Chapter 63 Petyr
PETYR
The second Kira bursts out of my office with a knife, I act.
“Kira.” I step in front of Sima, arms wide. “Put that down.”
Behind me, Sima chokes out a terrified sob. It tears through me, but I don’t let it split my focus. This situation is bad enough as it is. If I drop the ball now, there’s no telling what might happen.
So I don’t. I breathe in, slow and deep, and turn myself into a pakhan again. A soldier. Someone who can handle this coldly and professionally. Sima doesn’t need my human side, and Kira sure as fuck doesn’t deserve it.
“You brought her back?!” Kira screeches. “Are you fucking insane, Petyr?”
“Calm down.”
“No!” The knife in her hand slashes a wide arc in the air. “She’s the daughter of your enemy. She betrayed you! She—”
“She never betrayed me,” I growl. “You did. Now, put that knife down before you make your situation worse.”
Her face goes deathly pale. She barely looks human now. A wraith would be more accurate. White as bone, her black hair wild and unkempt, screaming. All along, she keeps waving that fucking knife.
She never left the house. The realization hits me all at once. She just hid in my office. She wasn’t supposed to have a key, but she found one, or made herself a spare.
Luka wouldn’t have looked for her behind a locked door. Not when all the signs pointed to her having run off into the woods. But that must have been a distraction, too.
Which means there’s no one in the house to call for backup. Just the guards outside, but they’ll be too late. Luka is in the woods with the rest of my men, looking for a woman he won’t find, and he’s not going to come back empty-handed.
So he’s not coming back at all.
If anyone is going to fix this, it’ll be me, alone.
“Kira,” I try again, “let’s think this through. You haven’t done anything irreparable yet. I’ll give you a chance to explain yourself, but only if you put that knife down.”
The truth is, I could reach for my gun. I’m a quick draw. She might get a stab in, but she’ll be dead seconds after.
But she’s still my brother’s wife. My sister-in-law. No matter how angry I am at her for what she did tonight, I can’t execute her in cold blood. I wouldn’t be able to look Dimitri in the eye ever again.
So I’ll wait for my chance to disarm her. It shouldn’t be hard, not with how panicked she is.
But fuck if she didn’t pick the biggest knife she could find.
As if on cue, she swings it again. I back Sima up a step, my arms still outstretched in front of her.
“It shouldn’t have been her,” Kira grits, her eyes wide and manic. “It should have been me! I was supposed to be the wife of the pakhan, not her!”
“You were,” I tell her. “You will be again, once Dimitri is back in—”
“Oh, please.” She scoffs. “You’ll never let him back into power.
And he’s too much of a vegetable to rule again.
If he’d given me a child before his accident, it’d be a different story, but how could he have?
” She barks out a deranged, bitter laugh.
“Always out at night, always back late. He called them meetings, but I knew what it was. Women.”
I clench my fists. Dimitri’s marriage was arranged, too, like mine had been with Polina Sidorov. In these situations, it isn’t unusual for the husband to find gratification elsewhere. For the wife, too, if she’s smart and careful about it.
I can’t say if Kira’s telling the truth or if it’s just her paranoia talking, but I do know my brother enough to understand that it’s possible. Dimitri was never one to get tied down. And Kira always acted like she was devoted to him, but he rarely seemed to give back with the same intensity.
I’d told myself it was none of my business. My brother’s marriage was his own, and he wasn’t the type to show his feelings openly anyway. I barely even noticed signs of unhappiness between them. Back then, I didn’t have anything to compare it to.
Now that I do, I feel sorry for Kira.
“You didn’t deserve that,” I say carefully. “If Dimitri really cheated on you, then he was in the wrong. But Sima’s innocent. She had nothing to do with—”
“She has everything to do with it!” Kira roars.
“She took you from me. After Dimitri’s accident, I could have still been the wife of a pakhan if she hadn’t gotten in the way.
I could have been your wife.” Her tone softens, her face painted with pain.
“I would have been a good wife to you. Better than her.”
“That’s impossible.” It’s not the smart answer to give, but right now, I don’t care about being smart. No one insults Sima to my face—no one. “And regardless, you still would have been married to Dimitri.”
“An easy enough problem to fix.” Her eyes go cold again. “If that shitty assassin had just done his job.”
I freeze. “What did you say?”
“Oh, please. Don’t tell me you haven’t figured it out already.” She laughs, but it sounds wrong. Crazed. “I’m the one who sent that idiot to the hospital. He was supposed to kill Dimitri with an overdose, make it look like an accident, but you just had to be there, didn’t you?”
My pulse roars in my ears. “You tried to have my brother murdered.”
Behind me, Sima gasps. “Kira, why—?”
“Shut up!” Kira slashes again, a downward arc that misses me by a hair. “You don’t get to fucking speak, you homewrecker!”
She isn’t making any sense anymore, but she’s too far gone to see it. As for me, I’m blind with rage. The thought that Kira was the one who put Dimitri’s life in danger is enough to almost make me reach for my gun.
Then I realize the implications.
She was the culprit. She knew that. If the assassin had talked, it would have been over for her.
So she planned to kill him at the warehouse. And then…
She pointed me to Sima.
It seems so obvious in hindsight. It was Kira who first brought up the possibility of Sima being the traitor. Every time I doubted my wife, Kira had been the one to push me. She manipulated me from the start.
She almost made me lose her.
I can’t blame it all on Kira. If I hadn’t been blinded by my own mistrust, I would have seen Sima’s innocence right away. But Kira has been a part of this family a long time. She knew exactly where to push with me.
All those times she threw herself at me—had those been part of her plans, too? Seduce me, then marry me?
Just so she could be the wife of the fucking pakhan?
“Kira, think it through.” It’s taking every ounce of restraint not to pounce on her, but I force myself to be cold.
Logical. Right now, Sima’s in danger, and until I’ve neutralized Kira, I need to keep her talking.
Split her focus for long enough to wrestle that knife out of her hands.
“Even if Dimitri had died, I still would have been married to Sima. Your plan couldn’t work. ”
“It could if she was dead, too.”
It’s Sima who answers from behind me. “You poisoned my food,” she blurts. “It was you.”
“Took you long enough to figure it out,” Kira scoffs.
“And the baby crying—that was you, too?” Sima sounds stricken. “You pushed me down the stairs? You… you tried to make me lose Lilia?”
“I just put a recording on a loop. You did the rest.” Kira doesn’t seem the least bit sorry.
“But you did it,” Sima presses. “You pushed me.”
“So what if I did?” Kira snaps. “You were in my way.”
“Lilia was innocent.” I’ve never heard Sima sound like this, broken and furious all at once. “She never did anything to you. She wasn’t even born yet!”
“She was Petyr’s!” Kira yells. “And he never would have let me give him a baby as long as he had her! Or you!”
Cold rage settles in my gut. This lunatic—she was behind everything. A snake in my house, and I didn’t even fucking know. If not for Sima, I never would have found out. I would have brought Dimitri home.
And Kira would have killed him. Just like she planned to kill my wife and daughter.
My knuckles pop. Every precaution flies out the window as I take a step towards Kira.
She stumbles back, but doesn’t loosen her grip.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” I growl. “I never would have married you. Even if you’d managed to kill every last person in this house, I wouldn’t have agreed to marry you. Not in a million fucking years.”
It’s the wrong thing to say, but I don’t give a shit. Because it’s right, too. It’s the truth. The only truth that matters.
I love Sima. Whatever happens, I will always love Sima. She’s it for me.
If I’m not married to her, then I don’t want to be married at all.
Kira trembles with rage. Her knuckles go white around the knife’s handle.
Then she lets out a high-pitched scream and lunges at me.
I raise my arm to block her. Pain blooms sharp along my tendons, but I manage to knock her back. Blood trickles to the floor from where she slashed at me.
“Petyr!” Sima screams.
“Stay back!” I open my arms wide, put myself in the way again. “Run! Get the guards!”
We lock eyes for a split-second. I can tell she doesn’t want to leave me. That she’d literally do anything else.
But then she sprints into a run.
Kira tries to go after her. I block her again, but it’s the same arm, and this time, her knife cuts deeper.
Shit. I try to reach for my gun, but my grip is too shaky. I can’t fire like this.
“You don’t want me?!” Kira screams, now fully deranged. “Fine! You can join your little wife in hell!”
She holds the knife with both hands and plunges forward.
This is it, I realize. If I can’t block this, take the knife from her, I’ll be done. She’ll drive it into my gut.
I lunge for her wrist, when—
CRASH!
Kira staggers. The knife slips from her hands. She stares ahead for a second, then two, like she can’t understand what just happened.
She touches the back of her head, and her hand comes away slick with blood.
We both turn. Behind her, Sima is panting, standing with an antique clock in hand. Heavy, wooden, the glass case now broken.
Kira frowns for one more second, and then she collapses on the floor.
I don’t stop to check if she’s still breathing. I just jump over her and rush to Sima.
“I told you to get the guards,” I say.
“I couldn’t leave you.” Her face is streaming with tears. She lets go of the antique clock, and it clatters to the ground, too. “I couldn’t lose you.”
I should be mad, but I get it. Fuck me, I get it. After tonight, I thought I was going to lose her, too. I know how that feels now.
But I never want to feel it again.
Without thinking, I crush her into my arms. Sima sobs, buries her face into my neck, her hands tight in my shirt. There’s blood on them, but I don’t care.
“Are you hurt?” I whisper.
“No.” She shakes her head. “But your arm—”
“It’s nothing. It’ll heal.”
“You need a doctor.” She pulls back, eyes shining. “Please.”
I don’t protest again. If Sima never wants to feel like she’s going to lose me again, either, I can hardly blame her for it. “Okay. I’ll call for one.”
“Thank you.”
“But first…” I grab the phone with my good hand and call Luka. “Everything okay, boss?”
“I found Kira.” My gaze flicks to her body on the floor. Unconscious, or perhaps dead. “Come get her in the foyer. And bring me a doctor.”
I pocket my phone and turn back to Sima. I want to whisk her upstairs and give her a long bath, then tuck her close to me in bed. Never let her out of my sight again.
But there’s somewhere we have to be before that.
I walk her to the nursery. Anya’s eyes widen when she sees us, but Sima isn’t looking at her. She isn’t looking anywhere but at the crib.
She picks Lilia up and hugs her to her chest.
I wrap my good arm around them both and watch my wife and daughter until Sima’s shoulders have stopped shaking.
And I realize, finally, just how lucky I am.