The Bratva’s Locked Up Love by Jagger Cole

7

Quinn

In the semi-darknessof the small club, the final notes of the electric guitar hum and hang in the air like morning mist. The solo woman on stage bows her head slowly, bathed in blue light. Her long red hair—almost the same color as her big electric guitar—drapes down in tangles and waves.

Her fingers strum the final chord once more, and I know every single person in the place feels it pull at their hearts like the taillights of a loved one leaving. The chord hangs in the air for a full seven seconds of utter pin-drop silence. Until suddenly, the whole place erupts in applause.

I launch to my feet at the little cafe table, clapping wildly. Goddamn, she’s good. She’s so good it almost hurts to see her play in tiny little, off-beat clubs like this. I mean we’re in Nashville. A chick as talented as June Hendrix should be playing the Ryman. Or on a world freaking tour.

But on a more selfish note, it’s so cool to see this much talent bottled onto a tiny little stage like the one in The Line, my favorite watering hole named after a Johnny Cash lyric.

When the applause dies down—there’s only thirty of us crammed in here—June flashes a final smile and a quick bow. It’s so funny to watch her transition like this. On stage, she’s an ephemeral rockstar. A femme-fatale poet savant, with a voice and guitar chops that would make Jeff Buckley’s jaw drop.

Then the lights come on, and shy, blushing, quirky, dorky June—my best friend in the world since we were five. I grin as I watch her awkwardly thank a gushing couple from the audience. She leans in for a very forced looking selfie, thanks them again, and then catches my eye.

She blows air through her lips, puffing her cheeks. She holds up a finger and turns to gently place Ruby, her most prized possession in the world, into its guitar case. She closes the hard-shell lid, locks it, and hefts it up before turning to maneuver through the small round tables to mine.

“Rock. Fucking. Star!”

She rolls her eyes as she gets to me. I wrap my arms around her, laughing as I hug her tight.

“That was amazing, eff-why-eye. That new song?! Are you shitting me?!”

She blushes and rolls her eyes. But I can see the glimmer of pride in her face anyways. My friend might be a huge, awkward dork off stage. But she’s not an idiot. She knows she’s good—like, really, really good. Even if she downplays it.

“Thanks. It still needs a little work though. I’m trying to tune it up before I record next month.”

June is a great example that the universe is not a fair place. She’s crazy talented, beautiful, kind, and works her ass off. But Nashville is a tough place. And June is in the endless grind of “write a great song, play it as much as you can for the handful of people who might listen to it, record a demo, and spend the next year literally begging record executives to listen to four seconds of it. Rinse, repeat.”

June’s my age, and she’s been at this since she was fifteen. She’s not famous yet, but I make a point of always framing that with “yet.” She’s too fucking good and way too driven to not get there eventually.

“Well, I think it’s fucking perfect. Holy shit, lady.”

She grins. “Thanks, Doogie.”

I roll my eyes. It’s her favorite nickname for me. Doogie, as in Doogie Howser, the teenage physician played by Neil Patrick Harris in the early nineties TV show. Hey, it’s infinitely better than the one million “Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman” jokes I’ve gotten over the years.

“Here, for you.”

I pass her a whiskey on the rocks.

“Oooo, thank—” she frowns. “Oh c’mon, am I really drinking alone again?”

I make a face. “Sorry, I’m on call.” But God do I wish I was drinking. It might help the jangling of my nerves and the thumping pulse that won’t quit, even four days after.

Four days after “the incident;” i.e., Maksim kissing me like a wild animal claiming his mate, in the middle of a cage.

I shiver heatedly at the memory.

“Lame. How are you on call? You don’t even work for a hospital.”

I shrug. “Sorry.”

She sighs. “It’s fine. I’m used to it. Tis the life of a successful doctor’s wife, I suppose,” she says wistfully with a grin.

I laugh at her dramatics, and at our inside joke about her being my wife.

“And how is Mr. Moneybags?”

I hide the cringe. Quinn and I tell each other everything; always, since we were five. Everything, that is, aside from what my actual job is these days. And I would tell her, if not for the frankly terrifying non-discloser agreements and CIA-vetted security clearances attached to me because of this job.

I want to tell her. But I can’t. Like, major, major consequences can’t. I always feel a twist of regret when I have to lie to her about my job. June, like everyone in my life, thinks I work as a private family doctor to an incredibly wealthy tycoon of some kind. The CIA gave me a fake person to tell people I work for—with a verifiable background and everything. But that felt like too much lying to me. So I just say he’s private and that I’ve signed non-disclosers. Which is true, technically.

“Oh, fine. Hypochondriac as always. Wait, so when do you go into the studio again?” I say, artfully steering us away from my job. June only half buys it.

“Someday, Doogie, I’m going to get you drunk enough to get you to spill about this mysterious job of yours.”

I swallow a gulp of my club soda with lime. “Yeah, well, someday. Tell me about this demo session.”

She shrugs. “It’s going to be good. I mean I have to go in at two in the morning because it’s the only time slot I could afford at the studio. But I did manage to convince that crazy-good violin chick we saw play at The Blue Note last month to lay down some tracks for way cheap.”

“Awesome!”

She beams as she takes a sip of her whiskey.

“Wait…” she’s being curiously quiet about another talent she was trying to book for the session. An extremely hot, long-haired, tatted up guitar player she was practically drooling over at a show a few weeks ago.

“Hmm?” she says quickly with a blush.

Oh yeah. Confirmed. My jaw drops.

“Did you seriously book hottie-mc-hot-face?”

She blushes deeply, biting her lip to hold back the grin. “First of all, his name is Jason.”

“Don’t care. And second?”

She grins. “I booked him.”

My face lights up. “June, that’s fucking amazing!”

“I know!” She giggles. “He’s so fucking hot.”

I roll my eyes. “Yeah, and good, more importantly.”

She quickly knocks back the rest of her drink. “Girl, tell me about it. Good and super, super successful. He’s like the talk of this town right now. Everyone wants him. I have no idea how I managed to convince him to play on the demo.”

“Because you’re extremely talented? Game recognizes game?”

She rolls her eyes. “Quinn, he’s like really good.”

“Yeah, and so are you.”

She smiles. “You’re the best. I just mean he’s the kind of good playing places that matter in this town.”

“Hey! Don’t you diss on The Line like that.”

It’s not like either of us are big drinkers or partiers. But we’ve been coming to The Line since we were twelve to see music, when they’d have all-ages shows here. June and I used to devour music like some teenagers devour celebrity gossip magazines and junior high drama.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons we stayed friends through those tumultuous teen years: both of us were weird in our own ways. I was graduating high school at twelve and entering college—at Vanderbilt here in Nashville, my dad’s insistence. And June was too busy learning every single Stevie Ray Vaughn guitar solo to give a single shit about boys or anything else.

The two years I was at Duke for medical school sucked since we weren’t together. But then she was awesome enough to come to Boston with me—me for my surgical residency at Mass General, her to attend Berklee College of Music.

Oh, and that joke about June being my “wife?” It’s a coping mechanism. Because at twenty-two, both of us are pretty much life-long single ladies. And not in the fun way. In the “destined for a house full of cats and Gilmore Girls reruns” kind of way.

June has at least dated a little bit. But me? Yeah, right. It’s not even just that I’ve been so incredibly busy with life since I was a kid. It’s the fact that I’ve never really been on the same page as my “peers.”

I mean I was twelve when I started college. No one is inviting a twelve-year-old to frat parties. Or at least, no one who shouldn’t be jailed.

I was fourteen when I left home for the first time, to go enter one of the most coveted medical schools in the country. The rest of my entering classmates were twenty-three. They unwound after a hard day of exams with happy hour. I couldn’t technically go see an R-rated movie.

And then when I got to Boston for my residency… well, no one has time for dating during their residency. No one has time to shower or eat or sleep during their residency. And besides that, I was the oddity. The spectacle. The girl they’d seen in news interviews next to pictures of Doogie fucking Howser. The barely legal curiosity.

Believe me, the men who tried to pick me up at that point in my life weren’t doing it because I was a brilliant surgeon…

The June being my “doctor’s wife” quip stemmed from her roommate in Boston finally getting tired of hearing us gripe about our lack of dating lives and telling us to “just get married to each other already.”

Honestly, in a couple more years, if it’s between her and a house-full of cats, I’m picking June. Neither of us are batting for the home team, but at least the music will be good.

“You’re in dreamland, what’s up?”

I startle, blinking to turn back to her.

“Nothing, I was just daydreaming about our married life.”

She snickers. “You know I can’t cook, right?”

“I’ll never be around.”

“That’s cool. Our sex life would be garbage anyway.”

I laugh. She’s right on so many levels. For one, we’re both straight. For two, neither of us would have a fucking clue what we’re doing in bed anyway with our lack of dating experience—straight or not.

But that thought suddenly moves from joke to something else. My thoughts slide back to Yellow Creek—specially, to one man, locked in a cage in the hole.

Maksim.

I tremble as I replay what happened for the millionth time. First in the medical cell, with his hands on me, and his rasping voice sending electrical surges from my ears directly to my core. Then, when he pulled me into him and kissed me like we were the last two people on earth.

I blush. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that kiss for days now—every single night since his lips touched mine. It wasn’t my first kiss—I’m not that pathetic. But it was the first kiss that ever made my toes curl, and my insides ignite. It was the first kiss to leave me braindead afterwards.

“Hello? Earth to Doogie?”

I blink again. This time, when I focus on her, I’m blushing hard. And she spots it, like a shark scenting blood in the water.

“Tell me.”

I blush even deeper. “Tell you what?”

“His name, for one.”

I grin and roll my eyes. But it doesn’t shake her off.

“Quinn, out with it.”

“There’s nothing—”

“You’re all blushy and moony. And unless you’re suddenly sentimentally attached to Love Will Tear Us Apart…” she nods her chin up at the speakers in the ceiling of The Line, now playing INXS.

“Um, hello? Michael Hutchence was a babe and a half.”

June rolls her eyes. “Preacher, meet choir. A total babe. But not enough to suddenly make you go all ‘lost in fantasy’ on me. Plus, you were like this before this song came on.”

I look down and suddenly feel the urge to start slowly gulping down seltzer with lime.

“You’re ridiculous, you know that?” She laughs. “Like I don’t know your tricks at this point?”

“June—”

“Who is he? I mean you have no social life.”

I frown. “Uh, hello? I’m here?”

“I mean no social life aside from me, which I adore, by the way,” she grins. “So who is it? Someone in your building?” Her face twists. “Eww, it’s not creepy Ken from the apartment above you, is it?”

I make a puke face. June laughs.

“Oooo, or at work?” She gasps dramatically. “Oh my God, are you going to run off with Mister Moneybags?! Isn’t he married?”

I roll my eyes. “As if my life would ever be that exciting. No, weirdo. There’s no guy. Not anywhere.”

She grins. “Well, I’m going to go get one more of these…” she rattles the ice in her glass. “And you’re going to have one too—”

“Can’t.”

She blows air out of her lips, sending a tendril of red floating ceiling-ward for a second. “By which I mean a simply delicious seltzer water with lemon.”

“Lime.”

She rolls her eyes. “Fine. But then I’m gluing you to that seat until you spill—”

My phone buzzes. With a frown, I pull it off the table and flip it over. I groan. Shit. It’s Yellow Creek. And at this hour, that just means there’s been some gruesome incident that I’m going to have to stitch up. Great.

“Work?”

I nod glumly. “Yep.”

“What’d Moneybags do, break his hip?”

I grin. “Who knows.”

“Oooo, orrrr…” She grins salaciously. “Is it a booty-call—”

“Yeah, that’s my cue to go.”

June laughs and stands with me. “Hey, do you. We both need a good dicking down.”

A greasy looking guy behind her swivels so fast his beer splashes on his jeans.

“Keep turning, creep,” she mutters. The guy shrugs and turns back. I laugh as I hug her tightly.

“You were fucking awesome tonight.”

“Thanks, chicka.”

“You okay to get home?”

She grins. It’s yet another dumb inside joke with us, since both of our apartments are roughly a hundred feet from The Line, albeit in different directions.

“Think I’ll manage. Say hi to Moneybags for me.”

I blow her a kiss and walk outside to call Yellow Creek back. The operator asks me to code in before I’m switched to a direct line to the main office.

“Yeah?”

“This is Doctor Coolidge. What’s the problem?”

The guy in the office sighs. “Same shit, different day, doc. Hope you didn’t have plans tonight.”

“What—”

“Better get here fast, doc. That Russian guy you patched up the other day just managed to get himself cut up again.”

Shit.

My heart drops as I hang up and bolt to my car.