Page 65 of Brooklyn Bratva

“I’m heading out. You two be good.”

I ambled over to the fridge as the front door slammed closed and peered inside.

My nose wrinkled and I let out a sigh. “Ivan, you have absolutely nothing edible in your fridge. Let’s get dressed, we need to go to the store.”

Becca

Across the other side of the street, outside the pharmacy, Mrs. K was talking to a stocky man who was maybe a few years older than me. I had a grocery bag in one arm, and Ivan had gone to find us some decent coffee. I was meant to be meet him back on the boardwalk.

But the man with Mama looked pissed, and he kept gesticulating. My anger rose at the way he was trying to shove her about. I couldn’t just walk on and pretend like I hadn’t seen anything.

He had a pharmacy bag, and I guessed it was her pills inside it. I hadn’t thought about her as an easy target before, but it hadn’t occurred to me what would happen if someone figured out she had so many morphine-based drugs and my stomach clenched.

Without a thought for my own safety, I hefted the grocery bag higher onto my hip and stormed across the street.

Maybe she could be moody sometimes, but she was Ivan’s mother, and she was a nice person. I was just about done with people thinking they could shove anybody around just because of a difference in size. I wasn’t about to stand back and watch her get robbed by some junkie.

What was this place coming to when a guy like him thought he could boss about a little old lady like Mama?

“Excuse me? Hi. What do you think you’re doing?”

Mama saw me first, and her eyes widened. To my surprise she didn’t look relieved to see me. She raised her hands, shooing me away.

“No no. Is fine. You go. Is all fine.”

“It is not fine!” I rounded on the guy, scowling at him. He wasn’t so tall, but up close I could see I might have made a mistake coming over the way I had. He had a hardness to him that I recognized from Ivan and Maxim, but there was also something much colder about him. “Look, I don’t know who you are – or who you think you are, but that’s not yours.”

“Listen, lady. You don’t understand what’s going on here. Mama here was just picking up some things for me.”

I narrowed my eyes. The guy was trying to convince me he knew Mrs K well enough for her to have him call her that.

“I don’t think so. She’s not your Mama, and those are not yours!”

I made a grab for the bag, and he yanked it back. The paper tore, spilling out not the pill bottles I was expecting, but a stash of wadded bills.

My jaw went slack.

Mama let out a wail, one hand rising up to cover her face even as she ducked down to the ground to shove the money back into the bag. The man rocked back on his heels and started laughing.

I liked him less and less by the minute.

“Mama, what’s going on?” I felt my gut turn over. What had I interrupted? “Are you paying him?”

The man scoffed. “Lady, you’ve got this the wrong way around. Hasn’t she, Mama. You just take what’s yours and carry on doing your job, huh?”

I bristled, stepping in between him and Mrs K. “You back off, you hear me? I’m going to call her son, and then you’ll be in trouble.”

“Becca – no!”

The man’s eyes snapped to me with a sudden viciousness that took me by surprise.

“I wouldn’t call your boyfriend. That’s not a good idea.”

“What?”

“You call Detective Kovalenko, I report your sweet little ass for processing fraudulent prescriptions. Bye bye medical career. Such a shame.”

I swear to God my heart stopped beating. I felt the color leave my cheeks entirely as I looked back over my shoulder at Mama. “What?”

She was staring, shamefaced, at the ground, and I didn’t need any more confirmation to know the man was telling the truth.

“Aw, you didn’t know? Couldn’t guess? You think anyone’s going to believe you when they see just how many pills we’re talking about?”

He was right. It had to look like I’d been a willing part of it. I wasn’t some dumb kid, I was about to start training to be a doctor. I should have trusted my gut that something wasn’t right, but I’d been too busy worrying about how ill she was, and whether Ivan really knew. I’d been the idiot who’d taken all those prescriptions into the clinic for her, to get them filled. I hadn’t even thought to question whether they were legitimate or not, even given the quantity of pills. Katja had trusted me. The whole clinic could be implicated.

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