Page 61 of Walking Red Flag

I moved to the side so I could see better, and saw Shasha Semyonov on my porch, drinking his own cup of coffee—this one from a travel mug.

I walked out the sliding glass door and took a seat in my chair beside him.

“Did she sleep okay?” he asked the moment I sat down.

“Other than the creepy comments throughout the night, she slept fine,” I admitted, unsure what I was supposed to do with Milena’s brother on my porch.

“I had my ear to the ground last night,” he continued.

I waited, not sure that I would like to hear what he was about to say.

“One, I have a lot of eyes on me after Nastya went through a murder investigation years ago,” he said. “It’s been lurking under the surface for a long time, meaning, if I kill that motherfucker the moment he gets out of prison—which apparently is supposed to happen soon—I’ll have every goddamn law enforcement agent in the city coming down on my head.”

“Okay…” I waited for him to add more, and he did moments later.

“I want you to kill him for me.”

My brows rose.

“What makes you think I wasn’t already going to do that?” I asked.

“Because you have a lot to lose,” he said. “I want to give you an incentive.”

I waited, not sure I liked where this was going.

“I want you to marry my sister.”

I blinked, not sure I’d heard him correctly.

“Hear me out.” He held up a hand. “First, I want you to know that we could have an alliance. Or, more accurately, myself and your club.”

I didn’t respond.

“I know that you do some illegal shit,” he began. “I’ve left you alone in this city because your shit doesn’t affect my shit. But I think that we could be better together.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that if you need help getting your product out of this city, I’m your man. What’s mine is yours. As long as you marry my sister, and you keep her safe,” he elaborated. “I saw the way you looked at her.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I had looked at her in a way that didn’t need to be explained.

I wasn’t sure, though, that I wanted to start a relationship with this woman on the wrong note. I felt what we had could easily be something that could last a lifetime, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that…

“He’s going to kill her the moment he’s out,” Shasha snapped. “I’ve been trying to get her to allow me to have a guard move in with her for years, and she keeps refusing. She wants to seem independent. I don’t know. But the guards that I keep outside her place have intercepted three hits that were taken out on her.”

I blinked, turning my head slowly to stare at him.

“The latest hit was her own ex-boyfriend,” he fumed. “Asher accepted the hit in exchange for someone paying off all his student loans. That night you got her off his bike, he was going to push her off into traffic. He’d set it all up.”

My stomach clenched.

“I need you to be there on the inside. Until I can get to the bottom of this, until Lyle Pennington is nothing but a speck of dust on this Earth, she’ll never be safe,” he insisted.

I swallowed hard. “And how, exactly, are we going to make this happen?”

His lips curled. “Leave it to me.”

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