meant most of them still had Russian accents and spoke in Russian when it suited them.
“Thanks, Katya,” I leaned my head against the wall.
“Your mother called and said there was an incident with the stove,” Katya continued. “So, we send you new stove! Our men will be delivering it today.” Katya’s voice was lyrical and excited. I wanted to cry. I settled for beating my head against the wall. My forehead was going to become bruised at this rate.
“Thank you, Katya,” I banged my head against the wall in time with the syllables of the words coming from my mouth. “The stove will be a great gift. Thank Natasha and Mikhail for me.”
“I will!” Katya paused for a moment, “we send black one, is that okay?”
“Black is fine,” I answered.
“I hear your fiancé has very blue eyes, very pretty to look at.”
“Yes, Katya, he does have very blue eyes and they are very pretty to look at. They are an ice blue most of the time,” I hung up. Ivan stopped me banging my head, which I had forgot I was doing.
“The first wedding gift?” Ivan asked.
“A new stove,” I answered. “For some reason, I don’t care much about being stabbed. I wish he had done a better job.”
“That’s how I felt too. It gets better. Zeke’s a good guy. He’ll make you happy. Unless you aren’t sexually attracted to him, then you guys are going to have to make some sort of arrangements.” Ivan frowned.
“I’m still trying to figure out how to walk down the aisle. Can we not talk about sex? Why did she pick Valentine’s Day? Isn’t that tacky?”
“Yes, but she knew you would remember your anniversary if it was also a holiday and New Year’s has passed.”
I frowned. Ivan was right. I would remember it.
The Arrival
If there was any justice in the world, the mob would attack my house within the hour. Unfortunately, I had never had that kind of luck. They only attacked when I didn’t want them to, never when it would have been helpful.
My mother was in her Sunday finest, despite it being Friday evening. This meant a skirt suit worth more than my couch and hooker shoes. I had no idea why she was obsessed with stiletto heels, considering she was in her sixties, but she never seemed to be without a pair. The only purpose I could find for them was stabbing people if I needed a make-shift weapon.
Her long nails were painted a bright purple with wavy lines in a lighter purple. I didn’t have a name for either shade of purple. Nor did I understand how the wavy lines got put on. Once, when I had been ten, my mother had taken me to get a manicure. She’d picked yellow for the color, and it had lasted until we got home. As soon as I got in the door, I had found the finger nail polish remover and scrubbed it off. It had already started chipping anyway. She had given up on making me a girly girl after that. She didn’t seem to understand that with four brothers, two older and two younger, it was hard to be a girly girl and not get picked on.
Zeke was on his way to get his mother from the airport. Alex and Sebastian were forced to join us for this first meet and greet, since I needed body guards and Daniels’ Security Agency was running low. I couldn’t keep up with business even when I wasn’t in need of a personal guard. I made a mental note to hire more staff. There was no doubt that I would forget it within the hour.
“So, what do you know about Telisa?” Melina asked me.
“Not a thing. Until yesterday, I wouldn’t have even been able to tell you if he had a mother,” I hiccupped. I was still a little hungover. My dogs were sleeping it off. I envied them.
“Nadine,” my mother used that tone when saying my name. “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone has a mother.”
“Alex doesn’t,” I pointed out.
“Yes she does,” my mother gave me a look that would have stopped me dead if a mother’s stares worked that way. While Alex did technically have a mother, she had never met her. Her mother had run-off after giving birth. Her father had gone back to Russia. My parents had raised her after that. All Alex and I knew about her mother was that she had been Russian born and married to my mother’s brother, Boris. “That was very insensitive of you,” my mother leaned in to whisper, but as usual, my mother’s whispers could be heard in outer space. If NASA had really wanted to find life on other planets, they could just give my mother a megaphone and tell her to shout at the stars. Of course, this would probably lead to an invasion, because my mother had a habit of being offensive without meaning to be.
“Are you going deaf?” I asked her. “When you whisper, people in the next house over can hear you.”
“I absolutely am not losing my hearing, Nadine Daniels.” My mother huffed at me. “And I will thank you to keep your offensive remarks to yourself. Never would I have talked to my mother in such a way.” This was probably true. My family was like most Russian families, the women were in charge. While society as a whole was patriarchal, there was this mythology built around females that kept them from being second class citizens. In some ways, they had far more power, skills and good old fashioned determination, than any Russian male could ever hope to achieve. The difference between my family and other Russian families was that my family seemed to have a double-dose of female willpower. If one wanted proof, they need look no further than my great-aunt Olga.
“So, what are the bridesmaids wearing?” Alex asked. I gave her my own version of my mother’s deadly glare. My mother instantly became personable again. It was hard to trust someone who had mood swings and wore hooker heels. In the years since my father’s death, my mother had changed, a lot. During my youth, I would never have seen her in such high heels, she wore more sensible shoes. She dressed nicely, but conservatively. Sometimes I wondered if she was advertising the fact that she was single, or if this was the real her and she had just stifled it while married.
“With Kenzie being in the wedding, we will need something soft,” my mother started talking.
“Who said Kenzie’s in the wedding?” I asked. She would be, if I got married, but that was for me to decide, not my mother.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother scoffed at me. Obviously, I was wrong and had no say in the matter. “As I was saying, with Kenzie we will need soft colors, her fair skin will look terrible in yellow or a dark green. I am considering a light blue, to match Zeke’s eyes, accented with an even lighter pink.” I suddenly realized how Katya knew Zeke had blue eyes. Maybe Zeke was my mom’s idea of good looking and marrying me off to him removed the temptation that she was feeling. It sounded twisted, but twisted summed up my family.
Despite the fact that they were planning my wedding, I felt like I was twelve. I was totally unnecessary even though the arrangements being made impacted my life the most. My forehead hurt from hitting the wall earlier, or I would have banged it a few more times.
“Nadine, why didn’t you shower this morning? You have dirty spots on your forehead,” my mother stood up, rushed to the kitchen and grabbed a paper towel. Before I could stop her, she was scrubbing my forehead. I was sure this was just making the bruise worse.
The sound of a car stopped the forehead scrubbing. I checked the clock. Zeke had been gone two hours. That was plenty of time to pick up his mother and get back here. Nervousness set in. I struggled to hold down my lunch and gave the room one last look for any small drop of whiskey that might have been left. At this point, it could have been one of the dogs’ bottles, and I wouldn’t have cared.
It suddenly sounded as if someone started throwing giant firecrackers at my house. Despite the bum leg, I dove at my mother, taking her to the ground. Something hard pressed into my chest. Sebastian and Alex were crawling towards the front hall.
My mother squirmed out from under me and also began a belly crawl towards the front of my house. She had a huge handgun that I was sure wasn’t legal in her hands. My gun was upstairs. My dogs, disturbed by the noise, woke up.
r /> Baldur growled. He found his footing and moved towards the utility room. Anubis followed, a little less enthusiastically. They could get out that door. All my dogs were trained, despite not acting like it. They took commands in German and they could get mean. Anubis was the largest, standing forty-two inches tall and weighing nearly two hundred pounds. However, none of them were registered as they were all too tall at the withers to be AKC registrable. Loki got to his feet, a little less steadily than the others. His eyes were redder than normal. Drool hung from his bottom lip. He went into the utility room. Enki, the smallest of the six, by four inches and thirty pounds, huffed out his jowls before joining his brothers. Marduk was the only one that stayed.
Suddenly, I wasn’t sure if the shooter should be more afraid of my mother or my dogs. My house was set up a little strange, the entrance way was actually a room that might once have been a parlor or something. My mother had made her way into this room and was taking up a position near a window. Glass tinkled as one of the windows broke, sending glass skittering across the hardwood floors.
Sebastian was making hand gestures to my mother and Alex. Both seemed to be ignoring him. My mother fired back, taking a two handed grip on her gun, it still jerked her wrists with the recoil. Someone outside shouted.
I considered my