Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
KOSTYA
I was exhausted, starving, and running out of time.
I needed to find Marina and get back to Russia before Gregor decided to have me killed on principle.
My plan had been simple: sit her down over a meal, explain what was happening, and then board the next flight to Moscow. But no, Marina had to be just as stubborn, if not more so, than her sister.
So now, I was going to do this the way I should have from the beginning—my way.
I knew where she lived, of course.
I went straight there after leaving the police station and stopping long enough to change suits, my patience threadbare. A few lights were on inside, shadows shifting behind the thin curtains. She was home. No doubt getting ready to run again.
The last thing I needed was another chase through Chicago.
I made my way to the tiny backyard, grabbed a rusted metal lawn chair, and jammed it under the back storm door handle. If she wanted to escape, she’d have to throw herself out of a damn window. I made a mental note to keep her far from any on the first floor.
Satisfied, I returned to the front door, my pulse hammering, head aching. I inhaled slowly, forcing myself to smother the anger simmering in my chest.
She was probably scared. Adrenaline had overridden her common sense, that had to be it.
She was, after all, a woman alone, stranded in a foreign country, working in a rundown diner.
Still, it made sense why she had run. A girl raised with every luxury, suddenly stripped of her security, left to fend for herself in a world that chewed up the weak. Of course she panicked. Of course she thought she had to handle this alone.
Once I had her cornered, once she had calmed down, we would talk.
No breaking down doors. No threats. No grabbing her and hauling her over my shoulder. No more attention-drawing scenes.
She would see reason.
I knocked. Actually knocked , like a civilized person, instead of the leashed animal I felt like. I had no choice. Not only Gregor but the boys over at the Four Monks were now on high alert over my actions in Chicago. The last thing I needed was any more attention.
A pause. Then the door creaked open a few inches.
But it wasn’t Marina standing there.
A skinny man with floppy black hair and a beanie pulled low over his eyes blinked at me. “Can I help you, bro?”
Whatever control I’d managed to hold onto snapped.
He opened his mouth to say something else, but I didn’t hear a damn word.
The only sound was the relentless pounding of my heart, urging me to kill.
I moved without thinking.
One second, he was standing there and the next, I had him by the throat, shoving him backward into the house. The door slammed shut behind us with a finality that should have terrified him.
It didn’t. Not yet.
I fixed that.
Driving him into the wall, I pinned him there with my forearm pressed against his scrawny throat. His eyes bulged, hands clawing at my arm as he tried—and failed—to pry me off.
“Who the fuck are you?” I growled, daring him to give me a reason to snap his neck.
A slow burn twisted in my gut, something I didn’t want to name, something I refused to acknowledge. My jaw ached from clenching so hard, but I didn’t loosen my grip.
Not even when his lips parted on a stuttering, useless breath. “I’m…I’m…I’m?—”
Pathetic.
I ripped him off the wall just to slam him back against it. The drywall crunched under the impact, the sound sharp and satisfying. A dent. A reminder.
“Tell me who you are,” I ordered .
The boy trembled. Weak. Spineless. This was the kind of man she trusted to be close to her?
He was nothing. Not strong enough. Not good enough. Not worthy enough to even breathe the same air as her.
“I’m John,” he finally choked out. His face turned blotchy with terror, and then the unmistakable stench of piss filled the air. A dark stain spread across the front of his already-filthy jeans.
Disgust curled through me.
“Who are you to Marina?”
“No one,” he wheezed, feet scrambling to find the floor.
I lifted him higher, pressing him into the wall until his legs dangled uselessly. He made a garbled sound, something between a plea and a sob.
“I’m just her roommate,” he croaked.
I narrowed my eyes. “Marina wouldn’t have a male roommate.”
I didn’t know if that was true. I should have. But I had stayed away from her. Deliberately distanced myself from the one thing I had truly wanted during the short, miserable years of my marriage.
Her.
In Moscow, she wouldn’t have been permitted to live with a man. The only man she would have ever lived with other than family would be her husband.
And this little dick?
Not a chance in hell.
“She does,” he blurted. “But I swear, man, other than the chore chart, we barely talk. I tried hitting that, but something is wrong with her. She’s frigid or a lesbian or something.”
I stilled.
The casual filth in his tone, the complete lack of respect in his words. He was too stupid to realize he had just sealed his fate.
“Or maybe she just has higher standards.” I let the words slip out, sharp and cutting.
He frowned, as if the thought had never even occurred to him.
I was done.
This worm wasn’t going to be of any use to me. His presence here was already an insult. Letting him talk was only angering me more.
My grip tightened, forearm pressing into his throat, just enough to watch his face shift from red to purple to blue. His hands slapped against my arm, fingers scratching, grasping for relief that would never come.
His struggles weakened. His eyelids fluttered.
And then—nothing.
I let his unconscious body crumple to the floor. The impact rattled through the room, but I didn’t spare him another glance. I crouched, ripped his phone out of his pocket, and used his own shoelaces to hog-tie his limp form, leaving him lying in the center of the floor.
He would wake up with a headache.
He deserved worse.
With him dealt with, I turned my focus to Marina.
She wasn’t home, but if I could find her room, I might get answers. Maybe something would tell me why Solovyov was so interested in her .
What had Veronika given her? What could she have said that was worth hunting Marina down across an entire ocean?
What was so important?
I needed to find out. And I needed to find out now.
Once I understood what I was dealing with, I could call Gregor, give him the information he needed, and make things right. But not until Marina was under my protection. Not until I knew I could keep her safe. Not until I finally did right by my late wife.
A familiar ache pulsed in my chest at the thought of Veronika.
Not longing. Never that.
It was anger—hot and sharp. Guilt—cold and corrosive.
A tangled mess of things I had no time to sort through.
And now, something else slithered through the mix.
Something new. Something green and dangerous.
I shoved it down, ignoring the feeling as I made my way up the stairs, searching room by room.
The first was an immediate no.
The walls were covered in posters of alt-rock pinup girls and weed leaves. A cloud of stale incense clung to the air, doing a poor job of covering up the underlying scent of marijuana.
Absolutely not Marina’s room.
I moved on.
The next door opened to something different.
Cozy. Lived-in. A space that felt like a home, not just a place to sleep.
Mismatched furniture held small, carefully placed odds and ends. A wooden chair, worn and rickety, had clothing draped over it; warm, stylish, but visibly secondhand. The kind of pieces someone chose for function rather than indulgence.
It wasn’t messy, but it was cluttered.
Shelves lined the walls, filled with trinkets; pretty, delicate, but not overtly girly. Tchotchkes and knickknacks arranged neatly between stacks and stacks of books, each one stamped with a sticker from Open Books, West Loop.
I picked one up, thumbing through the pages until I landed on a dog-eared section.
Explicit.
A sex scene.
Between a young woman and a priest.
What the hell?
This didn’t seem like Marina. Not the girl I remembered.
Doubt crept in. Maybe this was another roommate’s space. Maybe I’d been wrong?—
Then I saw it.
A shawl. Dark emerald-green, woven with a traditional pattern.
The first time I met her, she had been wearing it, and the image had burned itself into my mind. Not because it was expensive but because of the way it made her look. The green had brought out the depth of her eyes and made them glow. The fabric had turned her dirty blonde hair into spun gold under the winter light.
I reached for it without thinking, bringing it to my nose .
Her scent wrapped around me instantly.
Not the saccharine floral perfumes Veronika used to favor. This was different.
Deeper. Spicier. Warmer. Vanilla and clove.
It was her .
And it did things to me that it shouldn’t.
Not for a woman so young.
The age gap wasn’t scandalous, six years wasn’t much. In Moscow, it wouldn’t even be talked about.
But she wasn’t just any woman.
She was Veronika’s younger sister.
She was supposed to be forbidden.
The scent of her skin clung to the fabric, laced with something faintly sweet, something intoxicating. I inhaled again, my grip tightening.
How many nights had she wrapped this around herself, seeking warmth? Had she pulled it over her bare legs while curled up in bed? Had she pressed it to her lips in thought, in fear, in longing?
I shouldn’t have wanted to know.
But I did.
A violent, unwanted ache twisted in my gut.
Veronika had never brought feelings like this out in me. Even in our most intimate moments, there had been no heat, no fire, only duty. She had been cold, selfish, a woman who had never belonged to me, barely even in name.
But Marina…
I shut my eyes, jaw clenched, every muscle wound tight with something dark, something dangerous. I had spent years avoiding her, denying myself the pull of her sharp tongue, her defiant green eyes, her quiet strength. And now here I was, standing in her bedroom, holding her shawl in my hands like a man starved.
A man obsessed.
My fingers curled into the fabric. I should put it down.
I didn’t.
She had been running from me for months. Dodging me. Denying me. Hiding from what was inevitable. Because the one reason my marriage had never worked, the one thing I had never admitted, was that every time I looked at Veronika…I wished she were Marina.
Did Veronika know? Had she figured it out? Was that why she pulled away? Or had she simply never cared?
It didn’t matter.
None of it mattered.
Because no matter what I wanted, Marina was not for me.
She could never be for me.
It didn’t matter that she had the face of an angel but a body meant to tempt the devil—one sent to torment me, to haunt my dreams, to taint my every fantasy.
It didn’t matter that every time I had taken a woman to my bed, I had wished it was her.
It shouldn’t have mattered.
But it did.
It was wrong to lust after my sister-in-law.
My marriage to Veronika had never been about love. It was business, a calculated alliance. Still, I had told myself I would make it work. That I would try.
But the truth ?
Just because I had never loved Veronika didn’t mean she hadn’t been my wife. My responsibility.
And yet, I still held the shawl up to my nose again and inhaled deeply.
A vision flashed through my mind of Marina standing before me, wrapped in nothing but this shawl.
The soft wool barely covering her full breasts, slipping over the curve of her waist before draping over the swell of her hips and thighs. I pictured her lying back on that bed, the edges of the fabric slipping open, exposing creamy skin, the dip of her navel, the gentle parting of her thighs.
One hand trailing lower.
The other flipping through the pages of one of those dog-eared books, lost in whatever sin-laced story she had marked for later.
My fingers curled into the shawl, tightening, as heat licked through my veins.
Fuck.
This was wrong. And I needed to stop.
I forced myself to release the fabric, setting it back down with more care than was necessary. I needed to focus. I wasn’t here to fantasize. I was here to find out why a Russian bratva boss wanted her. What had Veronika given her?
I searched the room, my movements sharp, purposeful.
No jewelry box.
No loose floorboards.
No hidden compartments in the small desk.
Nothing .
Whatever she had, it wasn’t here.
Which meant the only thing left to do was wait.
She would come back.
She had to come back.
I knew she wouldn’t leave without the shawl.
It was a gift from Veronika.
And as far as I knew, aside from whatever Veronika had stolen from Solovyov, it was the only piece of her sister Marina had left.
I went back downstairs, my boots heavy against the floor. The roommate was still unconscious in the middle of the room.
For a brief moment, I felt the barest flicker of pity.
He was probably just some loser college kid, desperate for a cheap place to stay. More than likely, he had been here before Marina. She had probably taken the room because it was the only thing she could afford until she got on her feet.
Still.
I hated it.
I hated that another man got to see her first thing in the morning, before she had her coffee, her voice still husky from sleep. I hated that he was the last person she spoke to before bed, that he lived close enough to hear the rustle of sheets when she shifted in her sleep.
Even if he was too much of a coward to touch her, the fact remained…he could have.
The thought made something dark and ugly coil in my gut.
The second I met Marina, I knew she was going to be a problem .
She had been barely twenty, all soft curves and sharp wit, and I had known instantly, I shouldn’t want her. So I pulled away from Veronika’s family. I refused to get close. Refused to build those bonds.
Because every time I saw Marina, it was a test.
And I had always known that at some point, I would fail.
I kept my word, though. I never strayed. I never let my hands—or my thoughts—go where they weren’t supposed to. And how was I rewarded for my restraint?
With her ending up here. Living with this dick.
This coward got to be in her space. While she read page after page of filthy books that turned her on, he lived under the same roof. How long until she sought a man to satisfy her?
How long until she got tired of waiting for someone worthy and lowered her standards to him?
No.
I had stayed away because it would have been wrong to fuck my wife’s sister.
It hadn’t mattered that Veronika was never faithful to me. What had mattered was the principle.
But Veronika was dead now.
And she had died because she took a lover and then stole from him.
Why the fuck was I still holding back?
Guilt and lust warred inside me, a violent, intense mix.
I hadn’t been there to save Veronika.
But I was here now.
And Marina was mine to protect.
My eyes dropped to the unconscious bastard at my feet. I considered it—considered putting him out of his misery. It would be easy. Too easy.
And not nearly as satisfying as I needed it to be.
Besides, I had promised Var minimal bloodshed. The more attention I drew before I got Gregor fully up to speed, the worse it would be for me.
No, I would wait.
Marina would come back.
And when she did, we would come to an understanding.
She would be under my protection.
The longer I pursued her, the more I realized there was nothing stopping me from having her under me as well.
The front door creaked open.
“Hey, anyone home? I’m thinking about ordering pizza. Anyone want in—What the fuck happened to the wall?”
Another voice.
Masculine.
I saw red.