Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126003 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 630(@200wpm)___ 504(@250wpm)___ 420(@300wpm)
I was the little brother, after all.
Back then I didn’t really consider Eoin the baby, though he was. He was only just one. And we barely took any notice of him at all. He certainly never went along with us and Da for work.
But they never came, of course. There was no rescue.
I’m still here. That’s what I would tell my father if he were still alive. I’m still here, you fuckin’ asshole. I’m still here.
Anyway.
I find the surf shop and the poster of the girl. Though I’ve already seen it, I can’t help wanting to take a closer look. The shop is still open, though getting ready to close, I think. So I go in, make a deal with the clerk, and end up leaving the shop with that poster rolled up in my hands.
Even though I blew a lot of cash on the penthouse, I still have way more money than I need and I’m not really the kind of guy who likes to shop—never got the point of owning things the way Davis and Wade do. But they’re American and that’s just how the Americans are, I guess.
Probably the Irish are that way too, but I haven’t been Irish for a very long time now.
My point is that paying that clerk five hundred bucks for the poster was no big deal.
When I get back to my penthouse, I unroll the poster, grab some hand-wrap tape, and tape the poster on my ceiling just above my bed. Then I lie down and just look at her.
Irina.
Maart’s girl.
CHAPTER 3
I do not think about them. Ever.
I wake up and take hot showers. Long ones. I brew single cups of coffee and nibble on dried fruit. I walk the beach, and feed the birds, and wear cool mirrored sunglasses. And sometimes I go to work at the restaurant.
I love waitressing. At least it’s not a job where I have to sit all day. I had one of those when I first got to Miami. I answered phones for a law office. They thought my Russian accent was cool and hip when they hired me, but clients started complaining about it and it was suggested that I pay someone to get rid of it.
“Get rid of what?” I didn’t even ask politely, either.
The Russian accent had been canceled. I wasn’t even sure what that meant back then. I don’t come from this world—America feels like a distant planet compared to Brazil.
There was a war, I guess. I had a hard time understanding what, exactly, that had to do with me. If I ever lived in Russia, I sure as hell don’t remember it. I mean, honestly, I’m not even sure I’m Russian. I got this accent because my first language is Russian, but that doesn’t mean I’m from Russia. It just means I learned to talk around the Russian assholes who owned me first, so that’s the language I picked up.
Of course, I can’t explain this to people. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention. I was a child slave for an underground fighting ring until I was thirteen and have killed nine people in death matches, plus a couple of billionaires. So while I understand that I look and sound Russian, it just might not be the case.
That would go over well.
I mean, in Brazil, I could’ve told this story and most people—that I hung around, anyway—would just nod sympathetically and sigh, maybe pat my hand in solidarity.
But in America? Please. Americans have no fucking clue how the real world works.
Getting fired from the law office was really a great stroke of luck though. Because that’s how LMR Eats became my second home.
LMR stands for Luis, Manuel, and Romero, three brothers who each wanted to name their Cuban restaurant after themselves back when they first started out in the late Nineties. Settling for the first initial of each of their names was a fair compromise.
It’s funny how I got that job, because I wasn’t even looking for a job. Through some careful planning, some lucky breaks, and some underground fights when I first got here, I ended up with money. Not a lot. Not left, anyway. I used most of the windfall in the beginning to buy my condo.
It’s a tiny place just eight blocks off South Beach. And when I say tiny, I mean it’s like a closet. But it’s got a little kitchen, and my own stackable washer and dryer. Stackable, they call it here. I kinda love that word. Stackable. I don’t know why. I’ve been speaking English for as long as I can remember, but we didn’t use English a lot in the camp. Mostly Maart and Rainer used it, actually, because Cort, when he did speak, would only speak English. But every kid I knew in Cort’s camp spoke three or four languages and English was hard for most of us so, left up to us, we spoke anything but English. Until Anya came and Cort started talking more.