“Was… was he okay?”
Shaun smiled. “Yes, very much so, and the hospital staff got to know his entire family while he was recovering.” She stopped speaking verbally and started using sign language. Translators are extremely important people. They work with the U-N, Doctors Without Borders, the W-H-O. They are invaluable. There are so many wonderful things you can do with a degree in linguistics.
Saskia grinned from ear-to-ear and signed, I want to do it. I’d love to travel around the world doing translation work for important organizations. She glanced shyly away. Sort of like what you do with Doctors Without Borders.
Shaun’s heart swelled and she felt as though she was forging a genuine friendship with the younger woman. “There are plenty of translators working with Doctors Without Borders. It would be an excellent choice.”
Saskia’s look of hope melted away as quick as it came. Only instead of the carefully cultivated scowl she usually wore, she now looked crestfallen. “My parents will never go for it. They want me to marry into the life and have babies. Like Leeza. They look to us to spread the Koba genes.”
“And you don’t want that sort of life?” Shaun asked gently.
Saskia blanched, her face going pale. She looked visibly shaken which Shaun thought was an extreme reaction for a pretty basic question.
Concerned, Shaun asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yes, of course I am.” She stiffened her shoulders and hardened her gaze. “I will do as my parents ask. My duty is to the family.”
Saskia’s statement sent a chill through Shaun. The Koba family went beyond just tight knit. Their obsession with family bordered on cult-like. As far as she knew, anyone with even a drop of Koba blood lived either in the house or on the grounds. She’d found out the day before that two of the men on Jozef’s team were cousins to the family and several members of security were distantly related. She wasn’t surprised that someone holding the position of daughter to the boss would be closely monitored, her life mapped out for her. Like royalty, only Saskia was mafia royalty.
It was a grim insight into Shaun’s own future and any possible children she might have with Jozef. This thought sent her mind spinning into an abyss of emotion. The idea of having Jozef’s child made her feel inexplicably happy, yet she barely knew him. She couldn’t trust him to do the right thing when it came to children. She didn’t want to raise a family in the Koba household, under the thumb of mobsters. A group of people who would have thought nothing of her execution. Yet, she might already be pregnant.
“Everything okay over there?” There was an edge of sarcasm to Saskia’s tone.
“I’m fine, thank you.” She tried to shake off the feeling of someone walking across her grave and focused back on the conversation at hand. “If you really want to go to university you should push for it.”
“How?” Saskia asked skeptically. “Have you tried asking my parents for something you know they won’t approve of? It’s worse than just a no. They’ll have you watched every minute of every day to make sure you don’t take a single step out of line. They’re worse than cookies, or whatever the internet uses to ferret out every detail of our lives so they can come at us with personalized advertising, like I ever asked for a unicorn shaped dildo.”
Shaun giggled at the descriptive complaint before sobering. “I’ll help you,” she assured the other woman. “We just need to tell them something they want to hear. I bet your family could use a translator with some of their business associates.”
Saskia’s eyes grew round and she straightened in her seat. “They do use translators sometimes!” she said excitedly, but then her face fell again. “But I don’t want to do that kind of work. It’s not as… important… as the things you do.”
The glow within Shaun began to spread. She really had managed to pick up an ally in this fierce young woman. “You don’t have to work for your family; you just need to convince them to let you go to university. Once they agree, you’ll have four years to pick out your dream job and work on them from the inside. When you graduate, they’ll be so proud of your accomplishments that they’ll have no choice but to let you work wherever you want.”
Saskia looked completely blown away by Shaun’s logic. “That’s brilliant!”
Shaun laughed. “I’ve been known to have a good