Page 38 of Sexting the Pakhan

Her eyes go wide, and for the first time since I’ve known her, she looks at me with real fear.

Good, I tell myself. That’s safer for her.

But when she presses herself against the door and looks away from me, I don’t like it at all.

6

ZOYA

Mafia.

The word sits in my head like something heavy and poisonous.

Not mafia like movies. Not mafia like dramatic book covers and dangerous men who look beautiful under bad lighting. Real mafia. Guns in my library. People screaming. Ruslan’s hand around mine as he dragged me through the staff corridor while bullets hit the walls behind us.

I stare at him from the other side of the car.

He sits beside me like we weren’t getting shot at just half an hour ago.

His coat is open. One sleeve is torn near the cuff. There’s a thin line of blood across his knuckles that I don’t think belongs to him, and he keeps looking out the window, then at his phone, then at the side mirror, as if the city itself is full of things I’m too stupid to notice.

Maybe it is. Maybe I’ve been stupid for months.

My quiet library crush is not quiet. He’s not harmless. He’s not some mysterious rich man with strange reading habits and a nice voice.

He runs the Karelin organization.

I don’t know exactly what that means, but I know enough. I know it means guns. Men. Power. Blood. The kind of danger that doesn’t stop because you say you’re sorry or because you had nothing to do with it.

My stomach turns. “This is bad,” I whisper.

Ruslan looks at me.

I didn’t mean to say it out loud.

His face gives me nothing. “Yes.”

I almost laugh, but it comes out wrong, thin and shaky. “That’s it? Just yes?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that it’s not as bad as it sounds.”

“It is.”

My eyes burn. I look away because I refuse to cry in front of him. I refuse. Crying feels too intimate, and right now I don’t want to give him anything else.

We leave the city behind. The buildings thin. The traffic opens. Storefronts become gas stations, then warehouses, then long stretches of road bordered by dark trees and water I can’t fully see yet. I press my hands together in my lap to hide how badly they’re shaking.

My phone is in my cardigan pocket.

I’d forgotten.

I literally don’t have anything else on me. Not my bag, not my keys, not the lunch container I washed this morning and left in the break room fridge like an idiot. But my phone is here because Karina kept texting me during my shift about whether “Thursday Hot Man” had appeared, and I slipped it into my pocket instead of leaving it at the desk.

Thank God.

Or maybe not. Maybe texting someone is stupid. Maybe he’ll take it. Maybe there are rules in this car I don’t know about.