Chapter 124: Charming Boss Shows Up Again!

Kalina held his eyes for maybe three seconds. Eren didn’t count the seconds because he was too busy noticing how she had stopped breathing through her nose.

Rosa moved first. She slid half a step closer to Eren and pressed the side of her shoulder against his upper arm. Her fingers were white on the strap of her leather bag.

“Don’t tell her anything,” she said under her breath in Elvish. “She’s bluffing.”

“I know.”

“I mean it Eren. She has nothing and we don’t owe her anything.” She really meant that and Eren knew it. They both hated her for too long.

“I know.” But he was used to at least listen her and some things wouldn’t change so quickly.

He squeezed her wrist once on the way past and took a full step forward so that he was between Kalina and Rosa. The movement was small. Her eyes followed his shoulder as it moved into her line of sight and she pulled her chin up half a centimeter.

“Where have you been?” Kalina’s voice came out flat and when she realized Eren was quiet, she cleared her throat and said it louder again. “I asked you a question. You suddenly vanished and I need to hear why!”

Weird thing for her to ask first. She came here about the fruits or another business opportunity. Why is this the first thing out of her mouth. She was more about money and business over person

Eren opened his mouth and closed it. His brain wasn’t cooperating. Two and a half months of elves and monster hunting had done something strange to his ability to lie to adult sexy women in expensive coats and parfume.

“I was with my folks out of town. Everything was too much for me and I felt burned out.”

He knew it was stupid the second it left his mouth. And Kalina’s jaw moved with intense disgust like she knew it was a lie and he dared to used such a cheap one.

“Out of town…” She repeated it in a tone that could have stripped paint off a wall. “For eleven weeks. With your phone off the entire time. Without telling your mother where you were.”

A tall parent in a grey overcoat walked past them toward the kindergarten gate. Kalina noticed him out of the corner of her eye and her whole posture shifted. She smoothed the front of her coat with one hand and waited for the man to pass.

Rosa used the pause to look up at Eren. She tilted her head half a degree. The look said wow, you really went off the grid huh.

Eren scratched the back of his neck and tried to remember how to talk to a woman in Turkey without making things worse while ignoring Rosa’s stupid look.

“I’m back now.”

“Clearly.” Kalina tucked a strand of curly hair behind her left ear with two fingers. The gesture was familiar. He had watched her do it ten thousand times in meetings when she was about to say something mean. “..but I’m not buying that lie. I know you weren’t with your parents..”

The parent in the grey overcoat reached the gate and disappeared inside. Kalina waited until the door closed before she spoke again. The flat voice was gone when she opened her mouth. Something tired sat under it instead.

“I buried you Eren.”

He frowned with that absurd word choice of “burry”.

“You what?”

“I told the office you were dead or kidnapped or something, stupid moron!” Her eyes were on his collarbone not his face. She was pissed but for some reason didn’t look at his face like she used to do. “Three weeks ago. I stopped looking for you after you didn’t open my calls. And I told our team to clear out your desk.”

She told my team I was dead?

Eren felt the cold hit his bare arms for the first time since he had parked the motorcycle. It wasn’t a big cold. His skin barely registered it as unpleasant anymore. But it registered.

“Kalina…”

“Anyway.” She pulled the strap of her handbag higher on her shoulder and stepped back into the CEO she had arrived as. The tired thing went back into whatever drawer she kept it in. “I still need a supplier.”

“I’m not telling you anything.” Rosa lifted her chin and shifted her bag to the other shoulder. Her voice was steady but her fingers gave her away. She was shaking. “You had two men push me into a wall. I don’t make deals with people who do that to me.”

“Those aren’t my men. They are a private security firm I pay by the hour.”

“That’s worse.”

“Probably.” Kalina didn’t flinch. “If you won’t tell me where your supply comes from I will find out on my own. Every import license in this country passes through four customs officers at some point. I know three of them personally. You won’t sell another fruit in Istanbul without me hearing about it first.”

Rosa opened her mouth to answer back. Eren slid his hand between her shoulder blades and pressed his palm flat against her coat. She stopped with a small hiss.

“Kalina.”

Her head turned toward him. The sound of her name did something to her face that she didn’t want it to do. He saw it and pretended he didn’t.

“Tomorrow morning.” He kept his voice low because he didn’t need to raise it with her anymore. “You and me. Without Rosa. Without the two guys in suits. Without your customs connections sitting at the table.”

“Eren I…”

“Tomorrow morning.” He didn’t move. “Pick the place. Text me the address. My number didn’t change.”

She held his eyes for three long seconds. The downed bodyguard on the pavement made a small wheezing sound and tried to sit up. Kalina didn’t look at him.

“Nine o’clock.” Her voice was almost normal again. “I’ll send the address by ten tonight.”

“Fine.”

She tilted her head at the man in the slush.

“Get up Taner. You look pathetic.”

Taner got up slowly. He kept one hand pressed to his sternum like he was afraid something inside his chest had come loose. Eren felt a small embarrassed pinch in his stomach at the sight. He hadn’t meant to hit the man that hard.

Okay. Next time a suited idiot tries to block me I will tap him with the back of my hand instead of my whole shoulder. Noted.

Kalina turned her back and walked to the SUV. Her heels clicked sharp on the icy sidewalk. She had a small limp in her left leg that she was covering with the way she swung her hip. Eren didn’t remember her limping before. He filed it away without letting anything show on his face.

..

The cheap motorcycle engine barked once and settled. Eren zipped his t-shirt up to his throat even though he didn’t need to. Rosa climbed onto the back without her usual two-second hesitation. She hooked both arms around his middle and pressed her forehead between his shoulder blades hard enough that he felt the bone of it.

“Drive fast please.”

“I always drive fast now.”

He peeled the bike off the curb and took the first left before the SUV’s engine could even turn over. The cold winter air hit his bare arms hard enough that a normal person would have been in pain. His skin was only a little bothered by it. He filed that observation away too. Everything in Istanbul felt weaker than he remembered it. The wind. The traffic. The giant concrete buildings. Even the gravity.

Rosa kept her forehead on his back for half a kilometer. A traffic camera flashed them for speeding on Maslak Boulevard. Eren laughed once into his own jacket because he was never going to pay that ticket in his life.

Rosa leaned up to his right ear. She had to speak close so he could hear her over the engine.

“That was your old boss.”

“Yeah.”

“That was the boss you used to tell me yelled at you until you cried in the parking lot.”

“I never cried in a parking lot.”

“You cried in the car on the way home Eren. I remember that phone call.”

“That was a different night.”

“It wasn’t a different night.” She pinched his ribs through his t-shirt with the nail of her index finger. It didn’t hurt him but it made him swerve a little. “I called you on a Tuesday. You were in the car on the way home. You had to pull over because you couldn’t see the road properly.”

He went faster.

Rosa pressed her cheek against the back of his shoulder and didn’t say anything for the next kilometer. When she spoke again her voice was softer.

“You have changed. Not just the muscles.”

“I know.”

“Am I going to like who you become.”

He didn’t have a good answer for that one so he took the bike up to ninety on the slush.

The house in Zekeriyaköy had its lights on when they pulled up under the awning. Eren killed the engine. Rosa climbed off and started stripping her coat off on the way to the door because she needed to wash the last hour off her skin.

“I’ll make pasta for the elders,” she said over her shoulder. “Emily wants the shrimp kind. Do we have shrimp.”

“I have no idea.”

“Of course you don’t.”

She unlocked the front door with her own key. Eren was half a step behind her.

Emily was already standing in the entryway.

She was wearing one of his mother’s grey maternity sweaters that was too big for her everywhere except the front. The strap of her elf-style undergarment was showing at the neckline where the sweater had slipped. Her feet were bare on the polished wood. Her right hand was holding one of the small kitchen knives from the block on the counter. The blade pointed at the floor. She wasn’t holding it like a weapon. She was just holding it in case she needed it to be one.

She had dressed in thirty seconds to be ready at the door when the car pulled up. He knew it the second he saw her and something warm rolled over in his chest that had nothing to do with worry.

“Mister.” Her voice came out calm. Her eyes didn’t match her voice. She looked past him at Rosa and some of the tension in her shoulders let go. “You are both okay.”

“We’re both okay.” He shut the front door behind him with his heel and leaned back against it. “Nobody touched us.”

“Good.”

Rosa squeezed Emily’s wrist on the way past her into the kitchen. The knife went back into the wooden block on the counter as Emily passed it. She didn’t even look at her own hand while she did it.

Emily tilted her head to one side and waited for him to explain himself.

“Who was the woman.”

Galadrim was stirring something heavy in a copper pot on the stove and pretending not to listen. The pretending wasn’t convincing. The wooden spoon in her hand had stopped moving sixty seconds ago.

Eren exhaled and rubbed the base of his neck with his knuckles.

“My old boss from the company in Istanbul. Her name is Kalina.”

Emily’s eyes sharpened a half-shade. The tilt of her head didn’t move.

“The old boss who used to call you at midnight.”

“Yes.”

“The old boss who wanted you in her bed.”

His throat made a small dry sound that wasn’t a word. It wasn’t a useful sound either. Emily waited with her hands resting on the shelf of her belly and let him produce it.

He tried to say three different things and rejected all of them before they made it to his mouth. Emily smelled like the lavender soap from the downstairs bathroom and her hair was damp on the ends from a nap. He could hear Rosa turning on the kitchen sink in the other room. None of these three facts were helping him think straight.

“I need to explain a lot of things.”

“You do.” Emily turned toward the kitchen without another word. She brushed her fingertips along his left wrist as she passed him. Her skin was warm. “Come eat first. Then you explain.”

Galadrim cleared her throat from the stove. She still didn’t look up from her copper pot.

“The fish tastes better with more onion dear.” Her voice was mild. “And human lord shoul eat something of your hand before a proper scolding. Our elven customs always says that right..?”

Emily said like she was remembering a silly childhood poem with amusement.

“Feed him first. Cut him into pieces after the dessert..”

My mother used to say that..”

Rosa laughed from the other room and even Eren was laughing.

Elves are really weird..

He kicked his shoes off at the rack by the door and walked toward the dining room and tried to figure out how much of the truth he was going to put on the table when he came together with that dangerous boss.

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