The Lion’s Mail Order Menage

It was the very smallest embers of that thing ‘hope’ she hadn’t believed in before.  True, she knew nothing of the place where she was going, didn’t have the faintest clue what the men they were traveling to would be like, but it had to be better than Victor’s place.  It just had to be.  Almost as if she could read her mind, Kyra had placed one hand over Meena’s trembling one, smiling sweetly as if this were the most routine trip in the world.

“Are you nervous, chickadee?”

“Me?  Why would I be nervous?  It’s not like we’re going across the world or anything.  It’s not like we’re going to live with total and complete strangers.”

“Oh come on, it can’t be that bad, can it?  Or would you rather go back to Victor’s place?  Don’t tell me you’ve decided he’s someone you actually want to hang around with.”

“Oh no,” Meena smiled softly as she laid her head trustingly on Kyra’s shoulder, “I don’t see anything like that happening.  Not ever.  It’s just that I was thinking.”

“Thinking what, pet?”

Meena raised her head once more and was embarrassed to find that there were tears in her eyes.  There was nothing she could do to hide them, however, and it certainly wasn’t the only time Kyra had seen her emotional.  It was that thorn in her side that she couldn’t pull out.  Kyra may have wanted to change the emotional side of her friend Meena, but they both knew it wasn’t likely to go anywhere.  It was just who she was, despite all of the things she had already lived through in her time on earth.

“Meena, come on now.  You can tell me.  There’s no need to get upset.”

“It’s just that it’s over now, isn’t it?  It’s finally done.  All of that business with Victor.  We’re finally going to get to have a different kind of life.”

“Meena, I want to tell you that’s true.  Some of me even believes that it might be.  But you need to know that it isn’t all that simple.”

“Nothing ever is, is it?”

“I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I know that this isn’t.  It would be foolish to believe that Victor doesn’t have any kind of influence in the States.  Don’t allow your excitement over leaving to cloud your judgment.  Don’t let yourself believe that his hands can’t reach you once we get to New York.

“It’s probably the city he has the most people in, aside from Moscow.  I don’t want to scare you.  I just think it’s important that you know that he could still be a danger.”

“How is it that you know so much about Victor and the things he does?  I’m not saying that I don’t believe you because I do, but I just don’t understand how you know so much about him and the way he works.”

Kyra closed her eyes briefly and Meena wondered if she had perhaps gone too far this time.  It wasn’t often that Kyra looked anything close to rattled, but when she opened her eyes, she reached down with a shaking hand for the vodka on the rocks the flight attendants had just handed her. At this point, Meena just wanted to go back in time and not say anything at all, but of course that wasn’t possible.

She had learned in her life that you couldn’t take anything back, no matter how much you wished it could be so, and so she waited.  Waited to see if her friend was going to tell her something real about her life, something she didn’t really do all that often (or possibly ever; who could tell?).

“I know because I used to be more to him than one of his girls, a long, long time ago.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that back before Victor was anything special, I was his girlfriend.  I guess you could say we were in love, back when he was only a common criminal and not a gangster god.  It doesn’t even seem real anymore, when I think about it at all.  It was a lifetime ago, a different lifetime entirely.”

“What happened?  How did you wind up just another one of us?”

“What is that saying about power?  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  That pretty much sums Victor up.  The more power he got, the more power he wanted, until nothing else mattered to him, least of all a girlfriend that reminded him of a time when he was nothing important, nothing at all.  He didn’t want me anymore but he couldn’t let anyone else have me either.”

“But doesn’t that mean he might still care, deep down inside?”

“No,” she said with a disgusted smirk, “it doesn’t mean anything close to that.  What it does mean is that he thinks I might be dangerous to him somehow, as if I even cared enough to try and do anything to him.  He must think that as long as he knows exactly where I am, he can make sure I won’t hurt him.  I don’t know.  I don’t know him well enough anymore to really know what he thinks. I’m only guessing at this point.”

“I’m sorry.  I had no idea.  That must make this all even harder for you than it is for the rest of us.”

“No, I don’t think so.  I think it’s pretty horrible for all of us, each in our own way.  Now that’s enough of this talk.  I know I’m tired and you look like you’re practically sleeping while you talk.  Get some rest.  We’ll be there soon enough.”

That was when Meena dropped off to sleep and she did not wake up again until Kyra gently shook her, telling her that there was something happening she wasn’t going to want to miss.  She was still so tired, so tired that she wished she didn’t ever have to get up, but it was hard for her to say no to Kyra.

She would do pretty much anything she told her to, that’s how deep her loyalty was.  So she forced herself to raise her head and look with bleary eyes at her friend, who promptly laughed at her for her disheveled appearance.