Page 22 of Lies He Told Me (Bratva Crime Syndicate 1)

But there’s something else.

“Explain,” I order.

He does as I say, jogging over to tug a screen down the wall, wheeling out a projector from a hidden closet. I keep rapping my knuckles on the table as he opens his laptop and clicks around, humming under his breath.

“Today, Rudy,” I growl. What little patience I have is wearing thin.

“Here we go, boss,” he says, finally starting up a snappy orange and black PowerPoint presentation crammed with complicated color-coded animations of tables and numbers.

Compared to that garbage, what he says is as simple as it comes. “Focus groups indicate voters aren’t hearing what you’re saying because they don’t trust you. You aren’t sympathetic enough. Too cold. Too remote.”

He clicks on to slide after slide of Walsh’s ugly mug about town—setting up a stray dog sanctuary, giving a fat but apparently poor boy a fucking hot dog, on and on—while I wonder what exactly I’m paying Rudy two grand an hour for.

“Jesus fucking Christ, do we not have any footage of him saving an old lady’s cat from a tree?” I snarl sarcastically.

Rudy’s voice is contrite, resigned, grudgingly admiring. “Walsh is playing the game better. To date, he’s organized fourteen fundraisers, raised $243,000 to fight AIDS in Gambia, attended several local cultural festivals, and helped cut the ribbons at openings of a few local businesses. He’s everywhere. He’s lovable.”

I slap my hand on the table. Ludmil raises an eyebrow while he pops a Toblerone in his mouth.

Something about Rudy’s style of talking, going round and round the point like a mosquito, always pisses me the hell off. Not that getting an eyeful and earful of Walsh acting like a fucking Boy Scout is helping. “Get to the point.”

He tries to smile, fails. “Point is: you need to become more likable in the public’s eyes.”

“And…? What do you want me to do? Get a puppy?”

“That wouldn’t be bad.” Rudy rubs at his red-brown nape thoughtfully, but he’s already shaking his head. “But not enough, I’m afraid. It’s your overall image that’s hurting you: a loner, a playboy, aloof.”

I eye him carefully. “I’m assuming you have a solution.”

Enough of this. I want to hear the whole point of this conversation—what Rudy calls his ‘action step.’ That’s his trademark. That’s what I pay him for.

Rudy swallows, clicks on to the next slide. It’s Richard Walsh with his arm around his remarkably plain splat of a spouse, the one who, word has it, has her own country-style mansion surrounded by barbed wire on their Miami Beach property.

“You need a wife.”

A wife.

I mouth the words to myself, as if that might change them.

A wife.

No. Does nothing to quell the twist of distaste in me.

No, I do not need a wife. A leech, a hanger-on. A distraction, a nuisance.

I’ve seen wives—demanding, prissy, ungrateful bitches tugging at the strings of their whipping boys like it’s a fun game they’ll lose either way. And I’ve seen husbands—browbeaten, resentful, exhausted husks of the men they used to be. Yes, I’ve seen all-too-well the ‘merits’ of marriage.

I want none of it.

Maybe Ludmil and his wife actually seem happy—for now—but I’ve never been one to judge the rule by its exception.

“Out of the question,” I tell Rudy. “I ought to fire you just for suggesting it.”

I give him a look that asks, in no uncertain terms,This is what you called me away from my weekly briefing for?

“Hear me out.” He’s clicking through slides furiously like he knows how close I am to walking out that door. “We wouldn’t even have to go looking for one. I brainstormed some ideas myself.” He stops at a picture that looks vaguely familiar. “Now, there’s a fair share of sexy Instagram models up for grabs, but that seems a bit obvious, and I’ve looked into them, and frankly a good number of them are mentally unhinged—you know, borderline, bipolar, bulimic. I think one Serbian girl was even holding onto some assault rifles for the Balkan crime syndicate, but I digress. What I’m saying is, if we’re going to do this, I’d prefer we go all out. Now, obviously, a Kardashian would be a handful—but face it, the amount of free publicity—”

Ludmil howls with laughter, so hard that he chokes on the Toblerone he was eating. Half choking, he clears his throat, then laughs and laughs and laughs some more.

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