The annoying persistent doorbell buzzing woke me up.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

“Ugh, go away,” I mumbled under my breath.

There was no point in getting up. Ever since the incident with Ryan a week ago, my phone has been blowing up and so has my doorbell. The reporters and paparazzi have been harassing me so badly that on my third day at work, after pictures of Ryan banging a woman went viral, the head of the ER department asked me not to come back to work. I needed that job, not only for the paycheck but also to finish my residency, so I could be fully qualified. Besides, it helped to throw myself into work to get me through the days, this heartbreak and humiliation.

She said to stay away till things calmed down. I could understand her request; those reporters were getting out of hand. Entering the ER, faking injuries, even obtaining real injuries, just to get close to me and snap a picture.

I thought as the time went on, the interest would ease up. It didn’t. If anything, it became an even bigger topic.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

I put the pillow on top of my head, ignoring the persistent buzzing.

“I know you are in there,” a familiar female voice yelled. “You can’t ignore me anymore.”

Could it be-

Shifting off the bed, I headed towards the door and peeked through the hole.

“Oh my God,” I swung the door open. “Tatiana!”

“Yes, it’s me,” she announced, strolling into my small apartment.

I quickly shut the door and locked it. I wouldn’t put it past those damn paparazzi to come in if they found an unlocked door.

“What are you doing here?” She lived between New Orleans, D.C., and New York. We barely saw each other anymore.

“I saw what happened,” she replied, like that explained it all. When I continued staring at her blankly, she let out a deep sigh. “You needed saving. I sent you like twenty messages, and you didn’t reply to a single one.” I stared at those pale blue eyes so much like her brother’s. I really, really tried not to remember those eyes and that night, but it was hard not to when looking at my best friend. It was probably why I avoided her and her brother, Sasha, so much. I loved them both but the risk of running into Vasili and their resemblance had me running and hiding.

A lot of good did that to me. I still ran into him.

I headed to my little kitchen, Tatiana right on my trail.

“I’m sorry. My phone has been blowing up. There are thousands of messages and calls. I just-” I tried to justify myself but what could I say. I was just too depressed after losing my boyfriend and my job in the same week. “I didn’t feel like going through them all.”

“You are just hiding,” she announced, without beating around the bush. “But you should have at least read the messages from me.”

I took a deep breath. She was right, there was no point in denying. I was hiding and not in the best frame of mind. I have been publicly humiliated, my entire life ripped to pieces, and to top it all off, I couldn’t even throw myself into my job. Because I lost that too.

“I lost my job,” I muttered.

The expression on her face was that of shock.

“What?” Her voice was screechy when she got upset. “Why? How?”

“The reporters and paparazzi were swarming the ER.” Wrapping my arms around me, I felt like such a failure. “Faking injuries, making real injuries, and it just wasn’t safe. For anyone.”

“That’s bullshit,” she spat. “And you just let them fire you?”

“Tatiana, I wouldn’t have, but nurses were having to work sixteen hour shifts because of those idiots. It wasn’t fair, and Janet, our head of ER, was just trying to look out for everyone.”

“She sure as hell wasn’t looking out for you.”

I shrugged my shoulders. There was nothing she could do really. I just knew I had to find another job and finish my residency training. It was the last step required, and I was almost at the finish line.

“I’d offer you something to drink,” I muttered, “but the fridge is empty, and I’m all out of coffee.”

“Do you have any wine?” I shook my head in response. “Any kind of alcohol?”

“Maybe a Kahlua,” I muttered.

I hadn’t been to the grocery store in weeks. Initially, it was because I was too busy, and now, because I didn’t want to show my face anywhere. Between my job and Ryan, I barely ever ate at home, so I kept the bare minimum in the fridge. And my alcohol supply was pretty much nonexistent. I definitely regretted that this past week.

Tatiana strode to me and took my face between her hands. God, when she did that, she reminded me of a mother. And Tatiana was just a few months older than me.

The memory of my mom always hurt. I missed her. She never got to see me graduate from college. It was another blow after Vasili squashed my heart with a hammer. And all my ideals about my mother. There were so many secrets that lurked in the past, and sometimes I wished I remained ignorant of them all. But thanks to Vasili, they all came out in the open. A few months later, Mother was diagnosed with stage five cancer and passed away two short weeks later.

It was the worst time in my life. I had a fairly happy life, but that last year of college, after that Halloween night, things turned dark, and it took me a long time to get through them.

But no matter what, I still loved my mother. She was a good and caring mother to me my entire life. I couldn’t punish her for something she had done when she was barely twenty. People make mistakes. God, just look at me! How many mistakes have I made?

Except for Vasili Nikolaev. That man was cold as ice and never made a mistake.

Mom finally lost the battle one month before I graduated. In the span of a few months, my heart broke with the loss of my mother and the man I lusted after since my freshman year.

I graduated summa cum laude and walked across the stage feeling more alone than ever in my entire life. It was also the last time I saw Vasili who came to support Tatiana. Ironically, she avoided him, and for the first time, so did I.

“How are you?” Her pale blue eyes searched my face, and suddenly I felt too vulnerable. Too exposed. Ever since all the shit happened with Ryan, I had seen pity, envy, glee on people’s faces. I ignored it. But not a single person has asked me how I was doing.

A lump in my throat formed again and my lip trembled. I shouldn’t have been thinking about Vasili or my mother. I wasn’t sure whether I was numb or was it something else, but this with Ryan didn’t hurt as bad as it did with Vasili. The worst part about what happened with Ryan was that after two years, he couldn’t even give me a courtesy of telling me I wasn’t enough. He preferred for me to find out by witnessing it and walking away from him.

Tears stung in my eyes and I blinked hard, trying to hold them back. I felt the need to hide from the world’s prying eyes and lick my wounds.

“Fine,” I barely got the words out.

The look she gave me told me she didn’t believe me. We have been best friends since our first day at Georgetown University in D.C. We were roommates freshman year and stuck together from that first day. We were put together by happenstance. I didn’t know the connection between my mother and Tatiana’s family when we met. The universe’s own cruel joke, and I was at the center of it.

It still didn’t diminish the fact that Tatiana and I got close. We grinded together through all-nighter assignments, exams, cried our hearts out after boys, and ate our way through a lot of ice cream when we were sad. Needless to say, she knew when I was lying.

“No, you are not fine. And we are going to do something about it.”

The look on her face told me she wouldn’t take no for an answer. I just hoped she wasn’t up to something. Usually, she was. During the first few years of college, we were always up to something and getting in trouble. Living in D.C. gave us a lot of opportunities to enjoy a big city life and party hard. Trouble just followed. It was her oldest brother that usually bailed us out.

Don’t think about him now, I ordered myself.

“If you are thinking about drinking all night in a bar,” I told her in resignation, “I can’t. I don’t have the same alcohol tolerance level. Besides, there are paparazzi on each corner just waiting to attack.”

I was just tired. I needed time to rebound and form a new plan. Yes, that was all I needed. Fuck, I am doomed. The last time it took me several years to rebound. But now I have experience, I told myself. I should be able to rebound faster. Besides, there was a lot more that happened after Vasili dumped me after a one-night stand.

My mother’s illness. The baby. Skeletons that came out into the open.

“I think you should come to New Orleans with me.” My eyes snapped to Tatiana in shock, and I started shaking my head. “Hear me out,” she quickly justified. “That city has a different tempo and different audience from L.A. Most people probably won’t even recognize you or know who Ryan Johnson is.” A pang of hurt hit my chest. How could he have done that? He literally just asked me to move in with him and then did this? It made no sense at all.

“Isabella, are you listening?”

I blinked my eyes, eyeing her perfectly styled blonde hair. She wore a Chanel pink skirt with a white blouse and white heels. Her light blonde hair fell down her back in a slick curtain. She looked so put together, just like her life. On the other hand, my whole life was a complete mess. I was a disaster on two legs.

“You look really good,” I mumbled, unsure what else to say.

“That’s because I haven’t had my heart just slashed in the most public way possible.”

I strode to the couch and sat down in the corner, folding my legs underneath me. It was the first week of October, but I felt cold. Probably because the owner of the building controlled the A/C and turned it to freezing temperatures.

“Come to New Orleans with me,” she repeated, her voice soft. “Is there anything else for you here? Would anyone miss you?”

No, there wasn’t anything else for me here. And no, nobody would miss me. I had a job as an ER physician and a good team. I lost it. I had a boyfriend. I lost that too. I thought our relationship graduated to the next level when he asked me to move in with him.

I couldn’t afford not to have a job. Rent in L.A. was outrageously expensive. Between rent and my school loan, I was barely surviving. But my job and Ryan made it all worth it. At least that was what I kept telling myself for the past few months.

Now, I just couldn’t wrap my head around Ryan’s betrayal. The soft words he spoke that last night we spent together before he went on the tour kept replaying in my mind. What did I miss?

“Isabella?”

My eyes burned, and I felt a tear escape, rolling down my cheek. I wiped it with the back of my hand, angry at myself. Tatiana sat next to me and wrapped her arms around me.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I should learn to be more sensitive. I didn’t mean it that way but you have been saying how you contemplated moving. Maybe this is a sign.”

“It’s just so pathetic,” I whimpered, feeling sorry for myself. “If I left this city right now, nobody would even miss me or notice me gone.”

“The paparazzi would,” she attempted to joke.

I gave her a wobbly smile at best. “I just don’t understand what happened.”

“He’s a jerk who doesn’t deserve you,” she spat angry. “Come to New Orleans with me. You could stay with me while you look for a job. It could be college all over again.”

Despite a heavy heart, I chuckled. “You really want to relive those years?”

“Fuck, yeah. Those were the best years of our lives.” There was wistfulness in her voice. “Don’t you think so?”

I nodded. They were simple years, till that last year. Then everything went up in flames thanks to her oldest brother. But she didn’t need to know about that. Nobody knew about it except for the two of us. The problem was that I didn’t want to see Vasili again. I had no idea where he lived, but the siblings usually remained in the close vicinity of each other.

“So, what do you say?” she asked eagerly.

Taking a deep breath, I met her hopeful expression. “I have to move, yes. But I don’t want to live with you while hunting for an apartment. Your brothers are there, and I don’t-”

“No, no, no,” she cut me off. “I have my own place and my brothers have their own. Besides, for the past few weeks they were in Russia and will slowly start spending more time there than here. In fact, that’s where they’ll be for the foreseeable future. It would be just the two of us. Well, Katerina is there too. She ensures the house runs smoothly.”

I shook my head. Our lives were so vastly different, it was mind boggling. Before I met her, I had never known a single person that had a cook, maid, and entire staff to run a household. But that was exactly how Tatiana and her family lived. When we first met, I heard whispers about her family being part of the criminal underworld, but it was so far-fetched, I never paid it any attention. Initially, I had no clue what her family did for a living, but I knew they owed extensive real estate and multiple businesses. During our college years, I never asked, more interested in her friendship than anything else, so we never discussed it.

But after that night with Vasili and my mother’s death, there were so many secrets revealed. I had never even fathomed my mother could have kept so many damn, dark secrets. How did I not know? How did I not see? My mother’s journal I found after her death was eye-opening, that was for sure.

Tatiana’s family was part of a mafia. Scratch that, they were the damn mafia. But I couldn’t cast the first stone, because among all my mother’s written words I found out my heritage, and my father was a much worse man than Vasili’s father.

“I don’t know,” I told her honestly. “I’m not exactly in the best frame of mind.”

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Both of us jumped at the doorbell sound.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered to myself. “I wish they would just go away.”

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Tatiana got up and strode to the intercom. “Yes?”

“Miss Taylor, I have a few questions that-”

“Stop harassing me, or I’m calling the police,” Tatiana threatened.

“Just one-”

“No.”

She cut the conversation and strode back to me, like she was on a runway show.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

“When was the last time you left the apartment?” she questioned me.

I thought back. It was the day that I was told not to come back to work. “A week ago.”

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

“That’s enough of this,” she exclaimed. “Spend October with me. If you don’t like it in New Orleans, we’ll find someplace you like. Just not in this forsaken city.”

“At least the surfing is good here,” I muttered.

She gave me a blank look. “That was very random, and I didn’t know you still surfed.”

I shrugged. “Occasionally, I do.” After all, I grew up in Florida, right on the ocean.

“I can’t just get up and leave,” I told her. She might have that luxury but I didn’t.

“Yes, you can. I’ll handle it all.” That was the scary part. She could handle it all in a matter of hours. I knew firsthand she could handle anything and everything. “I just want one thing in return,” she added, a mischievous gleam in her eyes.

Immediately suspicious, I watched her for any hints of trouble. “What is that?”

“You go to a Halloween party with me,” she grinned. I hadn’t seen her in almost eight months, but sometimes, she acted like we were still in college. And truthfully, I haven’t been to a Halloween party since my senior year. It was my least favorite holiday. The memories of that night were bitter but I still couldn’t muster the will to regret it. Nobody had ever made me feel the way Vasili did that night. “There is this club, The Den of Sin.”

My head snapped to hers. “What?”

“Yes, can you believe it!” She continued all giddy. “Talk about coincidence. They are holding a Halloween party. I want to go there with someone, and I know you won’t ditch me. Besides, considering it was our dorm room name, it is a sign. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know if that is a good sign,” I muttered under my breath while my heart sped up despite my brain’s objections.

Reluctantly I recalled what happened during the last Halloween party. Even after all the cruel words spoken by Vasili, my body still warmed at the memories of that night. Nobody had ever felt like him or made my body respond like him.

“Besides, it is you that always ditches me,” I objected, pushing memories of her eldest brother out of my mind. “I’d ruin your time with my mood. I’m not exactly in the party mood.”

“Give it time,” she quickly replied, jumping at the opportunity. I didn’t shut it down firmly enough. “It is a few weeks away. I don’t want to see you drag around for months and months.” She referred to the last time I was dumped by the man I gave my virginity to. “You never told me who it was,” she complained. “And we are best friends. We are not supposed to have secrets.”

This was one secret I couldn’t share with her though. “We granted each other one secret,” I reminded her.

“So does that mean you are coming?”

I knew it was time to leave L.A., but after the encounter with Vasili three weeks ago, I knew I couldn’t be around him. I knew I should have mentioned to Tatiana that I saw Vasili three weeks ago, but it was so much easier not to mention it. I needed more time to get over him.

He won’t be there, I justified.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

I groaned, sick and tired of that sound.

“I’m visiting you in New Orleans, while I decide where I’m going next,” I told her, my mind made up.

She squealed so hard, I felt a headache coming on.