Chapter 42
Maksim
Vaska steps out of the apartment and the first thing I do is look past him.
Instinct.
Stupid, worthless instinct.
I don’t know if I’m checking for a body or hoping not to see one.
There’s nothing behind him except the open doorway and dark apartment shadow.
Good.
Or not.
I don’t fucking know anymore.
I push off the wall too fast, rage and relief hitting hard enough together to make me feel sick.
“Well?”
Vaska shuts the door behind him.
Infuriatingly calm. I want to break his face for it.
He looks at me once, takes in whatever’s on mine, and says, “Kaya started using her as a punching bag when she was thirteen.”
The words land flat and brutal.
He continues with the sad little story of the beginning of her life.
I say nothing.
Can’t.
Because all I can see is Ayla in that bathroom, bruised and wet and too tired to stand straight. Her face when she flinched from my hand. The rope burns. The split in her lip.
Gabriel Kaya.
I want him on his knees. I want his teeth in my sink. I want to tear his throat out with my hands and let him drown on the floor.
Instead I ask, “And?”
Vaska’s eyes stay on mine. “She wasn’t sent for you.”
That gets my attention fast.
“What?”
“Smash and Sugar.” His voice stays level. “Through me. She was supposed to get close to me. Be useful. Get information on imports. Then you happened.”
I laugh once. It sounds wrong. All venom. Sent to be Vaska’s. That doesn’t sit well.
“So I fucked up your possible little romance.”
Vaska ignores that.
“Kaya adjusted when she got close enough to you.”
My hand curls into a fist.
Of course he did.
Of course the minute she got near me, the whole thing changed shape. Because that’s what happens when I want something. It rots in my hands. Gets used. Gets blood on it.
“She stole the ledgers,” I say.
“Yes.”
“She lied.”
“Yes.”
The word cracks something open in my chest all over again.
I look away first. Down the hall. At the filthy carpet. At nothing.
“Did she give him anything else?”
Vaska is quiet for half a beat.
“Did you know she understands Russian?”
Everything in me goes still.
No.
No, she doesn’t.
I look at him. “What?”
“She understands it,” he says. “Enough.”
The hallway narrows.
Every meeting she sat through. Every time I spoke in front of her assuming language was a locked door. Every muttered thing in bed, half asleep, half hard, not careful enough because I thought she couldn’t follow.
My stomach turns vicious and cold.
“How much did she give him?” I ask.
“Ledgers. That’s it.”
That hits harder than if he’d said names.
Because ledgers means she could have given more. The ledgers means she didn’t. And now I have to live in that space—between what she did and what she chose not to do.
Vaska watches my face too closely.
“She had opportunities,” he says. “More than enough. Gabriel got books. Not routes. Not names. Not the inside of your skull.”
I drag a hand over my mouth.
Humiliation burns hot under my skin.
Nikolai would tear me apart for this.
This is what he’d say happens when men get soft. When they let women near the wrong rooms. Near the wrong thoughts. Into the wrong beds.
Weakness.
That word has his voice. I hate that I can still hear it.
“Did she…” The question nearly dies before it gets out. I force it anyway. “Did she say anything else?”
Vaska’s expression doesn’t change.
“Relevant to Bratva business?”
My mouth goes hard. “No.”
“Then no.”
I don’t know why I asked. I wish I hadn’t.
Vaska leans back against the opposite wall, arms loose, eyes still on me.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he says. “She stole from you. She lied to your face. She brought Gabriel into range of our business. None of that disappears because she cried on a couch.”
The thought of her tears hit like a slap.
I look away immediately.
I fucking hate tears. Hate what they do to a room. To a body. To me.
Ayla crying feels like a problem. Fills me with rage. Makes me want to either smash something or put my hand around the back of her neck and make it stop. Neither option is one I can afford.
“But,” Vaska says, “this wasn’t clean.”
I look back at him. He holds my gaze.
“This was abuse. Coercion. A girl born to the wrong blood and chained to it too long.” His head tilts once. “And somewhere in the middle of it, she got attached where she shouldn’t have.”
My jaw clenches.
“He’s her blood.”
“And Katya is yours.”
The words come out before I can stop them. “Katya would never do anything like this.”
“Yes.” Vaska shrugs one shoulder. “Because you don’t beat obedience into her.”
That shuts me up.
Because he’s right.
Katya disobeys because she can. Because no matter how furious I get, I’m not going to break her face and call it discipline. If I did, she’d obey too.
The realization makes me feel unclean. Vaska watches me absorb it and keeps going.
“So decide what this is.”
I stare at him.
His voice stays flat.
“You want me to call Dmitri? He’ll put a bullet in her head, no hesitation,” he says. “You want me to send her back to Gabriel? You want to bury her alive by the river and be done with it?” A pause. “Or do you want to keep her?”
The answer comes so fast it almost makes me flinch.
Keep her.
Mine.
Immediate. Vicious. Certain.
I say nothing.
Vaska notices anyway. He pushes off the wall.
“If the men find out where she came from,” I say before he can move, “it won’t just be her.”
He stops. I force the words out.
“They’ll look at me like I let it happen. Like I’m weak. Reckless.” My mouth twists. “Compromised.”
Vaska nods once.
He understands. That’s the worst part.
“She didn’t play you clean,” he says. “She got trapped between two men who both think possession is the best course for control.”
The words hit hard enough to make me want to put him through drywall.
Because he’s talking about Gabriel. And me.
I’m nothing like him.
I say nothing.
After a second, he adds, quieter, “If the Pakhan decides the truth dies here, then it dies here.”
That lands deeper than anything else he’s said.
Because I know that move.
Nikolai made it once. Took what truth he wanted and buried the rest under title and fear and the certainty that no one else got a vote.
I hated him for it.
Still do.
And now I understand exactly how a man gets there.
I think of Ayla with my name on her skin and blood on her face. I think of her saying I love you like it was a confession and a wound all at once.
Bile climbs hot into my throat.
Too much.
Too many fucking feelings all at once.
I want Kaya dead.
I want my men blind. I want Ayla healed and back in my bed. I want to shake her until the lies fall out. I want to never hear those three words again.
I close my eyes for half a second.
Weakness, Nikolai’s voice says.
Maybe.
But she’s still mine.
I brush past Vaska, open the apartment door, and step inside.
She’s on the couch. Wrists bandaged. Face bruised. Too small in the middle of all this wreckage and still somehow taking up the whole goddamn room.
Her head lifts the second she sees me.
For one second, neither of us move.
I don’t know what she sees on my face.
I don’t want to know. I just know what I see on hers.
Fear. Exhaustion. And that stubborn streak still there under the damage, like she’d bite me if she had enough blood left in her mouth to do it properly.
Good.
I can work with that.
I shut the door behind me and cross the room.
She tracks me with her eyes, but she doesn’t flinch. Not even when I stop right in front of the couch, close enough to see the tremor moving at her jaw.
I look at what Gabriel did to her and something black shifts under my ribs.
The split lip.
The bruising.
The wrists.
I catalog every mark and every one of them lands the same: too much damage.
I step closer. She doesn’t cower.
Just sits there with her hands fisted in her lap, waiting.
That’s what does it.
Not the fear. The waiting.
Like she already knows how this goes. Like if I hit her, she’ll take it. If I grab her, she’ll go limp and let me drag her where I want.
Because somebody taught her the difference between surviving and fighting, and right now she’s picked the one that leaves her breathing.
The thought hits so hard it makes my teeth lock.
I hate that I can see it. I hate more that I know exactly who taught her.
“Get up.”
Her throat moves when she swallows.
But she does it. Slowly, carefully. Like standing hurts.
She steadies herself beside the couch, eyes flicking over my face like she’s trying to read what version of me walked back in here.
I don’t give her one.
“Come home.”
The words leave me flat. Final. Not loud, but there’s no room in them for anything else.
She stares at me.
For half a second I think she’s going to argue. Fight. Say something stupid enough to make this harder than it already is.
Instead her mouth parts and she says, “But Gabriel—”
That name grates through me I feel it in my bones.
“He’ll be handled.”
Her eyes search mine. I don’t know what she’s looking for.
Mercy. Certainty. A promise.
What she gets is me.
“Come. Home.”
Something in her face shifts. Not relief, not exactly.
But she nods.
I reach for her without thinking, hand closing around her upper arm.
Gentler than I mean to be. Firm enough that she knows I’m not asking a third time.
I walk her to the door. She comes. Shaken, but alive. That’s enough for tonight.
I open the door and guide her out into the hallway.
Vaska is still there.
His eyes go to Ayla first, then to my hand on her arm, then back to my face.
I hold his gaze for one beat.
Then I nod once and say, “The Pakhan decides.”
***
By the time I get her through the front door, the townhouse is already moving.
Men crossing rooms with boxes in their arms. Garment bags slung over shoulders. Weapons cases stacked near the entry. One of the guards carrying files out of my office like the whole place is shedding skin around us.
Ayla steps slow for half a second, and I feel her eyes cut to me without her saying a word.