Page 27 of Keeping My Enemies Closer: Pt. 2

“What if it’s a seventeen-year-old hoodlum who’s about to kill you?”she asked, ready to call me out on a lie.

“Then we better be savvy enough to outsmart him or run,” I answered.“There are no exceptions, Zoya.If it ever got back to my father that any of us harmed a minor, then we’d be dealt with by Aleksei Korolev himself.”

After a few moments of silence, she asked, “Will you tell me why you killed those women?”

“Zoya, do you really want this kind of stuff inside your head?”I asked pointedly.“Once it gets inside your mind, it’s hard to get out.It’s also information that you don’t need to know, and if you’re not careful, you might find yourself in a place that’s a lot darker than you can handle.”

“Then why did you drag me into your world?”she rushed out, confused, angry, and a bit hurt.“Why am I here?What am I doing here if you don’t think that I can handle it?”

God, I wantedallof her fire back.

“You’re here because it’s possible to have you and also keep you safe from what my family is,” I answered smoothly.

After a few seconds she said, “Like your father does your mother.”

I gave her a terse nod.“Like my father does my mother.”

“Is that why I haven’t met her yet?”she asked.

Instead of answering her right away, I pushed off from the counter, then grabbed a chair to sit down across from her.“You haven’t met my mother because, while I love her dearly, she’s a non-factor in our day-to-day lives, Zoya.She enjoys living her life in ignorant bliss, and since we all like to see her happy, we leave her to live her life as she sees fit.”

“And is that the way that you’re expecting me to live my life?”

Yes.

“Is that not what you want?”I countered, instead of answering her truthfully.

“No, it’s not,” she replied quite seriously.“I don’t want pieces of a relationship.I don’t want half of a partner or husband.I don’t want my children to be involved in this whole other life that I’m ignorant of.I don’t want a fairytale with incomplete chapters.”

“Zoya, you’re not in a fairytale,” I reminded her.“If anything, you’re in a living nightmare, baby.”

Ignoring that, she asked, “Why did you kill those women?”

After a few seconds of silence, I finally answered her.“I’ve only killed five women in my life.Two were strung out, and it was a situation of either them or me.One was caught in some crossfire when she refused to run and hide, wanting to stand by her man when he opened fire in objection to paying us what he owed us.”

Zoya processed that for a second before asking, “And the other two?”

With all my heart, I didn’t want to tell her.I didn’t want evil touching her, despite how many times I’d already put my hands on her.When I had started this thing between us, I’d wanted to keep her safe from all the darkness that surrounded me, but I could see how that wasn’t going to be a possibility anymore.Zoya wasn’t the same person that I’d taken home with me from the auction.She was no longer as innocent as I’d wanted to keep her.

“We got wind that one of the women who worked Korolev territory had begun selling her young daughter for a bigger payday,” I finally told her.“I’d been at one of our clubs when a server had approached me to tell me that she’d spotted a girl about eleven-years-old in the back, and when I went to see what was going on, the mother had been bargaining with a john on prices.”

“Oh, God...”she mouthed, horror clouding her beautiful eyes.

“I ended up taking both of them to one of our warehouses, and I made her watch as I tortured the man to death, then I put a bullet in her head afterwards,” I told her honestly.

“What...what happened to the little girl?”

“She was sent to live with her father’s parents,” I answered.“The last that I heard, she’s doing well and continues therapy to this day.”

“And...and the fifth woman?”

“Again, I was at one of our clubs, and I stepped out into the alley to talk some business privately,” I replied.“Me and one of our shestyorkas heard a noise, and when we went to go see what it was, there was a homeless woman behind some crates in the back parking lot, and she was shooting heroine into a boy’s arm, and he looked no older than nine.I had the shestyorka take the kid to the nearest ER, and as soon as they were gone, I put a bullet in the woman’s head.”

“So, they all deserved it,” she muttered, more to herself than anything.

“While a lot of people would argue that something like that should be left up to God, I did what I did, and I don’t regret it,” I said truthfully.“However, I’m not a fan of killing women, even if I feel it justified.Just know that I will kill a woman and still be able to sleep at night, Zoya.Do not try to give me a conscience that I do not have.”

“And...and Marcelle?”she asked, finally getting to the reason why she was asking me these questions.“Would you kill her or torture her for me?”