The Virgin's Bargain by Michelle Love

Author:Michelle Love
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eliza Duke

8

Sergei

“It’s the mother. I’m certain of it.” I’ll have to tell Catherine as soon as she wakes up. I pace across my bedroom excitedly, talking into my phone. “Morty’s mother was one of the people who tried to sue, was she not?”

“Yes,” Xenia replies in her cool voice. “She has also been in and out of mental hospitals for the last fifteen years.” I hear keys clicking. “Delusional disorder. She believes that Morty’s spirit possesses her part time.”

“All right, listen.” My heart is pounding. The more time I spend with Catherine, the more devoted I find myself to her protection. I still don’t know how I will acquaint her to the reality of who I am and what I do, but I must try.

And if there is one thing that should make her take the news more favorably, it will be stopping her stalker once and for all.

“Mikhail has already placed another six men under my supervision to go with my dozen. All are to be given photographs and information about the mother and her delusions. She is the new target. She may be dressed like Morty, as she is in the third photograph.”

The woman has gone all out in her effort to look like her “possessing” son. Her hair has been clipped short like his and dyed that same dark-walnut brown. She wears a man’s overlarge fedora and trench coat that I quickly match to the ones in Marty’s picture, and in every picture, her face is blank of any expression.

“I will distribute the materials,” Xenia promises. “Good catch, Sergei.”

“And yourself.” I hang up the call, smiling—just as Boris bursts in out of breath with a look of anger and panic on his broad face.

“Sergei—it’s your girl! She snuck out of her room. We caught her slipping out the door on the security cameras, but the storm’s obscuring visibility outside and we lost her.” He starts in on an apology, but I am already racing out past him, heading for the stairs down to the first floor. I should be angry—furious that she has broken her promise to stay with me and outraged that she would be so cavalier about her own safety. Instead, I am afraid. Both that Morty will find her before I do and that she knows all and will never forgive me my secrets.

Catherine. I’m so sorry. There is so much I have not told her. My life. My family.

The harrowing journey to the States so that my mother could get proper care after my father’s death. My debt to Mikhail for getting us here, and how I ended up paying it off by bloodying my hands.

How all I want is something clean in my life—a wife, a family, and something to come home to which is untainted by my bloody work. How the adoration in her eyes leaves me hopeful, for the first time in my life, that it might be possible.

I race into the storm coatless, pistol hidden against my side, determined to find Catherine before Morty’s deranged mother does.

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