Chapter 38
Brendon
The first thing I wake up to is pain and Russian.
The pain is easier to name; it’s a hot, continuous throb along my side, wrapped in something heavy and tight, every breath tugging against it.
There’s a deeper ache under that, the kind that feels like I got hit by a truck and then reversed over, and my mouth is so dry my tongue feels glued to the roof.
Everything else is a blur of beeping, stale air, and the scratch of too-stiff sheets under my fingers.
The Russian is not the soft muttering Dominic falls into when he’s half-asleep and talking to ghosts.
It’s clipped this time, consonants hitting hard, vowels cutting through the steady hospital beeping.
There’s another voice layered over his, higher, younger, matching him beat for beat in volume and attitude.
For a second, I think I’m dreaming. The world feels wrong around the edges. The air smells like antiseptic and over-brewed coffee. I drag in a breath, and immediately feel the tug of tape pulling on skin, a plastic line rattling against a rail.
Definitely not a dream, especially not when I hear monitors beeping. Good. That means I’m not flatlining. Always nice to confirm.
When I turn my head carefully, my vision swims, then settles on Dominic standing near the door, every line of his body tight.
He’s in a hoodie and joggers, hair a mess, shoulders wound up around his ears.
The murder glare is on full power—that dead, cold fury he gets when he’s one breath away from doing permanent damage.
He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the girl in front of him.
She can’t be more than seventeen—dark hair in a braid that’s half come loose, same blue eyes as his, same mouth.
She’s wearing a denim jacket over a hoodie, backpack slung over one shoulder.
Her hands are flying as she snaps at him in Russian, then switches to English, like she’s too pissed to stay in one language.
“You can’t just send me away,” she says, glaring up at him.
“I’m not a child, Dom. I’m not running just because you’ve decided to play hero all of a sudden.
You drag me out of Mom’s house, tell me she’s ‘gone,’ and now you’re shipping me off to some school in Siberia, when you finally don’t have her breathing down your neck.
This is when I’m supposed to be with you, not—”
“I’m not fucking asking,” he growls back. “You’re not staying in this town while I figure out how big this explosion is going to be. You finish your last year somewhere quiet, where nobody knows you; where nobody can use you to get to me.”
“Oh, now you care about that,” she fires back. “Now you want to be in charge. Where was this five years ago?”
His jaw flexes, and I see guilt flash across his face, before he clamps down on it.
“I was doing what I had to do to keep us both alive,” he says gently. “Same thing I’m doing now.”
She throws her hands up. “How, by getting rid of me?”
“By getting you out of the blast radius,” he snaps. “I have a lot of shit to sort through, Kyra. You staying here, while I poke at everything she left behind, is a great way to get you caught in the crossfire. I’m not risking that.”
Kyra. His sister. The one he never talks about except in those small, offhand mentions that felt too heavy underneath.
Seeing her standing here, alive and pissed off and real, is a shock I wasn’t ready for. Then again, I also wasn’t ready to wake up anywhere that wasn’t a morgue, so we’re already on bonus time.
“She’s gone,” Kyra says, voice cracking under the anger for the first time. “You made sure of that. There’s nothing left for her to hurt.”
‘There’s nothing left for her to hurt.’
My foggy memory offers up nothing. I swallow, and my throat protests. I try to wet my lips, fail, and realize lying here silently while they argue about blast radii and dead mothers isn’t going to work for me.
“Dom,” I croak.
It comes out more air than word, but it’s enough. His head snaps toward me so fast I’m surprised he doesn’t give himself whiplash.
When his eyes land on me, the fury in them just… drops. One second, he’s all weapon; the next, his whole face changes—the tension in his jaw loosens, his mouth softens, his shoulders drop. It’s like watching the sun burn through a storm.
“Baby,” he breathes, already moving.
Kyra hovers by the foot of the bed, a frown carved into her face, but her gaze flicks between us now with open curiosity. The resemblance between them is painfully obvious up close. She has that same Volkov bone structure, that same stubborn set to her mouth, the same blue eyes.
“Hey,” I rasp, because my voice has apparently been replaced with sandpaper. “You’re loud.”
His mouth kicks up at one corner, and the sight of it makes my chest hurt in a different way. His eyes flick over me, taking in the lines, the machines, the way I’m clutching the sheet with one hand.
“Water, please?” I ask, and Dom immediately goes to the water pitcher in the corner, pours me a glass, and walks over. I drink from a straw as I watch his sister scowling.
“Oh, so he gets soft eyes, and I get exile,” she mutters, folding her arms over her chest.
“Kyra,” Dominic says without looking back, voice dropping into that commanding tone that makes my stomach flip, even when it’s not aimed at me. “Go get coffee. Or whatever. I’ll talk to you later.”
“I’m not leaving,” she says. “You promised you’d explain, and then you drag me to some hospital and—”
“Kyra.” One word, and he finally glances over his shoulder at her; even from my angle, I see the silent plea under the steel. “Please, solnyshko.”
The ‘please’ seems to do what the glare didn’t, and her expression softens a fraction. She gives me one more long look, eyes flicking to the bandage at my side, then sighs and rolls her eyes.
“Fine,” she mutters. “But when I come back, you’re not dodging me again.” She lifts her chin at me. “Glad you didn’t die, church boy. He’s even more annoying when he cries.”
It’s so aggressively Volkov that a weak laugh sputters out of me before I can stop it. Then my brain short-circuits at the thought of Dominic Volkov crying in front of anyone. But before I can latch onto that, she’s gone, the door shutting behind her with a soft click.
The room feels bigger without her; quieter. The only sounds are the beep of the monitor, the soft whoosh of the AC, and Dom’s breathing—which is not nearly as even as he probably wants it to be.
“How’s the pain?” he asks, eyes raking over my face. His voice is still rough from whatever they were arguing about, but the edges are for me now, not against me. “Scale of one to ten, and don’t fuck with me about it.”
I breathe carefully. My side throbs in this deep, pulsing way, like someone is pressing a hot iron into it and then letting up, over and over. “Seven if I move,” I say. “Four if I stay absolutely still and pretend my body isn’t real.”
His mouth quirks, but the humor doesn’t reach his eyes. “They’ve got you on good stuff. I’ll ask the nurse to top you up in a bit.” He pauses, jaw clenching. “You scared the shit out of me, Little Sin.”
“Sorry,” I whisper, because I honestly didn’t mean to do that in the middle of his mother deciding to go full slasher.
His fingers tighten around mine. “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t you fucking apologize for getting stabbed in my living room.”
That pulls me back to the memory completely.
The fog clears enough that memories start slotting into place: the cottage, the darkness, the way my side exploded when the knife went in, Dominic’s voice shouting my name, his mother’s silhouette, that horrible choice she tried to force on him. My stomach lurches.
“She… actually stabbed me,” I say slowly. “I thought I… dreamt some of it. It got weird.”
“It got fucked,” he says bluntly. “She waited at the cottage, tracked you there, decided to make a point.”
“Tracked me?” I rasp. “How—”
He grimaces. “She had trackers on the Charger and the bike. Probably on your shit, too,” he says. “I didn’t think to check because I was busy pretending that ignoring her meant I’d cut the chain. That’s on me.”
Silence stretches, thick and heavy. The monitor fills it with steady beeps, marking out the beats of a heart that’s hammering way too fast for someone who’s supposed to be resting.
“What the fuck were you doing at the cottage?” he asks, and there’s no heat in it, just that quiet, lethal intensity he uses. “You were supposed to be home, taking it easy, maybe yelling at your cat.”
I flush, because there’s no good answer that doesn’t make me sound pathetic.
“I was spiraling and I…” I swallow, tasting metal.
“I’m sorry. I just didn’t want to be in my apartment thinking about my parents.
Or the video. Or the way everything exploded.
Your place felt… safer, and I missed you,” I say, and the words come out smaller than I want them to.
“I was scared, and I wanted to be close to you. I didn’t know she’d be there. If I’d known, I never would’ve—”
“Hey,” he cuts in, voice softening. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad that she touched you and got in a dirty hit while my back was turned. Not you, baby. Never you.”
I look at him then, really look, and the rawness on his face steals the breath out of my lungs more effectively than any wound.
His eyes are red-rimmed, lids swollen in a way that says my boyfriend—the one I’ve only ever seen laugh or glare or smirk or go blank—has cried.
The dark smudges under his eyes look painted on.
His hair is a mess, his hoodie rumpled, his hands shaking just enough that I can feel it where they hold mine.
“You killed her,” I say quietly, because it sits there between us, obvious and heavy.
He doesn’t look away. “Yeah,” he says. “I killed her.”
There is no bravado in it, or even pride.
“She was still your mother,” I say, voice barely above a whisper.