32. NIKOLAI
Chapter thirty-two
I needed a fucking cigarette.
I dressed quickly, pulling on the black joggers I’d discarded and the closest dry shirt I could find. I walked barefoot across the hardwood toward the kitchen, where I yanked open the drawer beside the fridge—the one where I kept my stash.
A while back, I’d succeeded in quitting, and I’d gone without for over a year, but being back in Kyiv while it was under siege by those Kremlin fucks, seeing the destruction of the Ukrainian people, had reignited the craving.
Russia might’ve been the country of my birth, but Ukraine was my home by choice.
The war there was the reason I’d gotten into arms dealing in the first place.
And all the shit that had gone down this summer had only fueled my nicotine addiction.
Right now, I needed a hit.
I thumped the box against my palm. Once. Twice. Popped the lid. Pulled one out with my teeth and grabbed the old silver lighter from where it sat on the island. I cupped my hand around the flame and it sparked to life. The tip of the cigarette flared and caught.
The first drag scorched its way down to my lungs, taking off the edge of everything…for one fucking second.
But my frustration wouldn’t be denied.
Because no matter how hard I tried to justify it, I couldn’t get around one brutal, unrelenting truth—I’d hurt her. I’d treated her as if she were just another warm body, another asset to be handled.
But she wasn’t.
She was my little lamb.
Lacey Grace Oakley.
Not Lyla Laine, Lacey —the real one. The girl I’d stalked, studied, and broken.
I knew her story. I’d researched every detail of it. Her parents and sister—gone in an instant, wreckage on a Tennessee highway. She was alone in this life with just her grief and a dream she refused to let die.
She should’ve had support. Family. A safety net.
Instead, she was lying her way through survival, using her dead sister’s name. And her desperation had led her to get a job she had no business working—the kind of job that came with velvet ropes and backroom handcuffs. She was na?ve, but who could blame her?
She just wanted to make it on Broadway. Like so many others. Thought she could make her way to the top with grit, charm, and natural talent. No agent. No connections. Just fire in her belly and talent that could probably bring the house down—if she ever got a chance to really use it.
But this city didn’t give a shit about a person’s dreams. Manhattan chewed up girls like her for breakfast—starry-eyed hopefuls who showed up with a suitcase and a song in their heart, thinking they were going to be the next big thing.
They almost always ended up waiting tables, dancing in sleazy clubs, or worse—selling themselves just to make rent.
And Lacey?
She was barely holding on.
She danced in that hellhole not because she wanted to—but because she had to.
Because rent was high, the city was merciless, and rejection was a daily ritual.
The Broadway meat grinder didn’t care that she was gifted.
Didn’t care that she was sweet or kind or still mourning a life that had been ripped out from under her.
She was twenty fucking years old!
She should’ve been in school. Falling in love. Learning who she was.
Instead, she was spinning from a goddamn aerial pole in a club run by traffickers, while men like me sat in the shadows and watched.
And now?
Now she was mine.
Not by her choice. By my obsession. My control. My inability to fucking let go once I had her in my sights.
I’d taken the last pure thing she had left.
And I hadn’t seen the goddamn truth until it was far too late.
I stepped out onto the patio to finish my cigarette, closing the sliding glass door behind me. The rain had let up, but the sky was still ominous, black and iron-gray clouds hanging heavy and low over the city like a shroud.
I moved to stand at the parapet.
The one she’d nearly died on.
Where her feet had slipped on rain-slick stone as she dangled thirty-two stories above the sidewalk—trying to escape me .
I blew smoke out of the corner of my mouth and glowered down at the street below.
What the fuck had I done?
I thumped the cigarette against the wall, flicking ash into the wind, trying to burn away the guilt pounding behind my temples like a second heartbeat.
I hadn’t just touched her.
I hadn’t just fucked her.
I had taken her innocence.
And the worst part? I hadn’t even known . I’d been too wrapped up in my goddamn lust to see her. The way she had hissed when I’d put my fingers inside her—I had brushed it off. I’d thought she was just that tight, wet, perfect. Her body had gripped me as if it had been made for me.
That she was a virgin never even crossed my mind.
Not once.
Because of the way she danced at The Sacrifice—fuck, the way she moved—I had assumed . I’d judged her the way I would any other woman in this world, because women who survived in clubs like that didn’t usually come untouched.
But Lacey wasn’t just some girl dancing on a stage.
She was a girl who’d buried her entire family in one cruel twist of fate. A girl with nothing but broken dreams and a sister’s name in her pocket, trying to chase something better. She was someone who didn’t know a damn thing about the underworld.
And I had treated her like a fucking whore.
If someone did to my sister what I had done to Lyla?
I would carve their fucking heart out with a butter knife and make them watch it stop beating.
Jesus Christ.
I dragged another hit from the cigarette, trying to chase that flicker of numbness again.
I’d built my entire reputation on control. On respect. On being the man who didn’t need to bark to make people obey. I treated women as if they mattered, because they did .
But with Lyla? I had lost it.
I’d let the monster off the leash.
I’d let my addiction to her take the wheel.
I had bent her over and taken her without a second thought. Like an animal. Like the worst kind of man. And, fuck me, she had let me —because she trusted me. Because, despite everything, that little lamb still thought I might be her savior.
And I had broken that trust.
What she’d said to me at Cipher came back like a blade to the gut.
“How many women have you raped and murdered, Mr. Stalker?”
Fuck.
I’d never wanted to hurt her.
But I had.
And now…now I didn’t know how to fix it.
The cigarette burned low between my fingers, the ember crackling as it caught the breeze. I dropped it, crushed it under my heel, and laid both hands on the parapet, bowing my head.
There was no fixing this.
Her life would never be the same.
It wasn’t just about what I’d done to her.
It was everything else too.
She couldn’t go back to her apartment. To Cipher. To her Off-Broadway show. She’d been targeted. Auctioned. Nearly sold to the highest bidder by a cartel butcher who would’ve filmed every minute of her torture and streamed it on the fucking dark web.
Delgado wouldn’t stop. Not after the fire. Not after that auction had gotten shut down.
He’d come for her.
And the only reason she was still alive was because I’d gotten to her in the nick of time.
So what now?
What the fuck was I supposed to do?
Let her stay? Keep her caged in a tower while the world tried to kill her?
Or send her away—somewhere safe, somewhere clean, somewhere far from men like me?
My mind went to Tacoma again.
To Anastasia and the Thorin brothers.
Conan would protect her. That bastard would throw his body on a grenade if it meant keeping a woman safe. Braxton and Atticus too. All of them were protectors. Medical professionals. Healers, not killers.
Lacey could start over there. Be around people who deserved her. Maybe go back to school. Dance again. Hell, maybe even perform in some local theater, under her real name.
She could be safe.
She could be free .
But—
The next thought hit me hard.
If I let her go, I would only see her when I visited.
She would belong to someone else.
Some other man would teach her how to trust again. How to love. He’d make her laugh, make her blush. He’d bury himself inside her while she cried his name—and not mine .
My fingers curled against the stone.
I shouldn’t want to keep her.
I knew that.
I had no right.
Not in this world. Not with the kind of men I dealt with. The hacking jobs I ran. The bratva loyalties I couldn’t just walk away from. The secrets I carried. The blood on my hands.
The mafia wasn’t a life. It was a slow death—one full of tailored suits, dangerous lies, and frequent funerals.
And women?
Women didn’t get freedom in our world.
They got silenced. Married off. Traded. Watched. Owned.
Even the ones we loved.
Especially the ones we loved.
They lived under lock and key. With bodyguards. Rules. Shadows trailing their every step. They were always at the mercy of the man they belonged to, and their safety was dependent on obedience and politics.
That wasn’t a life.
It was a gilded fucking cage.
I couldn’t do that to her.
I shouldn’t do that to her.
But fuck me, the thought of another man ever touching her—
I would kill him.
No hesitation.
Maybe the only way to keep her safe was to keep her as mine .
To make it clear to everyone—Delgado, the bratva, the syndicate, the fucking world—that she was under my protection.
Untouchable.
Claimed.
Not for sale. Not to be harmed.
Marked.
By me.
And if anyone even thought of hurting her, I’d rip them apart and spread pieces of their bodies throughout the five boroughs.
Fuck! My little lamb had my thoughts all jumbled.
The girl who should’ve run from me the moment she saw me.
The girl I should’ve let go the second she walked away from me at Cipher.
We were both trapped in a situation where there were no good options.
And now? I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t keep her.
I had to cut her loose, but I didn’t know if I could.
I closed my eyes, let the wind rush over me, and breathed her name on a whisper of regret and longing.
Lacey Grace—forgive me.