Page 52 of Frozen Heart
Radimir insisted on driving my friends back home, so they didn’t have to get cabs. “It’s good that you have friends,” he said as the last one of them waved goodbye.
“What about you?” I asked.
His jaw tightened. “People like me don’t have friends. Civilians don’t understand my world. And the peopleinmy world all want to stab me in the back. All that’s left is family.” He put the car into gear, and we accelerated away.
“Isn’t thereanybody?”I asked.
He shook his head. Then, half a block later, he stuck out his lower lip and reluctantly shrugged. “There was one man, once…” He glanced across at me and sighed. “I wasn’t always aPakhan:a boss. When I first came to America, I…” He looked around the car, scowling. “I did what Valentin does now.”
He used to be a hitman!That explained how he’d killed Borislav so easily, how he’d dealt with the two men who attacked me in the bookstore. But he hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. I realized I was going to have to get used to that: watching what I said in case the car was bugged. “Go on.”
“My brothers and I were in New York, back then. I worked for a man called Luka Malakov. This man was Luka’s best...problem solver.The best in the whole city. He taught me and we became...close.” He scowled at the rear-view mirror, not meeting my eyes. “We lost touch when I moved to Chicago.”
“You could getbackin touch,” I said gently.
He shook his head. “It was a long time ago.
There was clearly more to it than he was saying, but with Radimir I always knew when a subject was closed. A lot of his past seemed to be off limits. I still didn’t know what happened to his parents, or why he and his brothers had come to America. Was he ever going to let me in?
We fell into silence, and I watched him as he drove, the setting sun painting gold highlights along the hard lines of hisjaw and cheekbones. God, he was gorgeous. And my gut instinct had been right, back when I first met him. Under all that coldness, he was completely alone…
The feelings had been building for weeks but I’d been fighting, denying, pushing them back behind a dam. Suddenly, as I stared at his profile, that dam began to creak and buckle.
He’s alone and he shouldn’t be. There’s a side to him no one else sees, a side that’s good.
The dam started to spring leaks, faster than I could patch it. The feelings began to blast their way through, a firehose that threatened to knock me right off my feet.
He doesn’tdeserveto be alone. And he doesn’t have to be because…Because…
The feelings surged and the dam disintegrated.
Because I’ve fallen for him.
I sat there motionless, barely breathing, my mind spinning. Then I slumped back in my seat, turning it over in my mind.
I’d fallen for him. But that didn’t change what he was. I still hated the world he lived in, the senseless violence of the gangs. I couldn’t just ignore that. So, for there to be any chance of us working, I had to understand it. Accept it.
“Radimir,” I said, my voice a little shaky. “Could you tell me about...what you do?”
He glanced at me and his jaw hardened. “You don’t need to know.” Protecting me, as always.
I shook my head and put my hand on his. “Idoneed to know,” I told him. “I need to understand. I need you to tell me why you do what you do.”
He stopped the car at a stoplight and turned to me, frowning. He must have seen something in my eyes because he suddenly inhaled, and his face lit up with hope before he managed to control it.
The light changed and he threw the car into a U-turn. “I can’t tell you,” He said, his voice tight with emotion. “But I can show you.”
I thought he’d take me to see the buildings he’d constructed, or the flashy casinos he ran. But he drove me to one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, instead. He offered me his hand, and we started walking down the street, our shoes crunching in the snow.
The first few people to see him shied away and I felt my heart sink.Everyone’s scared of him.But then the owner of a convenience store hurried out to speak to him. “Mr. Aristov! I wanted to thank you. I would have lost my whole business.” As I listened, I pieced together that the city had wanted to close him down over a planning dispute, and Radimir had smoothed things over. Then an old Korean lady stopped to shake his hand. Her son had been beaten up by a couple of cops, and the police department had looked the other way. Radimir had made sure the cops knew never, ever, to do something like that again. It went on and on, as we wandered down the street. Requests for him to use his contacts with the city to get the potholes fixed. Pleas for loans to start businesses, from people who’d been turned down by the banks.
I started to notice something. The neighborhood was poor, but it looked different to others I’d seen. It took me a while to figure out why, because I had to realize what therewasn’t. There wasn’t any graffiti. There wasn’t anyone selling drugs. It felt weirdly...safe.
I realized not everyone was scared of Radimir. To the poor people, he was a lifeline. He actually listened to their problems and made sure things happened. And he understood what was going on here far better than the people in City Hall who never left their air-conditioned offices.
Radimir pointed at two of his skyscrapers downtown. “All ofthatstarts here. This is where my brothers and I started, in this neighborhood. And we’re still here. We still run it.”
Then Radimir led me down a side street. We walked for a block, crossed an intersection, and suddenly the neighborhood changed. It was still the same kind of housing, but I could feel an edgy desperation in the air. People didn’t make eye contact. Stores were boarded up, there were snow-covered mounds of trash between the houses and there was what looked like a crack house on the corner.