Moskva

This is a standalone novella in the
How to Train Her Curves
universe. You do not need to read anything else in the series to enjoy this book.

The only woman he wants is the one woman he can't have…

Mikhael Nazarov left the crime family his mother married into with a gun to his head and a fire under his feet. Now he's back to rescue Alina Rodchenko from a kill order. But will Alina trust a man who abandoned her after a single night of passion that spawned a decade of pain and a secret too dark to tell?

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Russia - present day

Standing in the shadowed doorway of an abandoned shop, Mikhael Nazarov watched the woman leave the small grocery store carrying a bag of costly oranges. Smiling broadly, her wide hips swinging with her good mood, she walked two stores down and entered a bakery, the door chimes audible from where Nazarov stood on the opposite side of the street.

He scanned the sidewalks and entrances then the windows above the shops. His chest grew tighter with each second that passed. For three days, he had followed the woman. Every day was the same. She left the walled compound with only a single guard in tow, setting out on foot with a big smile and a bounce in her step, stopping first at the grocer for fruit and then the baker, where she paid the man extra and waited while he custom decorated two jumbo sized cupcakes.

Just as the woman's activities were predictable, so were those of her guard, a lazy and far too soft male that Mikhael placed somewhere in his late fifties.

Glancing at the corner, he confirmed the guard had yet again stepped into the poorly disguised whorehouse to get his own cupcake frosted for the ten or so minutes the woman would remain in the baker's before she was ready to return to the compound.

As casually as he could, Mikhael pushed away from the building and started across the street. He wore jeans and steel-toed hiking boots topped by a hooded sweatshirt roomy enough to conceal the Glock 20 nestled against his hip. The hood was down, small beads of sweat from the late summer heat in Moscow dotting his closely shaved head.

His gaze stayed locked on the woman, but his ears were tuned to the sounds of the street. He listened for the occasional car or a sudden change in the low hum of activity as mostly women went about their errands for the morning.

The target's smile never faltered. It was there when she left the compound, its intensity building as the baker started to decorate the cupcakes, the act producing an unexplainable giddiness that made her shoulders shake.

Nazarov knew it wasn't the sweets that excited her. Food had never been the cause of Alina Rodchenka's full waistline. The luscious curves that made his mouth water as he approached the bakery had been there since childhood, her father's attempts to starve them off always failing.

He turned over the fact that she never left with just any two cupcakes. They were specially decorated each morning after her arrival with a different design judging by the changing colors. Her smile would build during their manufacture to an expression of pure joy in a way that hurt Mikhael to his marrow.

It was not the treat that made her glow with happiness, he concluded, but the other person whose teeth and lips and tongue would consume the spongy cake and sweet icing.

Reaching the door to the bakery, he dipped his head and chastised the jealousy that flared inside him. Did he really want to find her after ten years and see her miserable instead of smiling?

She was not his widow, even if they had once been lovers and she thought him dead. She was not his sister, either, even though they had spent part of their lives growing up together, Mikhael protecting her within the vicious crime family that claimed them and Alina's innocent affection offering him comfort in a home where no other kind words or deeds were offered.

Oblivious to the danger around her, Alina didn't look in his direction when the door chimes announced his arrival. The baker did, his expression deadening as he took in Mikhael's size and the dark shades that hid his eyes. The old man's gaze darted toward Alina in warning, but her attention was on his hands and the wave jumping dolphin he had been drawing.

Mikhael touched her elbow, just the lightest whisper of flesh on flesh. An electric current sizzled through his fingertips and up his arm. There was no similar effect on the woman, at least not that he could see. She adjusted her stance as if the contact had been accidental.

When Mikhael didn't move, she looked up, her smile faltering when she saw the grim slash of his mouth. Her dark chocolate gaze darted around his face, piecing the features together into someone she recognized. When she landed on the stark blue eyes, her smile crumbled completely.

"Mishka?" she whispered. Body sagging, she braced her hands against the counter, her head lightly bouncing side to side in denial.

He didn't have time to explain. The baker would sound an alarm if he hadn't somehow done so already. Her guard, as lazy as the old slob was, would soon exit the whorehouse and light a cigarette. By the time the fast burning Russian smoke was done, he would expect Alina to have left the bakery already and be halfway to the for their return walk to the compound.

"We're leaving out the back--"

She shook her head and began digging in her purse. "You are leaving!"

Reaching past the rubles in her purse, she pulled out hundred dollar bills, her luminous eyes wide and pleading with the baker. Naively, she was trying to buy his silence in an area of Moscow brutally controlled by the Rodchenko family.

Mikhael knew the man would pocket the money then sell her out within minutes of her leaving. None of that mattered if Mikhael managed to get her out the back door and into the van he had parked at the end of the alley.

"Not without you," he growled, his big hand circling her elbow and locking in a hard grip. Lowering his mouth to her ear, he whispered as he crowded her toward the swinging door that lead into the bakery's kitchen. "Little devil has a kill order on you."

"Little devil" was their childhood name for Dima Rodchenko, the only legitimate child of Papa Rodchenko and the current boss of the Rodchenko crime family after the old man's death eight years ago. Groomed by his father to one day lead the family, Dima was already a full-blown psychopath at nineteen when Papa Rodchenko claimed Mikhael's mother as his wife.

For a few fleeting seconds, Alina stopped resisting. Fear replaced the vague panic that had filled her eyes upon recognizing her former stepbrother. Then her gaze hardened to black agates and she pushed back, throwing every pound packed into her plentiful curves against him as he had taught her to do so long ago.

"I cannot leave him," she choked, her protest ending with a quiver of lips and tears swimming in her eyes. "Go now before they kill you!"

Her words stabbed at his chest. He had expected a moment's resistance spurred by almost eleven years of thinking him dead. But he didn't expect her to fight back, didn't think he'd see her hand curling around the slim neck of a metal cake stand, the dark eyes warning him that she would pound it into his skull if she had to.

Releasing her, he pulled back. However much things had changed in the last decade, he didn't expect her to cling to a half-brother who wanted her dead, especially since Mikhael was no longer a mere boy but a man battle-tested when it came to taking down scum like the Rodchenko crime boss.

He had to convince the danger was real and that he could protect her.

"Dima has arranged to have you assassinated--"

The door chimes bounced as the front door of the bakery was slammed open. Alina lifted the cake stand and hurled it past Mikhael's shoulder as she tried to side step around him. He spun, pulling out the Glock as his other hand reached for Alina.

His fingers grabbed at empty air. She stepped in front of Mikhael, her back to the thuggish guard who had finally abandoned his whores and cigarettes to check on his charge.

"Go! Now!" she screamed, her face purpling from the tears she refused to cry. "I won't leave him for a ghost!"

The guard had his gun out, its tip pointed at the middle of Alina's back, her body serving as a shield for each man. Mikhael backed slowly toward the door to the kitchen, his eyes pleading with the woman to move, to give him a shot at the guard who didn't give a shit if he needed to shoot through her.

Shaking her head, she stretched her arms out, bracing one hand against the counter and the other against a bread rack.

With no other choice, he hurled his body through the swinging door to the kitchen, slid across a table of cooling pies and burst out the alley's back door at top speed. Lungs burning as he pumped his long legs, Mikhael passed the accuracy range of the guard's pistol by the time the old man reached the alley and fired off his first shot.

Diving into the van, he jammed the key into the ignition, turning it as he threw the vehicle into reverse and peeled out of the alley. He headed east, toward Moscow's center where he could dump the van, find another vehicle and start the task of saving Alina from her psychotic half-brother all over again.

Whether she wanted it or not.

Russia - present day

A meaty fist connected with the side of Nazarov's jaw. His head snapped left, blood from earlier blows to his mouth spraying the air.

The heavy metal chair he was tied to began to tilt from the force of the punch. He threw his weight toward his abuser, the man the others called Osip. He managed to right the chair just in time for a second, more vicious punch. His head and the chair shot a hard left.

He hit the ground, his upper arm pinned between the chair's metal frame and the concrete flooring of the industrial building in which the three men held him.

"Nice one," a thick voice slurred.

Kostya delivered the compliment, his Russian almost incomprehensible Nazarov because of his heavy accent and the frequent convergence of his mouth with the bottle of vodka he had purchased while fetching the men's dinner.

"Too nice."

This last voice was younger than the others, the few words more precisely spoken and belonging to Arkady, the "brains" of the trio consigned to sit on Nazarov until Dima Rodchenko returned to Moscow from a syndicate meeting in St. Petersburg.

The fact that they had freely used one another's names, both first and patronymic depending on the exchange, only solidified Nazarov's understanding that they all considered him a dead man.

Feet appeared in front of his face. Bracing for the inevitable kick, he twisted his neck and upper torso so that his closed eyes pointed toward the floor and not the incoming boot.

Waiting for the impact, he counted off the breaths he took, his nasal passages clogged with blood from a nose broken just that morning.

Nothing happened. They were playing with him, waiting for him to turn his head. They had nothing but time and no entertainment beyond torturing him. They were on their third day of it, ever since eight of the bastards had surrounded his replacement vehicle less than a day after his attempt at kidnapping Alina at the bakery.

"He's going to die before Rodchenko gets here," Arkady cautioned. "You know he wants to finish the job himself."

Mikhael cautiously turned his head to look at the young man. With his right eye swollen almost completely shut, he could make out little more than the shape of Arkady's narrow head and upper torso against the ballast light behind the man. Unlike Osip and Kostya, he was slight and hadn't done anything physical against Mikhael. Most of his time had been spent walking around the room trying to get a signal for his smartphone.

Leaning over, Osip tugged the chair upright. "Can't help it if I'm good at my job."

"You better," Arkady warned. "Rodchenko will be primed to kill. What happens if all we have to show is a corpse?"

Osip leaned forward, his hand cupping Mikhael's balls and threatening to rip them off as he put his ear close to the beaten man's lips and listened to him breathe. Blood gurgled in Mikhael's throat. He coughed, splattering Osip's ear with blood.

"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" Osip yelled, his big hand closing around the top of Nazarov's skull, the fingers splayed wide, their tips digging at flesh and bone as he hyperextended his victim's neck and wrapped his other hand around Nazarov's throat. "Son of a whore!"

Nazarov squeezed out one word before Osip cut his air off completely.

"Money."

Osip laughed and tightened his grip. "What, so I can have a tsar's funeral?"

Too drunk for caution, Kostya slid away from the wall and nudged Osip's hand away from their prisoner's throat.

"Let us pretend I find this conversation amusing," he said with a vodka lisp.

Retreating, Osip shoved his fists into the pockets of his loose cargo pants.

"I can get you millions," Nazarov wheezed then added. "In dollars."

He wasn't lying, but they couldn't exactly fact check him from the rundown building.

Even if they didn't accept the offer, he reasoned, it might buy time for his body to recover and the punch soup of his brain to come up with a better plan. He had been absent from his new life in America long enough for his powerful bosses to start looking for him. He just had to get at least one of these three jokers to start spreading his name around or try to access the account he had at his employer's bank.

Arkady came to stand over him, the young man's green gaze staring into the neon blue of Nazarov's good eye.

"As Osip said, corpses don't need money. You can't give us enough to keep us alive. And unless you have it laying around in paper, which you don't, you can take it back with a few keystrokes."

Half certain he was flinging himself from the frying pan into a volcano, Nazarov offered an alternative -- one that would certainly force them to communicate with someone outside the Rodchenko family syndicate.

"Ever hear of Rodya Kalinin?"

Arkady's face lit with speculation. "You mean the fucking rat who almost crippled the Grekovs?"

Almost?

Muscles painfully pulled the corners of Nazarov's mouth into a smile. Arkady's assessment was an understatement. Even the head of the Grekovs, old Vanya with his perpetually bloodstained fingers, had spent time in a Russian prison with all the information Kalinin had turned over to the Russian prosecutors.

Even more damaging, the family's presence in the States had been wiped out completely.

"What's so fucking funny?" Osip asked, hand leaving his pocket to wrap once more around Nazarov's throat.

"I am Kalinin," he answered, his pain momentarily abated as shock spread across the faces of the three men holding him prisoner. "And whether you pieces of shit want to save me for your boss or sell me off to the Grekovs, you better get me a fucking doctor."