21. LEO
TWENTY-ONE
LEO
My head is hazy. It's hard for it not to be after all this.
In an impersonal, generic, expensive hotel room, a man in glasses dabs antiseptic on the cuts on my face, and I can't focus on him.
He pushes the crooked bone of my nose back into place, and the pain isn't pleasant—it just makes my eyes water and an imaginary nail file scrape against my bones—but I can't focus on that either.
He injects a painkiller into my vein, says I wouldn't be able to swallow a pill with my face like this.
Okay. I don't focus. The tramadol seeps in, clearing my head. I don't focus.
All I can think about is him .
I didn't know if I was going to survive.
If the transfer had actually happened, Ivan would have surely killed me.
I can't hold my tongue. I had decided I would die laughing at that idiot for completely losing his composure over some cheap provocation, and I would fade out thinking of him .
Imagining that, at least, it would be his hands.
Honestly, dying at Dante's hands doesn't sound bad.
When he walked into that room, he didn't even look at me. He lunged at that nondescript henchman, and he must have heard the threats they threw at me. Luca executed the other one professionally, as he should, and Dante…
The look in his eyes was horrific. It sent a dirty shiver down my spine.
He tore that man apart as if he had personally offended him.
Blood splattered. A trickle shot across my cheek.
He didn't even notice. He just kept going until his hands were red up to the wrists, his lips pursed in hatred, his entire face smeared with blood.
And I couldn't stop watching. The Dante who walked into that room was the most poetic death sentence I had ever seen. And I've never felt so safe.
I knew from the beginning that Dante wasn't like anyone else. No one had ever bothered to raise their voice for me, let alone their hands. And he crossed that room as if anyone who touched me was breaking a rule written in his own blood.
I'm not an idiot. I know it was instinct. Rage. Territory. But it was for me . And when he finally looked at me, with all that blood hiding his skin, I knew. I'll never be able to walk away from this.
Dante is the only light I recognize. What those guys did to me should have been a cheap, chemical aphrodisiac, finally feeling some remnant of dopamine, of adrenaline, but it wasn't. It wasn't him. It couldn't have been him.
I don't know when this stopped being chemical. It's been a while. I was flirting with death in that room—it was only when he walked in that something switched on. A spark. An instinct. My whole body responded to him.
It's the light from the hallway that pulls me back. Luca is standing in the doorway—he's just entered, and he's waiting for the doctor to release me. He looks at me. He instantly looks away when I meet his gaze.
He saw the kiss. He saw the carnage. Dante didn't push me away, not even when he was calling for him, hurrying him to leave. Dante allowed it. I held him before Luca's eyes, kissed his face, pulled him to me. It makes me feel things I can't even name.
Luca doesn't understand what happened. He doesn't know how to deal with me now.
The doctor finishes placing a final bandage on my eyebrow ridge. "There. Try not to get punched in the face again for the next 24 hours."
I give him the closest thing to a smile I can manage. "No promises."
Luca clears his throat. "The boss is waiting for you," he says. He's tense.
I get up from the bed. I try not to breathe through my nose, but breathing through my mouth also creates a sensation of sandpaper on my ribs. One is broken. I have a compression wrap around my torso, and it makes everything even more uncomfortable.
I walk slowly toward Luca. He says nothing. I follow him out of the room—the last one down the hall is where the most feared man in the city and his siblings are. The Volkov triumvirate.
Luca opens the door for me. It's a luxury suite, bigger than my house. Svetlana is present on a large video call monitor, and Dante is standing, watching the city from the window. He turns as I enter.
A man in a gray suit with perfectly slicked-back hair stands before a wall of screens, analyzing data. That must be Dmitry, the middle Volkov brother. The three of them stare at me.
"Mr. Hays," Dmitry says. He stands up, walking toward me while closing the top button of his suit. He extends his hand to me as if he were meeting his brother's boyfriend. "You've been the center of our operations for a while—Dante talks a lot about you."
"Dima," I hear Dante complain.
Dmitry extends his hand and smiles.
"Dmitry Volkov," he introduces himself.
I shake his hand.
"Allow me," he says, lightly taking my arm to help me walk.
It's a surprise. I didn't think a Volkov would show kindness.
"I'm fine," I say.
"I insist."
I walk slowly—with Dmitry—to the armchair in the center of the room, facing them. Luca remains at the door as I sit down, trying to keep my torso straight. It's a bit hard to breathe.
Dmitry returns to his chair behind an office desk piled with documents.
Dima . The nickname slipped out of Dante automatically, intimately; someone you've grown up with. He said it with a serene brutality, without even realizing it. Some very poorly calibrated part of my nervous system found that beautiful.
"Report," Dante orders.
I let the spell break.
"They wanted to decrypt the data Sal stole," I say, getting straight to the point. "I met Alexei Malakov in person. Interesting experience."
They all have the same reaction: a subtle frown, a sense of unease. The king showing his face on the board is never a good sign.
" He spoke to you? " says Svetlana. She turns, and I see the reflection of a screen in her glasses. She's doing her research, checking records.
"He did. Even tried to recruit me. But I don't think he was serious."
Dmitry is watching me more closely now. Dante has never taken his suffocating focus off me.
" Elaborate ," Svetlana says, looking back at us.
I lean back in the chair. I feel a sharp pain in my ribs.
"I'll tell you what happened, what I think happened, and then you can be the judges," I say.
Svetlana isn't used to an outsider speaking so casually to her.
Her annoyance is visible. "I don't know how long I was confined, but the first few hours or days were in isolation.
I'd say they were gauging the Volkovs' reaction to decide how to proceed.
By the time Alexei arrived, Viktor Orlov was already dead, and someone had been separated into six pieces after… "
"Seven," Dmitry corrects.
"Seven," I continue. "Alexei wanted to know how much you were paying me. Made up something about a counter-offer…"
" Why do you think he made it up? " Svetlana interrupts, impatient.
"He wanted me to decrypt the stolen data willingly. And I did?—"
" You what?! " Svetlana immediately exclaims. Dmitry touches his temples, Dante tenses into that hateful expression I know so well.
I push myself forward in the chair. "It was for a good reason!
" I say, but I have to lean back to speak with a broken rib.
"He gave me a controlled terminal to work on—to reach you, I needed to run a script on an open network, which they only allowed after checking the files for security and authenticity.
And apparently, the message I left at the casino got through.
Or we wouldn't be having this conversation. "
Silence. Svetlana is displeased and opens her mouth to ask questions, but she lacks the expertise. I can almost feel it: how did you get a script past their check?
I'd even answer it.
"Let's assume that this data, after our attacks, is no longer useful to his operations," Dmitry says. I get it now—Dmitry is the peacemaker brother. He glances at Dante and Svetlana. "Right, Sveta? Donya?"
Donya . What an adorable nickname.
The two say nothing. It's not right by them, but Dmitry turns back to me anyway. "Continue, Nyx."
"Well, he checked the files before you all arrived, so if I hadn't done what I did, I'd be a corpse right now."
" We get it ," Svetlana says. She's irritated. It's a little funny that her temper is so similar to Dante's. " Get to the point ."
I give her the best half-smile I can muster.
"After that, he told me Dante was trying to wipe the Malakov name off the map.
That's why he was sending me to Ivan Malakov.
He implied Ivan had a firmer hand—but I've worked for them before, and Ivan, so the rumors go, is just an unhinged killer.
What I think really happened is that regardless of the Volkovs' reaction, Alexei would win.
If there was no retaliation, he'd try to blackmail me into working for him; if there was, and there was , he'd throw me to Ivan as bait, wait for you to dismantle half the empire, and then take over by centralizing it all himself.
In his best-case scenario, both Ivan and I would die, and the Volkovs would still be wounded. "
Svetlana has no direct reply this time. She and Dmitry pause, thinking about the implications.
There's a poorly disguised rivalry between Alexei and Ivan, but confirmation of a planned internal war is new.
And it is, as far as we know, a one-sided war.
Otherwise, Ivan wouldn't accept any gifts from Alexei like this.
It sinks in. I see the reflections of two screens in Svetlana's glasses, Dmitry checks his papers. And Dante tenses.
He doesn't take his eyes off me. I saw the veins in his wrists, his fists clenching. It was at the hypothetical possibility of Ivan killing me.
And fuck, he is so fucking beautiful.
"The analysis matches the movement of Alexei's funds to contingency accounts in the last twelve hours," Dmitry says. "He was preparing to fall back."
"A one-sided war," Dante says. He gets it. He understands where I'm going.