Chapter 4 Four

Elena couldn't sleep a wink the entire night. She is usually kept awake by Oliver climbing all over her or viciously playing with whatever, he can find that rolls in the night. However, he was as quiet as a church mouse last night, giving her the best opportunity to get some much-deserved sleep after the day she just had.

She was eventually woken up by her phone early in the morning and the screaming voice of Genevieve wondering how she managed to get a leave of absence and have none other than Dmitri Markov personally call in and ask. Trying her best to make it through the conversation without losing her job altogether, she is now wide awake.

Now that she has the day free to do nothing more than worry and wonder about what she is going to say to Dmitri, she also has the task of researching just who he is. Genevieve has never struck Elena has someone who would answer to anyone else but herself, and that is precisely why she works for no one but herself.

Yet she shakes in the sight of Dmitri and his men and obeys his every word. Just who the hell is Dmitri Markov? He isn't someone who makes her feel unsafe, but he does overwhelm her with his presence and is obviously a powerful man. But just how powerful can he be to get almost every person in New Jersey to practically bow down to him?

Getting her morning coffee and breakfast ready, she sits down at her laptop and tries to do a quick google search of Dmitri Markov, but it gives her a bunch of random people from Russia that don't really fit his profile, nothing that really stands out about any of them other than ordinary profiles of the name.

There is one name that comes up along with his that does seem to hold some significance. She types in the name Nikolai Markov, and a car company comes up. It seems to be more of a garage that repairs cars rather than one that sells them, not much information is given about the place but there is an address and contact number.

She compares it with the number she was given by Dmitri and sees they are the same. Whoever Nikolai is, he is obviously related to Dmitri, but their company doesn't seem that big or demanding, so it still doesn't explain how he can command such fear and obedience from people with the snap of his fingers.

It does help him being overbearing and overwhelming, but that doesn't always work and especially with the big figure heads of New York, she wouldn't be surprised if he has been beat on the street for looking at the wrong person in the wrong way.

Having found nothing new, she slams the laptop down and scowls down at her coffee. She shouldn't be bothered with things like this, she should be focusing her time on figuring out what it is she wants to do for the rest of her life. She can't keep relying on her parent's money and good fortune, she needs to make a living for herself, but she is having a hard time focusing on just one hobby or interest.

At first, she thought since she loved art so much, she could make a decent day time living as a make-up artist and work on the side as an artist, knowing she has a better chance landing a stable job as a make-up artist than she would as a freelance artist. But after just a few months taking a course about her, she found herself incredibly bored and put off from that aspect of art all together.

Now, she finds herself wandering helplessly from dead end to dead end, trying to pay off the debt of the failure still haunting her. She doesn't need any more distractions in her life, though reflecting on it, she doesn't really have any. She has worked at Genevieve's diner for so long because she knows no other place is any better than the abuse she suffers there, but at least she can get away with defending herself just a little with Genevieve, whereas she might not have the same freedom elsewhere.

A few customers and fellow employees have commented on her natural beauty, mostly thanks to her sharp Italian features inherited from her mother's family, though she has found that her mother doesn't seem to have the same features, and her father is supposedly Irish, so he is a ghost in comparison to Elena. Some people have wondered why she isn't working at high end restaurants and hotels, where celebrities and the rich dine, instead of slaving away at a mediocre diner in downtown New Jersey.

Because she knows her mouth will most likely get her blacklisted from ever working in those places again. Where she works now is just busy enough, with just the right amount of flair and drama for her to handle and pay off her debts while navigating through life.

"So, what the hell am I going to do about this?" she mutters to herself, sliding the screen of Dmitri's contact number up and down on her phone. She recalls their conversation in the car, wondering if he really does mean to just take her out to dinner, or if he thinks that he will be able to get lucky once the night is over.

Not that Elena isn't opposed to getting laid, it has been some time, but she has never been a girl to sleep with a guy on the first date. It's hard to break off from that person if the date doesn't exactly go well or there isn't a spark even after a night of intimacy.

And she has a feeling it's going to be a challenge shaking herself free of Dmitri if she agrees. She can't wrap her head around the intense interest he is showing in her with just a few minutes of conversation together. She can't deny she isn't attractive, but she has never had a guy throw themselves at her like he has, practically demanding she go on a date with them instead of pining after her.

He acts as if he knows she won't be able to resist him, and she is terrified at how right he has been so far. She should have given him a lot more than a few choice words when he forced himself on her, but a part of her couldn't ignore the fact that she liked the way his kiss made her feel. It gave her butterflies in her stomach and made her toes and fingertips tingle, feelings she hasn't felt ever that she can recall.

Elena had dated quite a few guys in college and even in high school, and she has always been attracted and head over heels for them but doesn't remember ever feeling such intense attraction from a single kiss, and their first one at that in such an odd situation.

"Ugh, this is stupid!" She throws down her phone and turns to the kitchen to dump her coffee contents out. Not wanting to think about it anymore she decides to do a major clean of her small apartment, something she has been putting off for a while now. Getting all of her dirty clothes together, grabbing lone socks from the farthest corners of the apartment, she goes downstairs to the built-in laundromat in the basement and sets her clothes to wash.

While they wash for a bit she cleans her apartment upstairs, scrubbing everything in sight down until the place is almost quite literally sparkling. She has periodically peered at her phone from time to time, but every time she did, she would turn back to her cleaning task and clean harder to distract her mind.

By 3PM she has nothing left to clean, her laundry is all cleaned and put away, and her head hurts from how much her apartment wreaks of cleaning supplies, the random scents mixing and not enough windows for her to air the place out.

Deciding to take a walk to clear her head, she showers and changes to go out, making note to pick up some wet food for Oliver while she is out. A sudden knock at the door causes her to jump, and the first place her mind goes to is Dmitri.

He wouldn't show up before giving her the time allotted, would he?

"Elena Grace, you better open this door, you beautiful bitch. I know you're in there, and you forgot to come to someone's birthday celebration last week!"

She lets out a sigh of relief when the booming voice of her college friend Natalia comes through the door, followed by another bang of her fists against the door. She was always known throughout her brief time at college as someone very aggressive and hard to approach, but she took a liking to Elena right away when she witnessed Elena swiftly cut down some kid for harassing her every day.

Since her parents agreed to allow her to take whatever she wanted, Elena had to figure out her own room and board. That's where Natalia really helped out, offering her the second bedroom in her apartment off campus while Elena studied. She even helped her get the apartment she has now when Elena decided to leave college, and recommended her the diner she works at now when she reached out to Natalia a little while after, complaining about how hard it was to land a job in New Jersey.

Elena practically owes her life to this girl, and she forgot to attend her 21st birthday party. She's dead.

"You used to be a waitress working under Genevieve, you have to understand how hard she works me and why I missed your birthday party. Please?" Elena begs as soon as she opens the door.

Natalia rolls her sharp green eyes but a smile soon spread across her cherry red lips.

"You can make it up to me by buying me coffee and catching me up on where you've been this past year. I almost thought you disappeared off the face of the Earth."

"Deal, I was just on my way out anyway, my apartment smells like the cleaning aisle at Wal-Mart."

Noticing the odd but strong smell of cleaner coming from her apartment, Natalia takes a whiff and reels back instantly. "What the hell were you doing in there? Did you gut your entire apartment and scrub the entire thing down?"

"I needed a distraction and what distracts someone better than cleaning everything in sight?" Elena asks, closing her door to lock up.

"Why the need for such an intense distraction? Trouble in paradise?"

It was always weird how Natalia could guess what Elena was having trouble with after just a few words. Then again, she can't imagine what else a girl could need such a distraction for, other than love problems.

"I'll tell you over coffee, it's a long story."

***

"Wow, so he just appeared out of nowhere and demanded you go to dinner with him? What kind of man does that in this day and age? Did you figure out how old he was?" Natalia went off on a rant of questions after Elena explained her night at the diner the other night, meeting Dmitri.

"I did my best to research him, he seems like a powerful man, but nothing really came up. All I could find was some car garage where they restored broken and damaged cars, I think. Something like that, but nothing to explain who he is or why he seems so domineering. But I can't imagine he is much older than us, he doesn't appear to be that old."

Natalia raises her eyebrows when Elena's tone changes at the mention of his appearance, a dead giveaway that this helpless romantic girl has already started to fall for this man.

"Oh really? Tell me what he looks like? He sounds like quite the attractive man," she says and nudges Elena's foot under the table teasingly.

"I would say he is your typical 'bad-boy' style, with the tattoos and dark hair, but at the same time the air he holds around him makes him seem so much more mature and overbearing, you can't help but be attracted to him the moment he walks through the door. It's really hard to wrap my feelings towards him around my head, that's why I needed such a big distraction today."

"And because you have less than five hours to give him an answer about dinner, right?"

Elena almost forgot about the time, panicking slightly that she has less than half a day to decide, or she knows he will be showing up for her again.

"What are you so afraid of? He doesn't seem like that bad of a guy, just go to dinner with him and see how you feel. If it really doesn't work out and you don't feel anything, then just call it quits."

Elena chuckles, wishing it seemed that easy with Dmitri. "You don't get it; I don't think it will be that easy to shake this guy. He seems really determined to claim me as his own or something, it's all very strange, and some parts of him almost feel oddly familiar to me."

This piques Natalia's interest. "In what ways?"

Elena shrugs. "I'm not sure exactly, but for example, he put his phone number in my phone the other night, and the name he saved it under isn't a very common nickname that I know of, but I seemed to recall it the moment I saw it, but I can't remember from where or when."

"What did you say his name was again? His full name?" Natalia asks.

"The card he gave me originally said Dmitri Markov."

Natalia's face goes pale and her eyes widen.

"Any relation to Nikolai Markov, and is the shop you researched called Markov Motors?"

Trying to remember what she saw this morning, she remembers seeing the name Nikolai, owner and CEO of Markov Motors.

"Yeah, I think that's the one, and the owner's name is Nikolai I believe. Why, what's wrong? It looked like just a simple unknown car shop."

"It's anything but that, and the reason you didn't find any information on Dmitri other than that is because it's deliberately hidden from public view."

"Who in the world has the power to do that?" Elena asks, her heart starting to race.

"The Russian Mafia do."