25. Dahlia
25
DAHLIA
I still don’t know how much time has passed. When I wake up again, I lie shivering on the bed, keeping my eyes closed. It’s the third—maybe the fourth time I’ve woken up since that first time, but I don’t know how long it’s been between each. Twice, I’ve been knocked out again, when the man who came to question me the first time—whose name I now know is Ivan…or at least the name he gave me is Ivan. Once, or maybe twice more, I’ve fallen into a disjointed kind of sleep. I don’t feel like I’ve entirely bounced back from whatever they keep drugging me with—I still feel foggy and heavy, like I’m not entirely sure if my limbs would cooperate if I tried to escape.
The baby . I’ve tried not to think about what might have happened to my baby. At least once, one of the men who Ivan brought in to try to force me to answer his questions has punched me in the ribs. The drug alone might have harmed the baby, but I have no way of knowing any of that. So I force myself not to think about it, because there’s nothing I can do. It will only drive me crazy. And I feel like I’m hanging onto my sanity by a shred as it is.
The last time Ivan came in to question me, he brought two men with him. One to hurt me every time I refused to answer, and another to stand just behind the chair, commenting on all the things he’d like to do to me. All the things the other men have talked about doing to me. And, according to Ivan, the next time he comes in here, if I refuse to talk, he’ll let them. One by one, until I talk, or he starts letting them use me in pairs. In groups. Until I tell him what he needs to know to get to Alek.
How long can I hold out on this? I don’t want to betray Alek. There’s no part of me that wants that. But I can only endure so much. I’m not some kind of soldier, trained to endure torture and pain. I’m just one woman, and, I can admit, one who has been fairly spoiled throughout her life. I’m tough in my own ways, and I’m stubborn, and I can handle myself in normal circumstances.
These aren’t normal. Not by any stretch of the word.
I close my eyes again, wanting to fall back into the blissful ignorance of sleep. I know they’re keeping me drugged, in the water they’ve given me intermittently or the bland food I was given once and barely managed to choke down before it threatened to come back up again, but that thought flits away, difficult to hold onto as I start to drift off again.
When I’m jolted awake again, the first thing that hits my consciousness is a sharp pop. I hear it again, pop, pop, pop —and I faintly think that it sounds like gunshots. Like the sound of the guns in Sal’s parking lot, when Alek came out and rescued me. Like the sound of the times my father would take me to the firing range back in D.C., telling me I should know how to use a gun to protect myself.
I’ve never owned one. Never wanted one. But I know how to shoot one, for all the good it’s done me now.
I hear the dull sound again, trying to pull myself out of the fog of sleep. They did drug me, this last time they brought me water, I think. They must have. Maybe that was Ivan’s plan, to bring his men in here and let them have their way with me while I was half-conscious, thinking that the next time I had my faculties, I’d be eager to answer his questions.
The thought sends a shudder through me, bile burning the back of my throat. I hear footsteps somewhere outside the locked door of my room, loud and harsh, like someone is running. There are more of those same sounds, the dull gunshots, and then the door to my room slams open, crashing into the wall behind it.
I think I see Alek through my blurred vision, standing in the doorway, his sandy blond hair plastered to his head with sweat and a gun in his hands. I could swear I see Dimitri and other men behind him, out in the hall, looking back and forth. But I’m hallucinating. I must be.
I close my eyes, wanting a different dream. One that won’t hurt so much when I wake up again and I’m alone. But the dream persists, even with my eyes closed. I feel something thrown over me, slick and cool like the lining of a jacket, wrapped around me as arms slide under me. There’s a a warm, broad surface against me, and the familiar scent of Alek’s skin, cedar and leather, envelops me.
Maybe I do want this dream. Even if it will hurt when I wake up, it feels good now. I lean into the strong arms holding me against his chest, opening my eyes only briefly as I feel him carrying me out of the room. What I’m seeing can’t be real. Bodies on the floor, blood pooling around them, spattered on the walls. A scene of brutal carnage, as if Alek and Dimitri tore their way through this building to get to me, killing everyone in their path.
I know I’m dreaming. This is what I’d dream about, isn’t it? My husband cared enough to come for me, carrying me away after rescuing me from the men who wanted to hurt me. Safety. Warmth. Love .
A cracked sound bubbles from my lips at that last thought. Alek doesn’t love me, and I don’t love him. I don’t. That’s not a part of our story, and it never will be.
My last thought, as I feel cool air hit my clammy skin and hear the creak of a door, is that this dream feels more real than I ever thought a dream could.
That I wish I could stay in it, instead of waking up again.
—
When I wake again, I feel very, very different.
The first thing I think is that the air smells familiar, like lavender. Everything around me feels soft and warm, and I don’t feel foggy any longer. My eyes feel a little sticky, my mouth a little dry, but I’ve lost that sensation of being held underwater, like I can’t fight my way out of a fog.
When I open my eyes, I’m in my room at the mansion. I recognize it immediately—that I’m back in my bed, in my room, and I’m safe . I wasn’t dreaming—or I still am.
For a moment, my head swims, fear gripping me and clogging my throat. If the first dream would have been painful to wake up from, this one would be unbearable. To be safe again, really safe, away from the horrors that Ivan and his men wanted to inflict on me, and then to wake up and find that it isn’t real might break me.
I dare a glance across the room, and my heart nearly stops in my chest. Maybe I really am still dreaming. That’s the only explanation for the fact that I see Alek across the room, slumped in the chair next to the window, his eyes closed as if he’s sleeping.
I’ve never seen him like that—sleeping, at peace. He’s always tense, on edge, like a predator in a cage pacing. Always wound tight. I’ve never seen him calm.
He’s always devastatingly handsome, gorgeous in a sharp-edged, dangerous way that has left my heart racing from the moment I met him. But like this, he looks softer. Beautiful in an almost approachable way. I stare at him, wanting to just look at him like this. I’m still not convinced that it isn’t a dream. And I am convinced that once I wake up, I’ll never see it again. Not him, not like this. Not after what he said to me and how everything since then has played out.
His eyes open, as if he feels me staring at him, and they widen suddenly. He sits bolt upright, shoving himself up out of the chair, and crosses the room in a few quick strides until he’s at my bedside. He looks down at me, his face full of worry, and for the first time since I woke in that room where I was kept, I start to wonder if maybe I haven’t been dreaming after all.
“Alek?” I whisper his name, and his face nearly crumples. He sinks down to the edge of the bed, clasping my face in his hands, and he presses his forehead to mine.
“Dahlia.” He whispers my name back, in a way that I’ve never heard before. “God, I’m so sorry, zhena . This was all my fault. I’m so fucking sorry?—”
“Wait.” I blink, pulling away from him, and for the first time he simply lets me go, sitting back with that same pained expression on his face. I push myself up in bed, feeling stronger than I remember having felt in days, and I look at him for a long moment. “I’m not dreaming?”
Alek frowns. “What do you mean?”
“I thought—” I blink again, reaching up to rub my eyes. “I thought I dreamed it all. The rescue, the blood, the bodies, you?—”
Another memory flits back into my head, a part of what I thought was that long dream. Alek carrying me up the stairs in the mansion, Evelyn just behind him, and him snarling at her to not touch his wife . Dimitri snapping back, telling him not to speak to Evelyn that way, and Alek continuing up the stairs as if he hadn’t heard, clutching me to his chest as if he couldn’t bear to let me go.
“You killed them?” I whisper. “All of them?”
“Every single fucking one,” Alek growls, his expression hardening, dark and intense. “They’ll never lay a finger on you again, Dahlia, not a single one of them—” His gaze sweeps over my face, and he gets that pained look in his eyes again. I remember how many times I was hit, and I wince.
“How bad is it?” I whisper, and then fear jolts through me as I remember the punches to my ribs, my stomach. “Oh god, Alek, the baby?—”
“The baby is fine.” He reaches out, grabbing my hand. “You’re fine, Dahlia. You’re beautiful. The bruises make me want to go back and kill every man who laid a hand on you all over again, but they don’t make you any less beautiful. And they’ll fade. Not like—” He stops, his lips pressing together. “Not like what was left on me. You’ll heal and it will be like nothing happened.”
I frown at him, not entirely understanding. “What?—”
“I should have told you the truth. As soon as you came and told me about the man at the bar, I should have told you.” His thumb sweeps over the back of my knuckles. “I’m sorry for all of it, zhena ?—”
“You’re sure the baby is okay?” I sit up a little more, and I can tell that my ribs and my body as a whole are sore, but not as much as I would have expected. “How long was I out for, after you came and got me? How long was I gone?” I rub my hand over my face. “It’s all a blur now.”
Alek swallows hard. “It’s been the better part of a week since you left. You slept for two days after we brought you back. It took some time for Dimitri and I to track down where they took you. But they’re all dead,” he repeats, as if saying it again will make me feel safer. “All of them. And the doctor came to look at you while you were sleeping. You and the baby both have a clean bill of health.”
Relief washes over me at that. “So they’re all gone? Everyone who wanted you?—”
Alek tenses. “Everyone that we found at the warehouse where they were keeping you is dead. As far as the man who wants me, and his associates—I’m still working on tracking him down. But we killed every man who we found in that warehouse, when we found you.”
I bite my lip. Ivan might still be alive, then. And the threat to Alek is still out there, which means?—
“What’s going on, Alek?” I look up at him, hoping that he meant it when he said he should have told me the truth—that he’ll tell me now. “Please, tell me.”
Alek draws in a slow breath, letting it out as he looks away for a moment. “It’s not an easy story to tell,” he says quietly. “I told Dimitri some of it. And I’m ashamed, zhena ,” he admits quietly. “I should have told both of you much sooner. I should have asked Dimitri for a bodyguard for you. I should have—” His jaw tightens. “There’s so many things I should have done differently.”
“So tell me now,” I urge gently. “Tell me what happened.”
Alek’s thumb sweeps over my knuckles again. “Seven years ago, I met a woman.” He swallows hard. “Her name was Elia Volnova. She said she’d come to New York for college—she was enrolled in Columbia. History. I met her at a bar—I thought at the time she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on.” He looks at me almost apologetically as he says it. “I don’t think that any longer.” he adds, and I manage a small smile.
“I’m not sure if that’s true right now,” I murmur, and Alek’s forehead creases.
“It is, zhena ,” he says emphatically, reaching up to touch my cheek gently. “I swear, Dahlia, all the things I’ve done since we’ve met, everything I’ve said to you that’s hurt you?—”
“Just tell me the story,” I say quietly. My chest aches, every part of me wanting to cling to this side of Alek that I’ve never seen before, this gentler, softer man. This part of him that I wanted to believe existed, and that he convinced me never could or would. Now I’m afraid to believe that it’s real, and not just another lie.
Alek nods, pressing his lips together. “We were together for two years. A little over a year into the relationship, her father—Gregoriy Volnov—came from Moscow to meet my father. Neither Dimitri nor I ever bought into the idea of arranged marriages between families, but I thought Elia and I were in love, and I was fine with the idea. But my father refused.”
I frown. “So you split up?”
Alek’s jaw tightens. “No. Now I wish to God we had. But I was stubborn—and, like I said, thought I was in love. I told Elia I didn’t care if either of our fathers approved of the marriage, and she said hers did. She made me believe she was madly in love with me. She wanted marriage, a family, all of it. She convinced me that she should go off of birth control, that if she was pregnant, my father couldn’t argue with us marrying. I hadn’t met her father when he came to visit—mine refused to allow me in the meeting and Elia and I ended up leaving town for a few days after he and I argued about it—and she wanted me to go to Moscow with her to meet him and the rest of her family. I wasn’t sure—mostly because I knew how much strife it would cause with my father—but she convinced me. She told me that she thought she might be pregnant already, that she’d find out for sure while we were there, and she wanted to be able to tell her family in person if it was true.”
Alek’s voice cracks slightly if he speaks, and my chest tightens, my eyes burning. I can hear the pain in his voice with every word, and I want to reach out and wrap my arms around him, pull him down to me and hold him there. However this story ends, it won’t be happy, and I’m beginning to understand why this pregnancy has been such a sensitive topic for him.
“We went to Moscow, and the first night, we had dinner at her father’s home. Something felt—off. A gut instinct, I suppose, from years of being my father’s enforcer, but I ignored it. I told myself I was being paranoid. That there was no reason for anything to be wrong.” Alek grits his teeth, and his hand tightens around mind. “They drugged me that night, at dinner. I woke up in a cell, in the lower part of the Volnov compound. I was terrified for Elia, more than myself—until she came to see me.”
He goes silent for a long moment, and my stomach twists with dread. “Alek?—”
He shakes his head. “Just let me finish,” he manages, his voice tight. “I found out that night that all of it was a lie. The entire relationship, beginning to end. My father had angered the wrong people in Moscow, men high up in the Bratva hierarchy there. The visit from the Volnov pakhan had nothing to do with marriage, but to try to convince my father to give them what they wanted—part of his territory, and money to pay off the insult he’d given them. When he refused, they continued with their plan that they’d laid from the start.”
“Was it her?” I whisper, pieces beginning to fall into place, and Alek nods sharply.
“She was sent to seduce me from the start—to get me to fall in love with her. If my father refused to bend, as they expected he would, she was instructed to get me to Moscow. There, I’d be imprisoned and… convinced to turn on my family. To return, murder my father and brother, and take over the Yashkov Bratva under the control of the Volnov family, as a proxy.”
“You can’t be serious.” Even as I say it, I know he is. There’s no way this is anything but the absolute truth, from the look on his face—and I think of the scars I felt that first night, the map of suffering written across his body that he’s never let me see. “Oh god, Alek?—”
“They tortured me for information about the family, and then they tortured me to try to convince me to go along with their plan. When I refused, they would bring me to the brink of death, allow me to heal, and then they would start over again.” He swallows audibly, every muscle in his body gone tight with the memories. “After a certain point, they no longer believed they could turn me. So instead, Gregoriy Volnov simply took pleasure in finding out how long he could keep me alive in that cycle. It lasted five years before I managed to escape—eight months ago.”
“What happened to Elia?” I whisper, and Alek shrugs.
“So far as I know? She’s living her life. She only came to visit me that one time, to tell me the truth, and I never saw her again. She did her job,” he adds bitterly. “After that, she had no reason to come and see me.”
“Alek, I’m so sorry.” I push myself up so that I’m sitting up fully, and I reach out, touching his cheek with my fingertips. He flinches, but he doesn’t pull away, and I lay my palm against his cheek, turning his face towards mine. “I had no idea. I mean—I knew something had happened, but I couldn’t have imagined?—”
“Of course not.” His voice is rough around the edges, choked with emotion. I can feel it in the air between us, tense and thick, everything that he’s been hiding for so long starting to come out. “How could you? I didn’t tell you anything. I should have, zhena . I should have told you all of it, should have protected you better?—”
“It makes sense now,” I whisper. “Why you didn’t trust me, why you thought I was lying—Alek, I understand you not telling me. You couldn’t even let yourself believe anything I was saying. And why would you, after—” Everything that’s happened between us shifts in my head, cast in a different light now. One colored by an awful betrayal and unimaginable pain, suffering that I can’t begin to imagine enduring. I spent just a few days in that warehouse, and I can’t imagine torture worse than that, for years and years—how anyone could bear it. “I understand, Alek. Or, I mean—I can’t understand , but I know why?—”
He leans forward, his mouth capturing mine. I freeze for a moment, startled by the sudden kiss, and his hand slides behind my head, cupping it gently as his tongue slides over my lower lip, pushing into my mouth as it opens on a gasp. For a brief moment, he kisses me with complete abandon, a groan vibrating against my mouth as his fingers thread through my hair.
And then, just as quickly, he pulls back.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I—you’re still healing. I shouldn’t have touched you. I—I don’t know how to do this, Dahlia. I’ve forgotten—” He swallows hard. “In a lot of ways, I think I’ve forgotten how to be a man. How to feel like anything other than an animal. It—those five years reduced me to that, in that cage. And once I was free, I didn’t feel real any longer. Nothing did, until?—”
“Until what?” I whisper, and his gaze flits to my mouth and up again, that hungry look that I recognize in his eyes. I understand it now, why he seemed so starved that first night, why he wanted me so badly. Five years of loneliness, of pain, of not being touched in any way that didn’t hurt. Although?—
“Until you,” he murmurs. “I was afraid to fuck anyone after I escaped. I was afraid I’d fall again, be tricked, be betrayed—I was waiting for it. I thought she’d ruined me. And then I saw you, and I had to have you. I couldn’t—I told myself it would be the one night. That’s why I was so angry when I saw you again. I was terrified of falling for someone who would hurt me like that again. So I pushed you away. I tried to hurt you so you’d hate me. And I’m so fucking sorry for it?—
“That night—” I swallow hard, and I find the courage to ask the question lingering in my head. “Was I?—”
“You were the first woman I’d touched since I escaped,” he murmurs, his eyes darkening at the memory. “The first woman I took to bed since her . I lost control with you. Everything about you—you made me feel alive again. You made me feel like a man for the first time in five years, and I—” His jaw tightens. “I’ve been dying to feel that way again with you every day since.”
My heart beats harder in my chest, desire heating my skin, my blood, all the way down to my core. “Go lock the door,” I whisper. “Come back to bed with me.”
Alek hesitates. “I know nothing has changed since you left?—”
“Everything changed. Everything has changed when you told me the truth. And you didn’t mean what you said that day. I wish you hadn’t said it—I wish you’d never lied to me, that you’d been honest from the start—but I see now why you did. And you wouldn’t have saved me if you meant it. You wouldn’t have come back for me.” I draw in a slow breath, trying to think past the whirl of emotions and desire that everything he’s said in the last few minutes has roused in me. “There’s just one thing I want.”
“What, zhena ?” Alek’s gaze holds mine, and I can see how much he wants me. How hard it is for him to hold back.
“I want you . I want to see you.” I swallow hard. “No clothes. No blindfolds. Nothing between us. Give me that, and that will change everything. We can—we can try to do this, for real, if you want. But you have to trust me enough to let me see.”
There’s fear in his eyes at that, and it startles me, cutting me to the bone. I can’t imagine anything frightening this man—but that does, the thought of me seeing him. “It’s—difficult to look at,” Alek says slowly. “You might not?—”
“I’ll want you regardless,” I promise. “Trust me.”
He freezes at those two words.
“You can trust me,” I whisper softly. “I’d never hurt you, Alek. I’d never turn on you, or betray you, or lie to you. Even when I was hurt and terrified, I wouldn’t give them anything.”
He swallows hard. “I gave you plenty of reasons to. Reason to hate me, to not protect me?—”
“That’s between us,” I tell him firmly. “I’d never turn you over to people who want to hurt you. Who hurt me to get to you. Alek—before you said those things, before I left…I thought I was falling for you, despite everything. You kept slipping under my defenses, giving me these glimpses of a man that I wanted to believe was there, fully. I only left because I couldn’t stay with a man who I felt that way for if he wouldn’t open up to me and couldn’t feel the same. And now—” I brush my fingers over his cheek again, down to his jaw, where I feel the rasp of stubble. “Now it’s different. Now I see what I wanted to see all along. So let me see the rest. Please.”
His jaw tightens, working, the small muscle in his cheek jumping. And then he nods, tightly, and stands up from the bed.
I watch him go to the door, flicking the lock closed. And then he walks back, slowly, every movement tight and hesitant, back to the edge of my bed.
“I promise,” I whisper, looking up at him as I push the blankets back, rising up on my knees to reach for him. “I promise I will still want you.”