The Bratva’s Locked Up Love by Jagger Cole

22

Quinn

One Month Later:

I standin front of the mirror and breathe in. I close my eyes, count to twenty, and then slowly exhale before I open my eyes. I swallow.

I look nice. Dark navy-blue slacks, a crisp white blouse, and a matching navy blazer, complete with black flats and a simple silver necklace. My makeup is light, mostly just enough to cover the bags under my eyes, and my hair is pulled back efficiently.

My lips twist and a frown shadows my face. I look like a high school vice principle.

But this is all planned, and very purposeful. My therapist has suggested that dressing even more professionally—the pants suit instead of my usual black jeans and boots—will make “work” seem more work-like.

She doesn’t say “and less like a place of trauma where you saw people killed in front of your eyes, and where you were held prisoner.” But, her job is to help me move past all that, not replay it. In our sessions, I let her think she’s doing a fantastic job on that front. But back in the solitude of my apartment, it’s the opposite.

I frown as my face falls. A month after the “security failures,” as the reports call it, at Yellow Creek, I’m not “fine.” I’m not “past” anything. But it’s not because I’m traumatized, like Tom, my father, and my therapist think I am.

It’s that I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to let go of what I had for a short period of time. I don’t want to erase the memories involving Maksim from my heart.

I eyes shut tight, and I wince. It’s been a month of silence and darkness for me. My father’s forbidden me from even coming to the farm during the cleanup and construction following the jail break. It’s supposed to be from a place of concern, since I was “kidnapped” and “held hostage by a dangerous criminal during a brutal prison riot.”

But I know my father better than he thinks I do. I know it’s mostly that he’s not sure if he can trust me not to lose my shit—and not because he’s concerned for my mental stability. He’s concerned about me fucking things up and slowing down the timeline if I have a breakdown on-site.

In two days though, it’s going to be sink or swim. That’s my first day back, after a month away from work. I’m anxious. I’m sleepless, and a whirlwind inside. But it isn’t because I’m worried about having a breakdown. It’s that I’m worried for Maksim.

Terrified, actually.

Since the day they dragged me away from him, I haven’t had a single clue as to what’s happened to him. And no one has told me shit, either.

I do know that the day the assault team breached the offices was the day they retook Yellow Creek. Close to seventy-five percent of the inmate holdings were compromised in the initial failure. So, about three hundred terrorists, mass-murderers, would-be-Unabombers, Neo Nazis, and other maniacs running rampant.

Aside from the ones that were killed, all inmates were secured that day. The system was overhauled and shored-up. New security measures were put in place. And apparently there’s been crews down there ever since, patching up bullet holes and generally erasing the signs of a war zone.

But I have no idea what’s happened to Maksim. Is he back in a cell? Back in the hole? Is he… I close my eyes.

Is he dead?

I shudder, wrapping my arms around myself. He can’t be. Or he could be. I want to tell myself something sappy and absurd like “I’d know if he was.” But I’m a doctor, not a character in a fictional love story. I’m not magic. He could be, and I’d never know…

I wince, gritting my teeth to stop the tears. I turn from the mirror and change out of the “professional” outfit I’ve planned for my first day. Then I slip back into the outfit I’ve been wearing for the last month: sweatpants and a baggie hoodie. Then I slump back on my couch, curl under the blanket, and blankly scroll the Netflix menu.

This has been my month. I’ve been a fucking recluse. I’ve even shut myself away from June. As if on cue, my phone buzzes. I glance at it and see my friend’s name pop up. But I silence it and go back to my Netflix screen. I’ll binge The Office. Again.

But my eyes drop to the tan file folder sitting on my coffee table. It’s the official report of “the incident at Yellow Creek.” A courier dropped it off this morning, sliding it under the door when I mumbled for them to.

I’ve read it twice now, growing even angrier the second time.

It says I was kidnapped as a human shield. It says I was imprisoned and abused. When the mandatory medical exam following my “rescue” found light bruises in the same shape and size as Maksim’s fingers on my thighs and hips, the conversation shifted to “did he sexually assault you?”

I cringe under my blankets, scowling at the report. I denied that he assaulted me, obviously. But then more “trauma specialists” would come in with even gentler voices and softer, more sympathetic looks to tell me it was “safe to open up about my ordeal.” That I’d “done nothing wrong,” and “wasn’t to blame.”

My lips thin as the memory replays. It was infuriating, and humiliating, to have to sit there and tell them over and over and over that they were wrong about the nature of my bruising. But no one wanted to hear that I’d gotten them willingly. No one would believe me in the slightest when I tried to tell them how Maksim actually saved me.

They called it “traumatic historical re-imagination.” Which is a nice clinical way of saying “you’re fucked up and you’re making things pretty in your head so you don’t have to be hurt anymore.”

It’s valid, and I’ve seen plenty of victims of assault and trauma who do that. But that isn’t me. That wasn’t my experience. They just don’t want to believe me.

My father came to see me once in the hospital. Once. Tom came four times in the week I was there. I asked him a hundred times to corroborate my story of Maksim saving him. But he’d just give me sad, frowning looks. He’d tell me I’d “been through a lot” and leave it at that.

I glare at the characters on the TV. Next to me, my phone buzzes again. Yet again, it’s June. I feel bad ignoring it, like I’ve felt awful ignoring her all month aside from very brief texts. But I can’t. I’m just not ready to look her in the eye and lie about all of this worse than I did before.

She calls again. I silence it. She calls again, and I do the same thing. But this time, she keeps calling. My mouth twists. Her record so far is four times in a row. We’re up to five, and then six. Then ten.

I swallow as I reach for the phone and finally answer it.

“Hey—”

“What the fuck, girl?!”

I wince. “June, I’m sorry…”

“Look, I know you’re in a rough spot after that break-in at your job, but it’s me!” she pleads.

I groan. The lies are already there. The only tidbits of what happened that June knows—or has been told—is that there was a violent break in at the mansion of my employer, while I was there alone. She’s been told that the robbers tied me up while they ransacked the house, and it took a full day for the authorities to find me.

“June, I know, I just—”

“Drastic measures, Quinn,” she says firmly. She’s got that “no bullshit” tone she gets. I frown.

“Uh, okay…”

“You’ve forced my hand!” I can hear the sound of wind whistling through the phone on her end.

I stiffen. “June, what are you—”

The hard knock on the window behind me has me almost screaming as lurch from the couch. I whirl, and my mouth falls open. I drop the phone and rush to the window to yank it open. A crazed-looking June with a hard look in her eyes and a white-knuckle grip on my fifth-floor fire escape comes tumbling inside.

“Are you insane?!” I blurt, staring at her as she gets to her feet in my living room and dusts her hands off. She slips her phone into her pocket and puts her fists on her hips.

“Yes! I am! Because my best friend in the world has gone through some serious shit and I’ve been dying not being able to be there for her!”

I shake my head, hugging myself. “How did you even get up here?” The fire escape isn’t accessible from the bottom without a ladder and a key.

“Your creepy upstairs neighbor, Ken.”

My mouth falls open. “Seriously?”

“Yes, Quinn,” she snaps. “Seriously! That is how worried about you I’ve gotten! I went to your super creepy upstairs neighbor’s door, I endured that creepy-ass way he licks his lips while he stares at your tits, and I spent five fucking minutes letting him tell me all about his new Cross-Fit routine and how it’s made his ‘fuck game’—that’s a direct fucking quote, by the fucking way—‘even better.’”

She’s red in the face and glaring at me, her mouth pursed tight.

“I did all of that, so he would let me crawl out his window, probably while staring at my ass, so I could conquer my fear of heights to scramble down here to your goddamn window with the hope that you would actually let me in!!”

When her tirade is over, I can’t help it. I grin. So does she, even if she looks furious.

“Well?!”

“I mean, I let you in.”

She smiles, rolling her eyes as she looks away. Then she glances back at me. “Quinn, talk to me. I know you went through a horrible thing, but you have to let me help you!”

I look at my hands, twisting in front of me. “June—”

“No, Quinn, we need to meet this head on. You were all alone, you were tied up, and I’m sure it was fucking terrifying! I can’t even imagine—”

“I wasn’t tied up,” I blurt.

She frowns. “Well, you were terrified—wait, what do you mean you weren’t tied up? I thought they found you a day later—”

“I wasn’t terrified, either,” I murmur.

“Quinn, it’s okay to admit it. Your experience traumatized and terrified you. It was a twenty-four-hour nightmare—”

Yeah, I’m done lying.

“It was a twenty-four-hour paradise escape!” I finally let rush out of me. “It was twenty-four-hours of the hottest, wildest sex ever—”

Her face pales. “Oh, God, honey…”

I groan and roll my eyes. “No! Not…” I sigh. “I wasn’t mugged. I wasn’t tied up. There was only one guy, and he wasn’t a scary threat, he was my protector.”

June stares at me. “I’m… confused?”

I blow air through my lips and look at the floor.

“So, I…. kinda need to tell you something…”

“You know I’m always—”

“Yeah, telling you this one breaks probably ten different anti-espionage and national security laws though.”

June is silent. When I look up, she’s grinning at me eagerly.

“Well, now you have my attention.”

Twenty minutes later,when I’m done, we’re sitting on the couch in silence. June blinks, slowly shaking her head.

“Holy shit.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean holy shit!”

“Yeah, I know,” I groan.

“I mean, you have to break him out, or something!”

I arch a brow. “Break him out?”

“Yes!”

“Of a maximum-security prison?”

She bites her lip. “Well, we can work on the details…”

I smile sadly and reach over to squeeze her hand. She squeezes mine back.

“What I need to do is get back to work, and see if he’s even still—”

“Of course he’s still alive,” she snaps. “You’d know if he wasn’t.”

I smile wryly. “I don’t think that’s a thing, girl.”

“Of course it is.”

“Of course it’s a thing that humans can just ‘know’ through telepathic means when someone they lo—”

I catch myself. But not before June’s ears perk up.

“Whoa, whoa. What?”

I shake my head and look away.

“No, you were about to say the L word.”

“Like.”

She snorts. “Yeah, sure. Well, crap. This makes things even more complicated.”

“One day at a time,” I say quietly, mimicking my therapist.

“First of all, Doctor,” she mutters. “Get out of your own smart head for one second and admit that you know I’m right. If you love this guy, you would know if he… you know.”

I smile thinly and shrug. “Look, can we move on to something else?”

Her hand squeezes mine again. “Yes.”

“How’s your life?”

“Uh, far less interesting than yours?”

I laugh. “What about the demo?”

“Going in next week!”

I smile, but it’s forced. “Excited?”

“Yeah. And nervous.”

“Oh please, you know it’s going to be amazing.” I wink. “Any headway with Jason?”

June makes a loud buzzer alarm noise and gives me a thumbs down. “No, because he’s way too hot and talented.”

I roll my eyes. “Stop it.”

She shrugs. “It is what it is.” She grins and looks up at me. “Hey, you know what we should do?”

“Huh.”

“Remember my grandparents’ cabin up at Ten Acre Pond?”

“Yeah?”

I haven’t actually been there in almost twelve years, but June and I used to go up there with her dad a lot during the summer. It was magical, too. But after her grandparent’s died, there was an issue with their will, mostly concerning their estranged daughter, June’s bat-shit crazy aunt Lorrie. Last time I heard, the cabin was tied up in Lorrie’s endless legal injunctions and motions.

“Lorrie tapped out.”

My mouth falls open. “What?!”

“Yep. Her husband finally got tired of bankrolling her bullshit legal claims, so she’s out.”

“That’s amazing!” I crow. “Wow, so it’s your dad’s now?”

She grins. “Technically yes, but he’s got his whole life out in California now. So…” she winks. “Guess who gets the keys?”

I shriek. “Seriously?!”

“Yep! Bet you wish you hadn’t blocked me out for the last month, huh?”

I give her a look, but she just laughs and comes across the couch to hug me.

“Just joking, you can come. What about this weekend?”

I frown. “I dunno, I’m just getting back to work…”

“All the more reason. Take it easy. Go for a few days, then we can take a few days up there. Plus, I could use the help cleaning it up. I don’t think anyone but mice have been in there for like eight years.”

“I knew there was a catch.”

She snickers.

“Will I get to watch you write songs up there?”

“Maybe?”

“Deal.”

She grins, eying me. “Alright, now I want to hear more about this Max character.

“Maksim,” I correct.

“Yeah, all I heard was ‘tattoos and built like a linebacker’, so, let’s go from there.”

She grins as I blush.