Page 103 of Bound to a Monster

I feel the same way about Carmie.

I tell him about the trip, about Simon and Olivier, about my solution for the problem and about the honeymoon afterward. As I talk, I realize how it happened. How I fell in love with Carmie a while back, maybe on that very first night, and struggled to learn how to deal with it.

The monster inside of me has always been a dealbreaker. I’ve never let myself get close to anyone, mostly because I’m afraid of what might happen if they ever get to see the real me.

Except it didn’t scare Carmie. If anything, she kind of likes the darkness. Maybe just the watered-down, safe version, but still. She doesn’t look at me like I’m a terror.

It feels fucking incredible.

“Months in Canada,” Alex muses as he tries on one of our latest Rolexes. “That’s going to be a pain in the ass.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“What’s there to do in Canada?”

“Same shit down here, only more problems.”

“And Carmie’s going with you?”

“That’s what she says.”

He grunts and nods to himself. “You got a good one.”

“I know I do.”

We make more small talk. I don’t want to get to why I’m really here. All I want is to sit around with my friend and pretend like shit’s the way it’s always been, like Stepan’s going to walk in through the door any second now and everything will be okay. But my brother’s dead, my father’s dead, and Natalya and I are all that’s left.

“Listen, I need to talk to you about something.” I lean back in my chair. Alex looks up from where he’s polishing a bracelet. “It’s about the store.”

“It’ll be fine without you. Might be better, honestly.”

I throw an empty box at him and he slaps it aside. “You’re making this hard.”

“Making what hard?”

“I want you to be co-owner of this place with me.”

His eyebrows raise. When my dad died, control of Fed passed into my hands, and Fed is basically the centerpiece of the Federov power. Making him co-owner is like sharing the entire criminal organization with him.

“That’s big,” he says at last.

“You deserve it. No, listen, you know you do. You’ve been holding this family together for a lot longer than I like to admit, and you should formally be in charge.”

“How’s that going to work?”

“You’ll get a forty percent stake to my sixty. That makes you minority owner.”

“And your second-in-command?”

“If you’ll accept it, that’s the idea.”

He tilts his head to the side, cracking his neck. “Is there a pay raise?”

I bark a laugh at him. “If you can earn more, you can keep more, you greedy prick.”

“Just making sure.” He grins at me. “It’s a lot of responsibility, but I accept.”

“I figured you would, you fucking bastard.”

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