♞Chapter Fifteen♞
Mikhail
I’m calling. Calling. Calling. Her phone is off. The silence eats at me like acid, burning through my ribs, my throat, my mind. I dial again, fingers trembling, jaw locked so tight it’s a wonder my teeth don’t crack. Nothing.
Fuck.
I don’t leave a message. What the hell would I even say?
Come back so I can ruin your life all over again?
I hurl the phone across the room. Not satisfying.
Not even close. I rip the nearest object off the shelf and throw it.
The crash barely registers before I’m onto the next.
A lamp. A chair. The whiskey decanter. Glass shatters at my feet, but I don’t stop.
I destroy everything in reach— but not the paintings. Never the paintings. The ones she made. The ones I bought because I couldn’t stomach the thought of another man owning them. Even in rage, I make sure her art stays untouched.
She heard me say she was nothing but a fuck. A sound tears from my chest, low, guttural, inhuman. My vision blurs with something red-hot and uncontainable.
I let go.
I drive my fist into the wall. Again. And again. Bone against drywall, until my knuckles split and blood streaks the white paint. A sharp pain shoots up my arm. I barely feel it.
Eleven PM.
She’s not home yet.
A horrible thought slithers in and wraps around my throat. She’s with someone else. Another man’s hands on her body. Another man’s mouth on her skin. Taking what belongs to me.
I grab the scotch with my bleeding hand, pour, swallow. The burn does nothing. Nothing touches this.
I could call Roman. Tell him to find her.
Have eyes on her within the hour. But that’s the problem.
Roman doesn’t know how much she means to me.
No one does. I spent so long keeping her a secret.
Keeping her safe. Safe from the Bratva. Safe from me.
This is for the best. She’ll finally be free.
Finally be safe. Then why does my body itch to hunt?
Midnight.
Still not here.
I tell myself to let her go, but I don’t sleep. Not a minute. I sit in the wreckage of my apartment, surrounded by the remnants of whatever control I thought I had. The bottle of scotch is empty.
Where is she?
Who the hell is she with?
The thought alone sends a fresh wave of rage barreling through me. She’s mine. Every inch of her, every look, every moan, every thought in that pretty little head—mine. Yet she’s out there, somewhere, slipping through my fingers.
I stare at the clock. The hours crawl. Midnight. Two. Four. Six. My body screams for rest, for relief, but none comes.
I wait. I count the minutes.
Then—eight AM.
The sharp click of heels against pavement. I bolt upright. The sound is lighter than usual. Slower. She must be tired. Of course she is. She’s been out all night. I yank the door open, and there she is, unlocking hers. She doesn’t even glance at me as her door opens.
No.
No. No. No.
I wedge myself in before it can close, slam it shut behind me, and press her against it. Our breaths mix, but hers stays steady. Indifferent. "Where the hell were you?" I snarl.
She exhales, slow and measured, already over this.
Over me. My bloody hand presses into her bare arm, staining her perfect skin.
She doesn’t flinch. The Lola I knew would’ve grabbed my wrist. She would’ve kissed the wound.
She would’ve cared. This Lola? She looks bored.
Her eyes flick up to mine, flat and uninterested. “It’s not your business.”
I let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “Not my—Lola, we agreed to be exclusive.” My voice is rough, barely controlled, like an animal gnashing its teeth behind bars.
She scoffs. “That deal ended the second you shit-talked me, Mikhail.”
I can’t breathe.
Can’t think.
The walls close in.
The thought slithers back in, poisoning everything: someone touched her. Someone’s hands, someone’s mouth, someone’s cock. My grip tightens on her waist, fingers digging in. “Tell me you didn’t.”
Her lips curl into something cold. Cruel.
She tilts her head, feigning sympathy. “What is it, Mikhail? You don’t like that your convenient fuck found another convenient fuck?”
My knees nearly buckle. I press more of my weight into her, crushing her against the door. Needing to feel her. Needing something real to hold on to. “You’re lying,” I whisper. But it sounds weak. Desperate.
She smiles. It doesn’t reach her eyes.
“Am I?”
I shake my head. My hands roam over her body, as if I can erase whoever touched her. As if I can undo what’s been done. “You’re mine, Lola. Mine.”
She shakes her head. Denying me. Denying that she’s mine.
Mine.
“That man, the one who gets to call me his, he would never say I’m mediocre at my passion. He wouldn’t reduce me to a girl who spreads her legs when he needs a ride.”
Shame swallows me whole. The weight of my own words presses on my chest like a slab of stone. “Lola, I’m so fucking sorry—”
“Shove your apologies up your ass,” she snaps. “I don’t want to hear them.” She’s never been like this with me. Never looked at me like I was beneath her, like I was something rotten she couldn’t wait to scrape off.
Now I see it. My Lola has two sides. One is sweet. So sweet you’d rip your own heart out to hand it to her. The other? Cruel. So cruel you’d take the same knife and drive it into your own throat just to make it stop. And I deserve this.
God, I deserve this.
She spits in my face. If she thinks this is punishment, she’s dead wrong. She could spit in my mouth, and I’d thank her. “I am not some whore, Mikhail,” she breathes. “Everything I gave you, I gave you out of love.”
My breath shudders out of me as she confesses what I’ve always known. She loves me.
I broke the heart of a woman who actually fucking loves me. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I was trying to keep you safe—”
“The man who keeps me safe would burn the world for me,” she snaps. “You know what, Mikhail? I was wrong about you.”
I shake my head, body screaming to stop her from saying the words I already see forming.
“I thought you were the man I wanted to spend my life with. But I was so, so wrong. You’re not man enough to protect me,” she goes on. “Whatever you were keeping me safe from, you had to shove me aside to do it. Treated me like a two-penny whore.”
I flinch.
“A man I’d want to spend my life with,” she whispers, pressing her palm to my chest, feeling the way my heart slams against my ribs, “would make the threat swallow those two pennies before ever painting me like that.”
“You’re cruel,” I rasp.
“That’s your fault for not seeing it from the start…”
Her lips brush mine for just a second before pulling back, leaving me starving. “Just like it’s mine for not seeing you for the coward you are.”
For years, I’ve been running. From the Bratva.
From the truth that no matter how fast I go, I’ll never outrun my blood, my nature, this violent, bloodthirsty beast curled inside my ribs.
Running from her. From the fact that I love her in a way no sane man should.
I’m done running. My hand moves before I even think.
Fingers wrap around her throat, not to crush, but to pin her harder to the wall.
I slam my mouth against hers, kissing her like I’m trying to break her. Like I want her to feel what she’s done to me. The chaos she’s unleashed. The monster she’s been pulling at the chains of for far too long.
She’s hard, unyielding. I rip my mouth away, hand still locked around her throat.
"You fucked up. You fucked up when you wrapped a beast of a man around your pretty little pinky finger," I hiss.
"You fucked up because now, Lola—there is no escaping this.
I'm pulling you into the dark with me. You wanted to see the man you call yours?
The man you thought you could walk away from?
" I let out a low, humorless laugh. “Well, now you will. And now, the opportunity to run is gone.”
I lied to myself. Said I could let her go like it was nothing.
But a mere few hours without her tore me apart.
Made me realize what letting go really means, watching her slip into someone else’s bed.
Damn it, she’s right. I was a coward. And it will always be my biggest regret that it took breaking her to see it.
I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to her.
"And here I thought I was the only unhinged one," she taunts. I shove her harder against the door.
"You think this scares me?" she murmurs. "You think you scare me?"
"I should."
"You don’t."
I let go of her throat only to grab her jaw, tilting her face up, making sure she sees every piece of the madness she’s carved into my bones.
“No one will touch you now," I promise. "No one will breathe next to you. Not unless they want to fucking die. I’ll no longer protect you by keeping you hidden," I growl. "No, Lola. No more hiding. You’ll be on my arm for the world to see. They’ll know exactly who you belong to." I inhale her like she’s the last clean breath I’ll ever take.
"And if anyone so much as looks at you the wrong way—" I kiss the side of her head gently.
"I will crush them, Lola. I will break their fucking bones. "
She’s my Lola. My cruel little queen. I realize now that hiding her was never protecting her, it was just keeping me from truly having her. One night without her drove me insane. A lifetime without her? She’d unleash havoc on the world.
I can’t let Lola remain in the shadows anymore. Every moment without her drives me closer to madness. Claiming her openly might put her at risk, but that just means I’ll fight every bastard who dares threaten her. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll protect her with my life. No matter what.
It’s selfish.
But it’s the only decision I can make.
I won’t shy away from exposing the details of my work. She’ll catch on soon enough. And if she overheard the full conversation I had with Roman, she already knows something’s off.
"You need to promise me that you won’t cry when you see the bodies or scream when you see blood. Because that’s where the man who calls you his addiction lives. In the violence. In the ruin. You’ve only seen the surface. You don’t know what you’ve chained yourself to yet."
"You think I’m light?" she mocks. "You think I don’t know what darkness is?"
"Mikhail," she murmurs, biting my bottom lip and tugging it, "you have no fucking idea."