Russian Boss’s Secret Baby by Bella King
Ch 35
MIA
Slate and Luke are going to blow up a building for me.
They’re going to kill people for me.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who would do this to keep me safe. I’ve never felt safe in the world, especially not since I became a woman in it. I’ve lived completely on my guard for what feels like multiple lifetimes over, constantly conscious of how my makeup or clothes or expression will project towards the onlooking men.
Now that I have Slate, I don’t think I’ll ever have to feel that way again.
Every once in a while, I can feel the baby moving inside of me. Sometimes it freaks me out, I won’t lie. Most of my time is spent preparing for the baby, mentally and otherwise. Slate is so helpful when he can be, of course, but there’s something about being pregnant that just makes me uneasy all the time, and it isn’t just the morning sickness.
It feels like my body has been invaded. In a way it has, I guess, but there’s this semi-permanent life force living there that is only going to get more and more alive and strong as time goes on. They will only get bigger and harder to ignore.
Childbirth absolutely terrifies me to my core. The fact that women have been doing it for millennia is no consolation. They have also died doing it for millennia.
Slate and Luke are deploying the men into the abandoned apartment building today. They’re setting up remote control explosives that can be activated with a cell phone. I’m not entirely sure how it all works, but they both sounded pretty confident about it.
Should I feel guilty? Maybe.
I think any sane person would agree that my ambivalence toward the deaths of multiple people for my sake might seem a little sociopathic. Sometimes I feel like I’ve aged ten years since I met Slate at the nightclub, like I was so naïve and immature back then. It’s only been a few months and I feel like a completely different person.
Slate’s money has bought practically unlimited healthcare for my father, which is absolutely invaluable to me. Some people would say that I’m putting my own interests above others, but who doesn’t?
Whenever I think about the building going down, of the inevitable collateral damage of human lives, I start to feel extremely guilty, almost remorseful. Am I upset for the loss of Katya’s life? Of course not. It’s the rest of them that I’ll mourn for.
I try to keep things in perspective through this whole thing, despite being strictly loyal to Slate and his Family. Katya may be crazy and evil and stupid, but the rest of her people, her soldiers, are people just like Luke or Michael.
Perhaps they were offered a better life, or an escape from poverty. That’s how I got here. How can I blame them for taking it?
Slate and Luke have been preparing all day, ensuring that everybody involved is exactly where they need to be. All the materials need to be accounted for, and Katya’s exact location needs to be known to everybody involved as closely as possible.
Luke has been trailing her nonstop for a week now, and I trust that he knows what he’s doing. Still, the potential for unexpected fatalities is ever-present.
They’ve decided to send five men into the building to set up the homemade bombs that they’d been working on. There are concrete pillars on the tenth floor of the apartment complex where they plan on planting the explosives. That way, the blast will bring the whole structure down at once.
I’ve never known anything about bombs, I hardly passed chemistry in high school. The fact that these perfectly unknown men in an organized crime family know how to create something that will bring down a skyscraper in a matter of minutes, maybe seconds, is incredible to me.
I told Slate that I wanted to be there, to be Involved, but he insists that I stay as far away from everything as possible. While I appreciate that he wants to take care of me and keep me safe, sometimes I feel like he doesn’t think I can handle the kinds of work he does despite the fact that he has killed two people in front of me.
Two people isn’t a building full of addicts and criminals, but it’s more than any other girlfriends he’s had, I’m sure.
It’s 9:00 PM, and Slate has ordered the five men to infiltrate the building and begin working. It’s early enough in the night that the cops aren’t casing the streets for drunks, but it’s also dark enough that the other junkies and crackheads in the lower levels of the building won’t realize that the men look unfamiliar. That, or they’ll be too fucked up to care.
Three of the men are already on their way, carefully handling the explosives and moving through the city like the most law-abiding citizens on the planet. That’s Slate’s first rule of operations: be completely unassuming. That’s why he doesn’t show off his money or rev the engine of his car when he goes out on his own. Showing off attracts attention from all sides, and he knows he doesn’t need that.
The other two men are following behind to spread out the influx of people into the building. Arriving in uneven numbers gives them more credibility in case one of Katya’s men sees them and demands an explanation.
Or they can just shoot him in the face.
Luke says that Katya is going out to a bigger nightclub during the night, which is when the men will be planting the bombs. She typically returns from her lavish and bombastic outings at around four in the morning, which gives them plenty of time to assess any issues.
At least I know what time they’re going to kill her.
The thought of her fully recovered, enjoying herself every single night with the money of a man who died for her, is infuriating to me. She almost killed me and my baby. At the very suggestion of empathy for her, I force myself to remember what she was so willing to take from me just to send a message to her ex-boyfriend.
