Chapter 40
Maksim
By the time I leave NovaRael, I’m already in a black mood.
Luciano Castillo showing up uninvited was enough to sour it.
Adriana making that little comment about Ayla made it worse.
Like she knew something.
Like everyone in that fucking room knew something I didn’t.
I take the bike too fast through the city, engine snarling under me, cold air cutting at my face hard enough to keep me sharp. She wasn’t at the townhouse when I got back last night. Her phone was on my bed. The credit card too. Left there like a message.
Like she thought she was leaving.
I grip the throttle harder.
She’s not leaving me.
She can throw every tantrum she wants. Can glare. Can fight. Can pretend she’s got one foot out the door.
Doesn’t matter.
She’s mine.
By the time I pull up outside her building, I’m already rehearsing what I’m going to say when I drag her stubborn ass back to the townhouse. Something vicious. Something that puts her right back where she belongs.
I get to her door. Try the handle. Unlocked.
I go dead still.
Then fury hits hot and fast.
Of course it’s unlocked.
Of course she leaves her fucking door unsecured in a building where any idiot with hands can turn a knob and walk right in. No alarm. No deadbolt. No common sense. This is exactly why she shouldn’t be here. This little shoebox isn’t safe. This entire fucking place is a liability.
I push inside.
“Ayla—”
The word dies in my throat. Chair in the middle of the kitchen.
Broken.
Rope on the floor.
The whole apartment goes strange around me after that. Too still. Too quiet. Like the air changed while I was standing in the doorway and now I’m breathing something wrong.
My body moves before my head catches up.
Bedroom.
Empty.
Sheets untouched.
No sign of her.
Then I see it. Bathroom door. Closed.
Every muscle in me locks so tight it hurts.
I cross the apartment fast and shove the door open.
She’s in the tub. Under the water.
My first reaction is irritation so sharp it almost feels normal.
Of course.
Of course she’s in here hiding from me like a brat.
I lean one shoulder against the frame and wait for her to come up. Wait for that sputtering inhale. That startled look. That glare she’ll throw at me like I’m the problem for finding her.
I’m ready for it.
Almost want it.
Come on, little liar.
Come up.
The water stays still.
Something cold slides down my spine.
I straighten off the frame. Still nothing.
Then my eyes catch everything at once, the angle of her body, the limp drift of her hair in the water, the chair outside, the rope on the floor—
My heart stops.
I’m across the room before the thought even finishes. I hit the tub hard enough to send water sloshing over the edge and get both hands under her, hauling her up out of it in one violent motion.
“Ayla—”
She breaks the surface with a gasp.
Air punches back into my lungs so hard it feels like I got hit.
She coughs once, sucking in breath, and I’m holding her against my chest with water running everywhere and my heart still trying to beat its way out through my ribs.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” It comes out harsher than I mean it to. Rough. Shaken. “What the hell are you doing?”
Her skin is hot from the water. Her body too loose in my arms. Too tired.
Then I get a good look at her face.
Everything in me goes still.
Bruising.
Swelling.
Blood crusted under her nose.
A split in her lip.
Something black and murderous tears open inside my chest.
“What the fuck, Ayla.”
I reach for her face without thinking, thumb angling toward her jaw, and she flinches.
Flinches.
From me. That does something ugly to my head. My hand curls into a fist before I force it open again.
She tries to push up out of the tub on her own. Doesn’t get far.
I catch her under the arms before she can slip.
“Easy,” I snap, like she’s the one pissing me off. Like I’m not one second from losing my fucking mind. “Stop.”
I get her out of the tub, water pouring off both of us, and grab the towel hanging nearby. Wrap it around her. Dry her fast, rougher than I should, gentler than I know how to be. Her wrists are raw too. Rope burns. Deep ones.
My vision goes white for half a second. Someone tied her up in her own kitchen.
I get the towel around her properly and back her toward the wall, bracketing her there without touching more than I have to. My forehead drops to hers before I even think about it.
She’s breathing.
That’s all my body seems to care about right now.
She’s breathing. She’s warm. She’s here.
“Please,” I say, and the word feels wrong in my mouth. Rusted. Foreign. “Please just tell me who did this to you.”
Her breath stutters.
I keep my forehead against hers, voice low and vicious and breaking in places I hate.
“Let me fix it.”
My hand plants on the wall beside her head.
“Let me end them.”
Her eyes squeeze shut.
“I can’t,” she whispers.
“You can.”
“I can’t.”
She ducks under my arm before I stop her, towel clutched tight around her body while she grabs clothes with shaking hands. Sleep shorts. A shirt. She drags them on fast, wet skin making everything clumsy, and walks out of the bathroom without looking at me.
I follow.
She gets to the living room and turns like she expects me to block the exit. Maybe I would on any other day.
Not this one.
Not when she looks like she might fall over if I breathe wrong.
“Ayla.”
My voice sounds wrecked. I hate that too.
She shakes her head. “Maks, I can’t.”
“You can.”
“No.” Her breathing starts going uneven. Fast. Thin. “I can’t do this with you. I’m not going back with you.”
Her eyes flick toward the door like she’s measuring distance.
Then she says, “I’m not even staying in the city. I’m leaving.”
The words hit me like a blade slid in under the ribs.
I take one step toward her.
She stiffens.
Rage flashes hot enough to scorch straight through my fear.
“Tell me who did that to you.”
She says nothing.
I point toward her face. Her wrists. “Tell me.”
Silence.
My voice cracks across the room. “Who are you afraid of?”
She shakes her head again.
Not no.
Just won’t answer.
I close the distance slower this time. Deliberate. Careful. Every instinct in me screaming to grab her, pin her down, force the truth out of her before she does something fucking stupid and disappears again.
Instead I stop in front of her and set my hands on her shoulders.
Gentle.
As gentle as I can manage.
She’s trembling.
“Ayla.” Her name comes out low. Raw. “Please.”
I hate how it sounds.
I hate that I mean it.
“Don’t make me fucking beg to kill whoever did this to you.” My thumbs shift once against her shoulders, barely there. “Just tell me.”
Her mouth parts.
For a second I think she’s not going to say it.
Then, so quietly I almost miss it, she says, “Gabriel Kaya.”
Everything in me rearranges around the name.
Gabriel.
My mind goes exactly where it shouldn’t.
My enemy. So this retaliation.
A message.
Because of me.
I see her face again and something brutal starts building in my chest. I force it down just enough to think.
“Why?” I bite out. “Does he think hurting you gets to me? Do you owe him money? Were you running for him?”
Her head jerks once. “No.”
She’s breathing harder now. Too fast.
I tighten my grip on her shoulders, not enough to hurt, just enough to keep her with me.
“Then tell me.”
Her eyes go glassy.
“Tell me, Ayla.”
Her lips tremble once. She swallows hard enough for me to see it.
Then she says, “He’s my…” Her voice catches. Breaks. “My brother.”
I go still.
My hands fall away from her like I touched fire.
Brother.
For one second the room drops out from under me. Not an enemy using her. Not some debt. Not some random piece of collateral damage in a war I understand.
Blood.
Her blood.
I take one step back and just stare at her.
Her brother.
The words hang there for a second, wrong, impossible, like my brain refuses to fit them into place.
I look at her and see too much all at once. The bruises on her face. The rope burns on her wrists. The trembling in her shoulders. The way she keeps trying to hold herself together and failing by inches.
Then the rest of it catches up.
She was sent to me.
Sent into my house.
Into my bed.
Into my life.
“What exactly are you telling me?”
Her mouth opens and then everything comes out at once.
Too fast. Too broken.
Gabriel sent her. Ledgers from Smash and Sugar. She found them in my office. He was supposed to get one thing, now he has Exile too. She brought them here. She wasn’t going to give them to him. He was already waiting. He took them anyway.
I hear the words.
But the only one that matters is sent.
Sent.
Sent.
My hand twitches toward my gun.
She sees it.
Stops breathing.
For one ugly second I think about how fast it would be. How clean. One shot and the problem ends before it spreads.
My fingers close around the grip and lock there.
I can’t do it.
The realization tears through me so violently it feels like rage.
She keeps talking. Crying now.
I can’t fucking stand crying.
It gets under my skin. Makes me want to break something just to drown it out. Makes the walls feel too tight. Makes my own body feel like a bad fit.
And worse—worse because it’s her.
Her scent is still all over this room. Sweet under blood and soap and fear. My body knows her before my head can make sense of any of this. Knows the sound of her. The feel of her. The way she melts and fights and laughs and shakes in my hands.
And now she’s standing in front of me telling me she was sent here for me.
“I didn’t tell him anything,” she says, voice breaking apart. “I didn’t want to give him the ledgers. I didn’t want to hurt you. I—”
She chokes on it, like the words are fighting her on the way out. “I love you.”
Everything in me stops.
My eyes snap to hers.
“What the hell did you just say to me?”
Tears spill faster now. “I love you.”
The words are so foreign in her mouth I almost don’t know what to do with them.
“I love you,” she says again, shaking. “I didn’t want to do this. It wasn’t even supposed to be you. I just—I couldn’t get away from him. There was no getting away from him, Maksim! Every time I said no—”
Her hand jerks weakly toward her face. Toward the bruising.
Something black flashes across my vision.
“Do you know what I have to do now?” I say, and my voice comes out low enough to scare even me.
She goes still.
“If the Bratva finds out who you are, why you were here, what you took—do you understand what that makes you?”
She just stares at me. Too wet-eyed. Too hurt.
I can’t look at her for long.
I turn away, drag both hands over my face, pace once, twice, then stop at the radiator beneath the window.
Old iron. Bolted into the wall.
Solid.
My eyes burn just staring at it.
Behind me, her breathing changes.
She knows.
Good.
Because I need her to know this is real. What she’s done is real. I turn, cross the room, grab up the rope and catch her by the wrist.
She jerks back on instinct. “Maksim—”
“Don’t.”
“Please—”
“Don’t fucking beg.” That nearly comes out as a shout.
I hate that too.
I hate all of this.
I pull her to the radiator and she resists just enough to remind me she’s still Ayla. Still fire under all this fear. Weak right now, shaking, crying, but not gone.
It makes this worse.
It makes everything worse.
I bind her wrists to the pipe, secure enough that she can’t run, careful despite myself with the raw skin Gabriel already tore open.
When I step back, she looks at me like I’ve become exactly the monster everyone warned her I was.
Maybe I have.
I brace one hand on the wall bending till we’re face to face and finally force myself to say it.
The truth.
“Torturing you will destroy me.” My voice is wrecked. Rough. Barely held together. “Do you understand that?”
Her breath catches.
“Do you get it?” I ask. “Do you see the position you put me in?”
“Yes,” she whispers, voice shaking. “But I know—”
“You should have told me.”
The words come out hard enough to cut.
“You had ample fucking time to tell me,” I say. “Every time I saw bruises on you. Every time I asked you who did it. Every time you looked me in the face and lied.”
Her shoulders hitch. “I couldn’t.”
“You could have.”
“It would have ended up like this anyway,” she says, and her voice frays on the last word. Her eyes flick down to the rope around her wrists, then back to me. “Me tied to something and you having to—”
She cuts herself off.
Can’t say it.
My jaw flexes.
“Kill you,” I finish for her.
She flinches.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yes. It would have ended like this every single time.”
Her face crumples harder, and I have to look away for half a second because I can’t fucking stand it.
“But you should have told me before I put you in those meetings,” I grind out. “You should have told me before I brought you into my home.”
Her head jerks up.
“I didn’t ask to be in your home,” she shoots back, louder now, more herself through the wreck of her voice.
And fuck.
That shouldn’t hit me as hard as it does.
But it does.
Because she’s right.
I dragged her in. Into the townhouse. Into my bed. Into my orbit. I kept pulling her closer and closer like I could make the whole world narrow down to just me and her and whatever this thing was between us.
I stare at her and all I can think is: I can’t do this.
I can’t fucking do this.
The air in the room feels wrong. Too tight. Too hot. Her crying still scraping over my nerves, my own thoughts turning vicious and tangled in my skull.
If I stay in here, I’m going to do something I can’t take back.
I straighten so fast the movement makes her jolt.
For one second she looks up at me like she thinks this is it. Like I’m reaching for the gun. Like I’m about to end it.
I can’t even look at her.
I turn and walk out.
Not fast. But every step feels like I’m peeling my own skin off.
I get out of the apartment and into the hallway before I drag my phone out and call Vaska.
One ring.
Two.
Three.
He answers on the third. “Maksim.”
“I need you at Ayla’s apartment.”
Silence.
“What happened?”
My hand curls so hard around the phone my knuckles ache.
I stare at the opposite wall and keep my voice flat by force.
“I can’t do what you said I had to do.”
That gets him quiet. Still in a way that tells me he understands exactly what I mean.
Then Vaska says, “I’ll handle it.”
The words hit like a fist to the throat.
I don’t answer.
I end the call.
And stand there in the hallway staring at nothing, feeling like the whole fucking world just tilted under my feet.