Chapter 44
Maksim
She doesn’t ask questions when I tell her we’re going out, just hops on my bike and holds on.
Her face is healing, but the rage hasn’t simmered for what that fucker did.
Santo’s voice is still in my ear from this morning, low and devastating with facts I asked for. Her mother. Her father. Kaya. The whole rotten line of it. Enough pieces filled in that the shape of her life sits in my head now like broken glass.
So today my girl needs something she never gets.
Something I’m not built for.
Something soft.
I take her out past the edge of the city.
Past warehouses and fenced lots and the places men like me usually live in. Past the roads that smell like gasoline and hot concrete. Out where the buildings thin and the sky opens up wide enough to feel almost freeing.
I pull off onto a smaller road, then smaller again until the pavement gives way to packed dirt and wild grass on both sides. The bike growls beneath us and dust kicks up behind.
When I finally stop, the engine ticks hot in the silence. Ayla loosens her hold but doesn’t get off right away.
I cut the engine fully, pull off my helmet and glance back over my shoulder.
“Off.”
She slides off the bike and pulls her helmet free. Her hair spills out a little messy from under it, brown and soft in the sunlight. She blinks at the field in front of us.
It’s nothing special if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
Just land gone half wild. Tall green grass. A sweep of yellow-white heads nodding in the breeze. Dandelions gone full and soft, some still gold, some already ready to break apart and fly.
She goes very still. I watch her face instead of the field.
Recognition hits first.
Then something quieter. Smaller. More dangerous.
“You remembered,” she says.
Her voice is so soft I almost don’t hear it.
I shrug once because that’s easier than saying yes, I remembered every word you said, every small thing you offered me like it was nothing.
“You said you made wishes on them.”
Her eyes sweep the field.
The wind catches strands of her hair and lifts them off her cheek. The bruise there has started yellowing at the edges. I still want to kill him every time I see it.
For a second I think she might cry.
I don’t know what I’ll do if she cries.
But then she hands me the helmet and walks forward one slow step, then another.
And then she starts running. Not hard. Not far.
Into the field like something in her finally forgot to be afraid for half a second.
I stand there with both helmets in one hand and watch her go.
The grass brushes her legs. Yellow flowers bend around her boots. She turns once, looking over the spread of it all like she can’t decide if it’s real.
Then she laughs.
I feel it low in my chest before I fully hear it.
A real laugh. Breathy and startled like it slipped out by accident.
She lifts her arms.
Spins.
Her shirt rides up a little at her waist and sunlight hits her face full on.
Fuck.
I’ve seen her angry. Wet. bruised. Shaking. Defiant in my bed and vicious in my kitchen and half-feral with want under my hands.
None of it touches this.
Her smile breaks across her face like something holy and reckless at once, and those brown eyes go molten in the light, caramel and gold and alive enough to make the whole world around her look dim.
Bozhe Moi.
That smile.
It hits me harder than any bullet ever could.
She turns again, arms still out, head tipped back, and for one impossible second she looks young. Not naive. Not soft exactly, but free in a way I’ve never seen on her.
I drop the helmets onto the bike seat and go to her.
Fast.
Before I can think too much about why my chest feels split open.
She hears me too late. Turns just as I reach her, and I catch her around the waist with both hands and lift her clean off the ground.
A squeak leaves her before it turns into a giggle.
A real fucking giggle.
I stare at her.
She stares back, wide-eyed and bright, both hands grabbing my shoulders on instinct.
“You asshole—”
I kiss her before she can finish it. Not rough this time.
Just hungry and a little stunned and probably too much, because everything in me is reacting to that sound she made like I found something rare and breakable in a world full of knives.
She laughs against my mouth.
I lower her enough that her boots brush the tops of the grass but I don’t let go.
“Do that again,” I mutter.
Her mouth curves. “Do what?”
“That.”
“You’re going to have to be more specific.”
Brat.
I slide one hand higher up her back, the other still locked at her waist. “The laughing.”
Her expression changes a little at that.
Softer. More careful.
Like she doesn’t know what to do with the fact that I want it.
Then her fingers brush my eyebrow ring, feather-light. “You brought me to a dandelion field.”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes search mine. “Why?”
Because I don’t know how to give you your childhood back, but I’d rip the world open trying.
Because I can’t undo what men did to you.
Because I can’t be soft the way you deserve, but I can drag softness into existence and put it at your feet if that’s what it takes.
Instead I say, “Because you like dandelions.”
Her face does that thing again.
That dangerous little openness that makes my whole body go alert because I know how badly I want to keep it there.
She exhales slowly. “Maks.”
Just my name.
Nothing after it.
I kiss the corner of her mouth because if I look at her too long, I’ll say something unhinged.
She pulls back, tugging me with her, and I let her. She lowers herself into the grass, and I lie down beside her.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
The grass whispers every time the wind shifts. Above us, the sky is stupidly blue. Too open. Too clean for men like me. I keep one arm bent under my head and stare up at nothing while she breathes beside me, quieter now, the last of that laugh still lodged somewhere under my ribs.
I can feel her there without touching her.
Warm. Close. Real.
A dandelion brushes the back of my hand. I catch the stem between my fingers and pull it free without thinking. Just instinct. White head gone soft and full. Fragile as hell.
I turn it once between my fingers, then hold it out to her.
“Make a wish.”
She takes it gently and rolls the stem between two fingers.
A quiet chuckle leaves her. “That’s not how it works. My mom used to say if you think the wish instead of saying it, it lasts longer.”
I roll onto my side and prop my head on my hand so I can look at her properly.
“Tell me about her.”
She doesn’t answer right away.
Just keeps turning the dandelion stem slowly between her fingers, eyes on the white head like she’s looking at something else entirely.
When she finally speaks, her voice is quieter than before.
“She was warm.”
Ayla swallows.
“Fun,” she says after a second, and there’s the faintest ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth.
“She used to make everything feel like a game when she could tell I was getting scared.” Her thumb brushes over the stem again and again.
“If we were out somewhere and it got too crowded, she’d hide me away. ”
My eyes stay on her face.
“Hide you where?”
She shrugs one shoulder against the grass. “Anywhere she could. Bathroom stalls. Back rooms. Once under a restaurant table with the cloth pulled down all the way to the floor.” Her mouth twitches a little more. “She told me crowds weren’t safe because Baba had a scary job.”
Her lashes lower. “At least that’s what she told me.”
The wind moves over us, bending the grass in soft waves.
“She couldn’t exactly tell an eight-year-old her father was the leader of a syndicate,” she says, and this time the smile that touches her mouth is thin.
My chest tightens.
I watch her profile. The line of her nose. The bruise still fading at her cheek. The way she’s looking up at the sky like it’s easier than looking at me.
“She’d braid my hair too tight,” she says softly. “Always too tight. And then she’d kiss the top of my head after like that fixed it.”
She takes a breath.
“She smelled good. Sweet. I don’t know.” She frowns a little, trying to pull the memory closer. “Like flowers and sugar and something warm.”
I don’t say anything. Don’t rush her.
She goes quiet long enough that I think that’s all she’s giving me until she speaks again. Soft.
“I was there the day she died.”
The words drop flat between us.
“Yeah?”
Her fingers stop moving on the stem.
“Yes.”
Nothing in her face changes at first, but her voice does. Thinner now. Pulled tighter. “I was in the closet.”
Every muscle in me goes still.
She blinks up at the sky once. Twice.
“She put me there sometimes if she thought something was wrong. Told me it was a game. Told me not to come out unless she came to get me herself.” Her throat works. “That day a woman came.”
Her hand tightens around the dandelion hard enough that a few white strands drift loose into the air.
“The woman sounded so angry,” Ayla whispers. “I remember that first. I got small peeks of what she looked like, but—” Her brows pull together. “I don’t… I don’t really know what happened. Not all of it. I heard shouting. My mother trying to calm her down. Then more shouting. Then—”
She cuts herself off.
I can hear her breathing change. Rougher. The field suddenly feels too still. Too bright.
I shift closer.
“Ayla.”
She shuts her eyes.
“I remember the sound.” Her voice breaks a little around it and she hates that, I can tell. I can see it in the way her jaw clenches right after. “And then everything went quiet, and I stayed in the closet for so long until I was brave enough to leave it.”
She swallows hard. “I never got a reason why.”
I say nothing.
There’s nothing to say to that. Nothing that doesn’t sound weak beside a little girl sitting in the dark with her mother’s blood drying somewhere outside the door.
Her fingers keep twisting the dandelion stem until it bends.