Bond to Break (Stolen Obsessions #4)

24. Fyodor

CHAPTER 24

FYODOR

I don’t sleep. Instead, I watch her and think about the life I’ve led and the mistakes I’ve made and how they all led me to be in the perfect position to save her exactly when she needed it most. Is that what I’m actually doing? Saving someone who needed it.

Or is that what I’m telling myself so I can feel good about doing the wrong thing because I want her more than air?

Her hair sweeps over her shoulders and back like sheets of golden silk, accenting her dancer’s curves. While much of her muscle tone has suffered since the accident, she still has the most delicious curve at the waist and strong ass and thighs. She’s so fucking beautiful; the thought of losing all this frightens the hell out of me.

My hands skate over her, but it’s not explicitly sexual. She’s alive and warm beneath my touch, and I’m like a mechanic wanting to get the feel for the tuning of a machine.

To keep her with me, I need to know what makes her tick, what she dreams of, and what she thinks about when she’s not in pain. I’m also asking the mob doc to put her on an antidepressant, at least while she gets through the worst of this.

She’s in and out of sleep, and I’m sure it will stay that way for a while. My nose finds its way into her hair, and a rogue arm wraps around her stomach to pull her tight against me. The warm length of her body and the rhythm of her breathing keep me close to calm.

She’s put herself through a lot, and I want her to sleep, but occasionally, she says things to me. Some of them have been funny, but most just hurt and remind me how close I came to a world without Katya. Given I’m more than thirty years older than her, it’s a world I never want to see.

“I wanted to talk to my mama,” she tells me one of the times she wakes slightly. “When I died, I thought I’d be with Mama. God, I miss her.”

But she didn’t die, and for that, I am intensely grateful. Relief and anger war inside me, settling into something close to peace with her so close.

“I’d want to see mine too,” I agree, speaking softly in her ear like I’m instructing her dreams. “My father less so, but I doubt they’re together in the afterlife.”

“Why?” she asks in a dreamy tone, sliding her body back against mine, tucking our faces even closer together. “They weren’t in love?” Her voice croaks from the soreness of being underwater too long.

I laugh softly, but there’s no humor. The memories of my childhood are blotchy with full stretches of time when I can’t remember a thing. He wasn’t always around, especially if he had a new girlfriend. I got my title of Pakhan from him, and he was a man who readily took advantage of his position.

My mother didn’t even demand fidelity or sobriety from him, and he was still a mean bastard, a powerful man who beat us for fun. A man who made the way I treated my sons seem okay. I try not to think of how similar my face is to his, how much Irakily’s is. I fear too much of him lives in both of us.

I don’t explain these unhappy things to her. I don’t tell her how many of my scars are from him. He would smash beer bottles and cut me for entertainment. Sure, the one from my brow to my nose came from a mean mafioso with a knife, but I earned the best from my father.

I appreciate how innocent she still is despite how cruel life has been to her. Stronger than she realizes right now, sassy when she wants to be, genuinely fucking precious, and she nearly died on the bottom of my tub like a hairball in a clogged drain. I’m sick at that thought, furious with every cruel turn that brought her to that point.

I’m so fucking grateful she’s alive. I pray for the first time in a while, thanking God for leaving her here, and I make him a promise.

She won’t be alone in the world as long as I’m here.

When I think she’s back asleep, I decide I do want to talk about my mother. She died young too, not as bad as Katya’s parents or Sne?ana, but I’ve outlived my mother by a few years now.

“My mama didn’t have a lot of options, Kotyonok, a lot like you actually.” My hand absently runs across her arm. “She did her best. My father… I’m sure he’s exactly where he deserves to be.” This is the version of the truth I told my own children when they were young and asked why their grandma was so quiet and sad. My father died not long after her, but I would have paid the devil to take him sooner.

“Not so much like me,” she disagrees, surprising me that she’s paying that much attention, but she snores in the same breath, so I assume it’s all a part of her dream.

“What does that mean?”

A beat passes, another snore, and I nudge her softly.

“I’m not doing my best,” she continues like she never stopped speaking. “My best is passed, my best is dead, and I’m what’s left after the art has gone back to heaven or wherever it came from. I’m a shell.”

The idea that she sees herself that way doesn’t sit well with me, but I’m also not sure how to change it. One thing I know is that our image of ourselves, whether good or bad, is one of the most powerful influences on our reality. I’ve never been weaker in my life than when I feel it.

“As your biggest fan, that’s just not true.”

I plan to continue championing her as long as she’ll listen, but I realize she’s already back in a deep sleep, and she can’t hear me.

I spend some time thinking about Katya, how her dancing has defined her, how she clung so hard to Pietro. She didn’t have many friends before their accident and even less after. Anatoly had a conversation with Scott, who texted me to ask for the money. He wouldn’t admit to shit concerning the auction or the text he sent, but he confirmed a lot of my suspicions about her social circle.

Was all of that a response to losing her parents so young? She had only been in this country for five years before they died. That alone had to be profoundly isolating. I was able to discover all of this information about her with a little bit of well-placed digging, but what I can’t uncover is what I want to know most.

How did she feel about it? How did it shape her? Did it influence why she climbed in that tub? Did I?

My heart hurts for the girl pressed up against me. The selfless part of me wants her to sleep more than anything, but the selfish majority wants to wake her up and ask her endless questions.

She threw herself into ballet fully from the time she was a little girl, and that’s been a constant between countries, friends, losses, and now it’s gone. The way she clung to Pietro makes a lot of sense to me. When it’s hard to trust and bond, and you find one worthy soul? The feeling is unlike anything else, and I don’t blame her for how she clung on as hard as possible.

What if I think she’s a worthy soul, and it’s my time to cling to her? My arm snakes tighter around her, and in a strange peaceful lurch, I sleep too.

Somewhere late in the night when my hold has loosened, she turns toward me and rubs her face into my chest, stirring me from a dream I hadn’t realized I’d slipped into. I gasp before I remember exactly where I am and shut the fuck up.

“Are you okay?” Her soft voice wraps around me and slows my pounding heart. I don’t have many dreams. I’ve never slept deeply enough for that, and I didn’t even realize these particular memories were lurking in my subconscious in so much detail.

“What happened to your wife?” Her voice is rough from everything that’s happened, and I’m shocked that this is her first question. I don’t answer at first, but the hand stroking her back doesn’t stop either. “You said something about your wife.”

I’m surprised I called Arisia that, even in my sleep, but when I killed her, I yelled how she was supposed to be my wife again and again. Given the dream, it would make sense for me to be shouting it now.

“She had breast cancer. It took her pretty quickly once we found out. Why do you ask, Kotyonok?” I answer as fast as I can, hoping she doesn’t hear the way I hesitate. I only had one real wife, Sne?ana. That bitch I put in the ground doesn’t deserve a name. She surely didn’t get a tombstone.

I pull her against me and continue to rub her back. She settles into me, and after a moment, her breathing calms.

“That’s terrible. My parents were shot in a robbery at a liquor store, but at least they didn’t die slow.” I have to admit she’s acting strangely, and I’m not sure what it is. The Narcan would nullify any opiates in her system. I don’t fight it too much because I like this open side of her that says whatever she thinks. She’s usually so contained, and she’s right. There’s a real mercy in dying quickly.

“That’s true, beautiful.”

“You think I’m beautiful? I like that… I always thought you looked sad.”

“I am,” I agree with a laugh in the back of my throat, feeling no reason to lie to her about this safer topic of conversation. At least she’s not focused on the dream. “Though much of that sadness comes from my failings since her passing. I ultimately know I can’t control a disease, as much as it hurts to have watched her suffer and lost her.”

“How did you fail?” The question surprises me because I didn’t expect her to focus on the tiny detail.

Looking down at her, I find her eyes partially peeled back, and she’s so close to sleep I doubt she’ll remember this. Confiding in her ear with the scent of her hair in my nose sounds too good to be true. It’s been a long time since I was even tempted to unburden myself, and maybe if she had not tried to kill herself tonight, I’d stay quiet, but talking to her feels like exactly what I want to do.

“After my wife died, the boys were still young… I wasn’t a kind father. I beat them too often, and I tried too hard to make them the type of men they needed to be to run the Bratva…”

The dream gets louder. It’s a little worse than the reality of my memories, but not much. It’s hard to admit this out loud, to know that there are so many ways I failed those boys, and as much as I disapprove of their actions, I’m responsible for who they turned into.

“It was stupid to try to replace their mother, but that’s exactly what I thought they needed. They were only nine and twelve, and they weren’t allowed to cry with me. How the hell could they grieve with a man who wouldn’t let them cry?”

It’s one of my deepest regrets, one of my greatest failings. I taught them they couldn’t cry and left them full of all that grief when they lost their mother. I carry that pain beside my boys, and if I could change one thing in my life, I would do better for them.

She sniffs, and I look down to find she’s crying. Tears run in delicate streams down her cheeks, but her eyes are shut, and I think she’s mostly back to sleep.

“I can stop,” I promise.

But she says nothing, and I take that as validation to confess my sins to her as she sleeps.

“I thought they needed a woman to hold them while they cried, to make them feel okay again without her.”

“Needed you...” My arms tighten around her, and I control myself from squeezing hard enough to hurt her. God, don’t I know that now.

“I picked the wrong woman, and rather than comforting my sons, she took advantage of them. Daniil, she just manipulated, and I believe she would have eventually gotten to him too, but Irakily…”

I struggle to even think about what happened, let alone admit it. Why do I want to admit everything to her? Why does it feel like my soul weighs ten million pounds, and if I just confess my sins to this one girl, everything will be okay?

“She convinced him she loved him. He was just a boy, and he didn’t know better. So when she asked him to…” The truth sticks in my throat.

“To?”

Is she really going to make me say it? Do I have to spell my failings out for her so explicitly? Is she awake or asleep, and why the hell am I risking her remembering any of this tomorrow? Knowledge is power, and when people know things about you, they can use them against you, and that’s a weakness.

Her eyes are still closed, her cheek pressed to my chest, and the way she leans against me like I’m the greatest source of comfort she has in the world gives me a little comfort back. She’s the one who lost her virginity, but I’m the one who can’t help but cling to her. I am pathetic, and I’m ashamed of myself, but that’s true in so many goddamn ways.

“She started a predatory relationship with him. She convinced him she was in love with him and they would be together. She was having sex with him, and…” I breathe as I remember the pictures I found in his room.

“No,” she says, not realizing how much this is taking from me, and somehow, her sweet cluelessness makes this possible to say. It would be so much worse if she was listening deeply and trying to convince me it was all okay, that I need not feel guilty.

“She convinced him to kill me. That if he got rid of me, the two of them could finally be together. He, at thirteen, would be boss, and she would help him run things. When I caught him over my bed with that knife…”

I can’t say any more, and I don’t tell her I smacked him, or that he cried to me for the first time since his mama died that his stepmother loved him and not me. I’ve never been so sick. I failed Irakily; I failed Sne?ana’s memory. I killed the second woman he loved, and while she deserved it, he hated me for that too.

After that, I never struck my sons again. I cut that bitch’s throat and left her to die on the front steps of our home as a message to anyone who would come for me or my sons. That message spread far, fast, and wide, perhaps carrying different words than I originally intended.

My heart aches for my sons and the life they might’ve had with a different father, for the wife I loved and lost, for this girl I bought snuggling against me who thought it was better to die than be herself, and I wonder, truly wonder, if God just might forgive me after all of this.

I know if I were him, I couldn’t.

The day I found out what I allowed to happen to my son is the day I gave up confession and asking for penance. I don’t want God to forgive me. I should suffer for my failings. My sons should hate me for the things I’ve done.

“I feel so bad for all of you.”

Of all the things I thought she might say, that takes me by surprise.

“How do you feel bad for me?”

“You tried, didn’t you?” her sleep voice asks.

“Sometimes we try and we fail, Kotyonok.”