Total pages in book: 34
Estimated words: 32402 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 162(@200wpm)___ 130(@250wpm)___ 108(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 32402 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 162(@200wpm)___ 130(@250wpm)___ 108(@300wpm)
Alexey didn’t complain. He had a home-cooked meal every night. Along with her cooking adventures, she had also started to bake. The guards loved her baking attempts, although some complained they had put on weight. This was a bit of a problem.
She was used to hard work. Once she cleaned the apartment every day, she had a lot of time on her hands and nothing to do. This was when she stocked up Alexey’s freezer. From there, she even started to cook for the guards. Then came the baking and the excess goods she had no choice but to give to several guards, because they would spoil before she got a chance to eat them.
Cooking only took up so much time. She had to find another hobby. Growing up, she tended to have the hobby of avoiding the drunken foster parent or hiding from the bully. There was a lot of hiding and avoiding, which was just a way of life.
So, she used the computer Alexey had given her and started to look at homebound, or at least apartment-bound hobbies. This was why she now sat on the sofa, knitting what was supposed to be a sweater; however, if she held it up to the light, it had more holes in it than cheese. She was determined to finish it.
Most people started with a scarf. Jane wanted something challenging, and what the fuck did “cast off three, keep knitting until the end row, then knit another row and cast off an additional three to shape the neckline,” even mean? It was confusing, but the women on the online tutorials made it look like so much fun.
Maybe hobbies were not her thing.
She hadn’t even realized so much time had passed, until Alexey literally walked through the door.
At nearly three months, most of her bruises were gone. There was the odd mottling on her stomach from being stomped on at least twice. That had been the deepest of all the bruises. The ones on her face were gone. Her lip was no longer split, nor her eye swollen.
“Evening,” she said, finishing off her row of the horrible-looking sweater and getting to her feet.
She had put a pot roast in the oven on low, and it would take the broccoli just a few minutes to tenderize. She pulled out the pot roast, checked the meat, and of course it was juicy and tender. She had come to learn to trust a selection of the cookbooks Alexey had gotten for her. They had not steered her wrong, and she felt like a better cook for it.
“Evening,” Alexey said.
“Long day?”
This was the longest she had stayed with anyone. The broccoli was cooking in the skillet with a tiny bit of butter and some oil, and she grabbed the wine from the fridge. It was a nice, deep red wine that was supposed to go well with pot roast. She would be using the leftovers tomorrow to make a pie.
Jane stopped as she realized how domestic she sounded. It was crazy that this was currently her life.
“Yeah, it was long.”
Alexey never talked about work. He would occasionally give her an update on Morello. From what she knew, things had not been going well in the past couple of months. Morello was pissed because Alexey had cost him a few million in drug money, by blowing up his shipment. Jane hadn’t thought it was funny. Alexey had. Even Nikolai, Igor, and Makar had found it funny. From time to time, they stopped by to enjoy some food and talk with Alexey.
She liked all his friends, which was a shock to her. At least they all had his back. She had come to see herself as quite a good judge of character. It helped her survive a lot over the years.
They were good men. Sure, they did bad things, but there were a lot of bad men out there. It was rare to find good bad men. She knew it was weird, but it made sense to her. Alexey was a good man.
She handed him a glass of wine and made her way into the kitchen to serve them some pot roast with broccoli. She opened the fridge door, grabbed the parsley she had chopped earlier, and quickly sprinkled it across the roast before serving, then she added a little more for decoration at the end. It looked so damn good. This was not the first pot roast she had made.
“So, I was thinking, and this is a crazy thought, but I was hoping you would consider letting me perhaps take a small walk in the park tomorrow. I’m talking ten minutes tops. I just walk from one end of the park to another and come back,” she said.
Every time she had suggested leaving the apartment, he didn’t even give her a chance to beg. It was always a strict, “Hell, no.” Jane looked at him, and the fact it was taking him a few extra minutes to answer was indeed a miracle. She waited.