Chapter Seventeen
Nora
Sometimes in life, you have to make a choice.
And sometimes that choice changes the entire trajectory of everything that comes after—for better, or for so much worse.
Today is that day for me. And I have to make the choice under gunfire.
This is exactly the scenario I always knew was waiting somewhere down the road in Slava's world.
Nothing but violence. Blood. Filth that goes past anything I was ever taught to consider a sin.
I always knew this moment would come eventually, the second he dragged me into this life.
I just never knew if I'd survive it, or when it would actually arrive, or who it would take away from me.
It's a filthy, ugly world.
And it's the only version of life that has my Slava in it.
The man I love with a passion that scares me most days.
He spoils me endlessly—except it's filthy money paying for every bit of it.
He holds me like I'm something precious every single night, touches me in ways that feel like the closest thing to heaven I've ever known—except his hands are blood-stained.
Slava is not a good man. He is, by every conventional measure, a very bad one.
And I have to choose.
Accept him exactly as he is. Learn to live as a sinner by association, and spend every day praying I don't lose him to some mafia war. Or run. Slip out the back, buy myself peace and a clean conscience, and let go of the only man I've ever loved.
Right now, in this exact chaos, I could actually do it. Slip through the back door while everyone is distracted. Nobody would notice until it was already done.
It's now or never.
As if Ada can read my thoughts, her grip on my wrist tightens. "Please. Stay. You soften his edges, dorogaya. Don't leave him."
Leave. Or don't leave.
A bullet shatters a vase somewhere behind us, and I flinch hard, my shoulder slamming into the cabinet.
Am I going to survive this? Is he?
I need to decide, and I can feel my eyes dragging toward the back door every few seconds.
Ada releases my wrist. "You have five minutes. I won't stop you either way, whatever you choose. In five minutes, Sonya comes to take us to the safe room. That is all the time either of us has."
Five minutes. The single biggest decision of my entire life, and I get exactly three hundred seconds to make it.
Ada cups my face with both hands, forcing my eyes onto hers—awkward, considering we are both folded underneath the counter.
"Let me tell you something, and then I will say nothing else.
That man is obsessed with you in a way I have never once seen before.
You are the reason he breathes, Nora. If you walk out that door, you are not just leaving him. You are taking his air with you."
A tear slides down my cheek.
Whatever I choose in the next few minutes, I have to actually live with it.
If I run, I get freedom back. Safety. My conscience clean, exactly as it was before any of this happened.
But I lose Slava. The man who looks at me like I hung the stars myself. I don't wake up in his bed anymore. I don't get his hands on me at 2 a.m., or our stupid bickering over nothing, or his hands on me making me forget my own name.
I don't do Nataly's nails for prom, either, and I already promised her French tips. I don't help Ada in the kitchen anymore. I never find out what happens to any of them—whether they live or die.
I'd be betraying him a second time.
I pull my eyes off the door and back onto Ada's, and a smile breaks across her face like she knows my decision just from my facial expression.
It appears she does.
"Thank you, pakhanessa."
I don't grimace at the word this time. I made myself a promise a second ago that whatever I choose, I choose fully. I'm a sinner now. A criminal by association.
And in exchange for all of that, I get to keep him. I get to keep this strange, violent, unexpectedly warm family that's grown on me.
Sonya bursts through the doorway, relief flooding her face the second she spots me and Ada crouched together. She walks toward us, and a stray round catches the spot she'd been standing a second earlier.
"Come on, pakhanessa." She hauls me up and angles her own body between me and the open floor. Ada falls into step on my other side—they are positioning themselves so any bullet finds them first.
I don't feel guilty about that anymore. I told myself I'd live in this fully, and this is what "fully" costs—them doing their job, and my job being to survive it, so Slava doesn't lose his mind entirely if today goes the wrong way. So that the Bratva doesn’t go down with him.
We reach what has to be the safe room, a handful of women already inside when we duck through. Nataly's one of them, and she runs to me the moment she sees me, arms locking around my waist.
"Where's your mother?" I whisper against her hair, pressing a kiss to her forehead.
"With my father." Her voice wobbles once before she swallows it down.
"Fighting?"
She nods. "Fighting."
I hold her tighter and don't offer her false comfort, don't promise her anything I can't guarantee. Because I don't know how this ends.
I lose track of time completely after that. Minutes, maybe hours, I don’t know how long this goes on.
A hand brushes my cheek, and it comes away wet. Nataly whispers, "Don't cry, pakhanessa. Pakhan is strong. He always comes back."
I hadn't even realized I was crying.
What if I lose him? My head shakes on its own, refusing the thought.
Sonya crouches in front of me, pressing something into my hand. "For you."
A gun. Something I would have sooner cut off my own hand than hold three weeks ago, before any of this, before the choice I made. Now my fingers close around the grip without hesitation.
"Will you teach me to shoot properly, once this is over?" I whisper.
Something softens in Sonya's expression. "It would be an honor, pakhanessa."
I'm consumed by darkness now.
Pounding starts against the reinforced door, and my heart drops straight through the floor. I shove Nataly behind me and raise the gun with both hands like I have any idea what I'm doing with it.
Sonya's already up from the floor, weapon trained on the door.
"Sonya! Open the door—it's me!"
Slava.
My Slava.
Sonya has the door open in under two seconds, and his eyes tear across the room in a wild sweep until they land on me. I watch his knees actually buckle, but he catches himself against the doorframe, and then he's across the room and hauling me against his chest.
"You're okay. You're okay." His hands run over my arms, my shoulders, my face, checking for wounds.
The other women filter out around us, one at a time, heading off to check on the state of the estate, on husbands and brothers and sons still unaccounted for.
"You're bleeding," I whisper, my thumb brushing dried blood off the shell of his ear.
"Nothing but a scratch, my little butterfly." He kisses me, and I kiss him back with the same reverence.
"Is it done?" I ask against his mouth.
"Mostly." His forehead drops to mine.
We stay like that for a long moment, foreheads together.
"I choose you, Slava."
"Oh, thank fuck," he breathes out, and then his mouth is everywhere—my hand, my eyes, my nose, my mouth again, anywhere he can reach. "Because you've always been my choice. From the second I saw you. I love you more than should be humanly possible, Nora."
"I love you too."