presence of a sniper registered in the blink of an eye, and one of the other guards must have spotted it at the same time, because he yelled “Pistolet,” the Russian word for gun.

  Suddenly Pushka was there and he grabbed Leo’s arm and all but threw him toward the car. As Leo had a death grip on Vries’s forearm she was dragged along too. There was no guarantee that Leo was the gunman’s intended target, but she had no intention of taking a chance. The building where the trial had been held was part of a complex forming a large square the size of a city block. The discharge of the bullet echoed through the square, followed rapidly by others. Then there was silence.

  Leo was in the car and Vries was following, thankful that he’d been missed when suddenly it felt as though she’d been punched in the chest—by a refrigerator—forcing the air out of her lungs in a violent whoosh! In that moment everything went from double time to slow motion. As though from outside of herself she watched Leo pull her into the car and cover her with his body on the floor of the car. She could hear him yelling in Russian and even smell the acrid scent from the tires as Pushka burned rubber getting away. She wanted to tell Leo to move. She couldn’t breathe and it would be awful to survive the gunshot only to be smothered by her big behemoth of a boyfriend. Boyfriend? Where had that come from? Vries tried to ponder the inappropriateness of that title, but her mind wouldn’t hold a thought long enough to do so.

  Breathing became more and more of a struggle. She tried to look down at herself, but all she could see was the side of Leo’s ash blonde head and hear him alternately swearing at Pushka and crooning endearments to her in Russian. He was absolutely frantic. She wanted to tell him to calm down, everything was going to be okay, but forming words was impossible when she couldn’t even draw a breath. Besides her tongue felt thick in her mouth, making speech impossible. Despite the breathing and speaking difficulties, she wasn’t frightened until her eyesight started to fade. It began with tiny black spots, then the edges of her vision grayed, the tunnel of sight growing smaller and smaller until finally everything faded to black. Her last conscious thought was it was a shame she was going to die without ever telling Leo she loved him.

  ***

  As Vries came to, she immediately knew she was in a hospital. Where else could she be? The hum of the machinery. Antiseptic smell and soft voices gave it away even though the room looked more like the suite in a luxury hotel. The walls were painted a warm golden hue and there was a small sofa as well as a lounge chair and desk. Of course, her mechanical bed she was propped up on was a dead giveaway as well. Her gown wasn’t standard issue, either, it was made of a soft jersey knit, and she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think it was the backless variety she was accustomed to. Still cataloguing events she recalled being shot, and knew it was a chest wound. Her only question was where the hell was she? Terrified at the thought of being trapped wounded and helpless in a Russian hospital, she looked around the room.

  She knew better than to try to sit up, the pain from even the slightest movement threatened to cause her to black out again, and really she didn’t want that. There were people talking in the hallway outside her room and she strained to hear them. Desperately hoping to hear Italian, she was almost as relived to realize the people were speaking German. Vries closed her eyes and almost drifted back to sleep, but her eyes sprang open on another question. Where was Leo? Surely he hadn’t stayed behind in Moscow? There was no one else in the room with her, and she tried to reach for the button to ring for a nurse but fell asleep again before she could follow through.

  Leo finished up the last of his phone calls in the business office of the medical facility where Vries was staying. He probably would have been more comfortable back at the hotel he checked into upon their arrival, but hadn’t slept in since. Leaving Vries was out of the question. Each time he closed his eyes, he could see the way her body jerked in the air when the bullet struck her and then the blood pouring out in a hellish stream. There was so much of it he thought she’d bleed out before h
e could get her to the plane and out of the country. Lying there on the floor pressing his shirt against her wound he’d found himself whispering the words he’d hesitated to say before. He knew his love would frighten her. Make her run. But now he didn’t give a damn and he’d follow her to the edges of hell if need be.

  This past week had been hellish on a scale he hadn’t experienced since he was a boy watching his mother die. Vries was very good at what she did, but he was no good at watching her do it. He was, however, good at negotiation as this week’s machinations had proven. Now if he could come up with a way to talk her out of this line of work.

  When Vries awakened again she quickly realized she wasn’t alone. Remembering the pain from her previous attempt, she turned her head slowly, this time expecting to see Leo; instead she looked directly into Deringer’s sherry brown gaze.

  Though she tried to shout her voice came out as barely a whisper. “What are you doing here? Where is Leo?”

  “Don’t try to talk, they just took that tube out. Your Big Russian is around here somewhere.”

  “Were you there when—” to her horror, tears suddenly started flowing from her eyes.

  “When you got shot?”

  She nodded and Deringer handed her some tissue from the table next to her bed. She wiped her eyes as quickly as she could, embarrassed to show weakness over her injury when she knew Deringer had been shot several times.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. A sucking chest wound and a collapsed lung will take it out of the best of us,” he said softly as he leaned forward to give her a soft kiss. Just then Leo came through the door of her room. The expression on his face when he spotted Deringer was enough to make her regret having regained consciousness.

  “What are you doing here?” he barked at Deringer.

  “Why does everyone keep asking me that? It’s enough to make a guy feel unwanted,” Deringer said.

  “You are unwanted. Leave.”

  “Hey, I have the right to visit my friend—’’ Leo’s punch lifted Deringer off his feet and he crashed to the floor before he could finish his sentence. To his credit, he sprang to his feet with the agility of a top-notch gymnast.

  Vries rose to sitting position. This could get deadly very quickly. Fear gave her back her voice and she yelled at Leo. “Stop. You don’t understand. He’s—” but Deringer cut her off with a quick shake of his head.

  “That’s a helluva punch you’ve got there. I’ve got a wedding to attend back stateside. My best friend is getting married,” he said.

  Vries knew her eyes had widened with shock. “Someone’s marrying Nate?”

  “Yeah. Hard to believe, huh?” he said with a grin. “Anyways, I guess I’ll be off.” He walked over to the bed and gave Vries another kiss, a longer one this time, an obvious effort to taunt Leo. The area around his right eye was already reddened and she feared he’d have a huge shiner within a day. He returned Leo’s snarled response with a defiant sneer of his own. “You take care of her,” he said softly. Then he sauntered out of the room.

  Vries stared at Leo. “I can’t believe you hit him.”

  “He deserved that. The way I’m feeling right now, he’s fortunate I did not beat him to death. How are you feeling? Should I call the nurse?”

  Vries decided to save her energy for more pressing matters. “Talking really hurts.”

  “Yeah, that’s from the tube. They had it in to help you breathe.”

  “Can you tell me what’s going on? Why am I in Germany? We are in Germany, aren’t we?”

  “Getting you back to Milan proved impossible, and staying in Russia was out of the question. We were still in the air; I was trying to get permission to fly you to Paris when I got a phone call from a stranger who told me to bring you here. I assumed it was your people. So I did.”

  Lelia nodded. So this must be one of the secret medical facilities the Department kept. That would explain Deringer’s presence. Presumably he’d arranged for her to be brought here. She shivered, being obliged to the Department for anything was never a good plan, but she was hardly in any shape to argue. She’d told them no before and she could certainly do it again.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “A week.”

  “Good Lord. I had no idea. You’ve been here all this time?”

  “Of course. You are here. Where else would I be?”

  Vries yawned as the tiredness that plagued her began pulling her back into somnolence once again. Try though she might, she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

  The last thing she heard was the comforting rumble of Leo’s voice. “Sleep, my little Vrieshka.” Before he’d finished the short sentence she was sound asleep.

  ***

  “I can’t believe they’re finally letting me go home. I’ve never been so desperate to leave a place in my life,” Vries said.

  “Ten days is not a long time considering. Chest wounds are a serious matter and you were lucky that yours didn’t do any greater damage.”

  “I know that and I swear I’ll thank God and kneel to kiss the earth when that plane lands in Milan.”

  “You will do no such thing. The doctor was clear that you are to take it easy. You don’t want to aggravate the wound.”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.”

  “Not yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Vries, I’ve never been so terrified in my life as I was when I saw all that blood. I thought you were dead, and all I could do was curse and pray. You will do as the doctors say or I will tie you to the bed myself.”

  Vries’s first instinct was to bristle at his arrogance, but one of the last things she remembered after being shot was the anguish on his face as he desperately whispered love words to her. She didn’t want to do anything to put that expression on his face again. “If I promise to be good will you tie me down anyway?”

  He leaned down to give her a brief kiss on the lips and pulled her close into a gentle hug. “Thank you,” he said, and she knew he understood how hard it was for her to give in on anything.

  “I just want to go home,” she said looking up at him. An emotion passed over his face too quickly for her to determine what it was, but she was pretty sure it was grief. Of course, she must still be under the influence of those stupid drugs so she missed it. St. Petersburg. His beloved Pitr. “Home. I’m so sorry you can’t go to yours, I know you miss it.”

  “Home is wherever you are, Vrieshka.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Three Months Later

  Vries passed Leo her e-reader so he could see an article about the continued unrest in Russia because of the fraudulent elections. She watched as he read the article, then cuddled up against his side in the large bed. It had become a regular habit for them now that they were back in Milan to spend any morning they had free cuddling in bed reading together. “You think they were inspired by the Arab Spring?”

  “It’s possible, but I think it’s more about Putilin himself. I think he’s overreached himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The man is pathologically greedy. No matter how much he’s given, he must have more. He was always the power in the country, no matter who was president, but he had to steal an election to get the title back,” Leo said with a sigh. “I’ve spent most of the last few months embroiled in the toughest negotiation I’ve ever had.

  Vries frowned, puzzled by the subject change. “Really? Are you buying a new company?” He’d had no trouble moving his base of operations to Milan. He complained about the taxes, of course, but that made him no different than everyone else. “No, I was negotiating the repatriation of my money to Russia in order to end the attempts on my life.”

  “What? Lyova, what are you talking about?” How had she missed that? But she knew. Her convalescence had taken considerably longer than she had expected. She’d spent nearly a month in bed on antibiotics and was only now resuming her normal schedule. Clearly Leo had taken advantage of her incapacitation to hide this from her. No mean feat considering she’d moved in when th
ey returned and hadn’t left. They spoke Russian almost exclusively at home and she had become quite fluent.

  “In exchange for all the companies I still own in my country, the president is willing to let bygones be bygones, as you say. As long as I stay out of the country, of course.”

  “Oh my God, they took all your money? But you earned that.”

  “No, I told you, I had already liquidated many of my companies and that money is safe. I gave him essentially double what the companies were worth when I took ownership of them, and kept the rest of the profit,” he said. “The few companies I had left are still valuable, but not as valuable as the ones I sold.

  She looked down at the football jersey she wore. “I’m so sorry you lost your team.”

  “Oh no. No. I’m still the owner of Zenit. Under no circumstances was I willing to give it to Vlad.”

  “Well, as long as you have your priorities in order,” she said, her words dripping with sarcasm.

  “But that’s just it, malyshka, my priorities are in order, but his are not. Here I was handing him billions of dollars, which is what he claims he wants, but negotiations were hung up on ownership of the team. He was willing to lose billions for a team that’s probably worth less than a hundred million.”

  Vries studied his face closely. Something in the tightness around his eyes and mouth told their own tale. Leo was angry. Very angry. Not about losing his money. No, he seemed fairly philosophical about that. Not even about being exiled. He was hurt about it, but understood the logic behind it. No, something more was bothering him.

  “You’re going back, aren’t you?”

  He caressed the slightly raised scar that bisected her chest. It and a slight wheeze to her breathing in really cold weather were the only traces of her near death experience.

  “This is why I will return. He almost took the most precious thing in the world to me, and for this, he will pay.”

  “But he wasn’t aiming for me—” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter. He will pay.”