Chapter Twenty-Six
Elena
Fear suffocates me so much, I can almost taste it. The air is heavy with tension, hot and damp as I breathe in and out frantically, each breath faster than the last.
With my hands on my hips, I cross the room multiple times, pacing like it’ll ease the burden that feels like a ton of bricks on my chest.
“Calm down, Elena. Take a deep breath,” I try to encourage myself. But it doesn’t work.
Nothing has made me feel better for the past few hours since I was forced to enter the safe house, which only has one lamp to serve as light.
There’s been no way to communicate with anyone or anything in the outside world. My instructions were clear: all I have to do is wait. They’ll come to me.
But it’s so freaking hard to just stand by and do nothing.
Anxiety claws at me, gnawing at my insides, till I’m sure I have little time left until I finally crack with insanity. I want to pull my hair out. I want to scream.
The mental pictures won’t leave me alone, no matter how many times I’ve attempted to remain positive.
Leonid could be hurt right now. Tatiana, too. What if he doesn’t find her on time? What if the men aren’t able to protect each other? What if—
I flinch when the heavy reinforced doors burst open with a loud groan. I hear muffled conversation in hot rushes of Russian before the men step inside—Mikhail first, then a few others.
Some limp in obvious pain and crumple to the floor with their backs against the wall, while the others start tucking their weapons aside and hunch to attend to the injured.
My eyes search their faces wildly and my heart rate triples for every second I don’t see Leonid.
I’m quick on my feet, running toward Mikhail. His gaze zeroes in on me as I approach, and I stagger on my feet, halting immediately at the large smear of crimson across his vest.
The light in the room might not be bright, but I don’t need it to tell what that is. Blood. And from the looks of him—with how perfectly alert he is, standing upright and easily dismantling his gun—it’s not his.
I suck in a deep breath, forcefully dragging my eyes away from the sight as I whisper, “Where are they?”
Mikhail opens his mouth to speak, but a tall, familiar shadow falls over the doorway, and he clamps his mouth shut, then quietly moves aside with his dismantled gun.
The figure at the door steps into the safe house, and my hand flies to my chest.
“Oh my God…”
Leonid steps over the threshold. He’s a sight torn straight out of a nightmare. There are dark purple bruises around his eyes. He’s battered and splattered with a horrific amount of fresh blood that, unlike Mikhail’s, seems like some of it might be his.
His grips his ribs through his torn leather jacket. His knuckles are split raw, and yet he still finds a way to be as commanding and terrifying as ever.
He doesn’t look like a man who just survived death—he looks like the god of death itself, radiating a lethal, dark energy that makes every man in the room briefly drop their gaze.
Tatiana clings to his side, her face pale with exhaustion. Tears stream down her face, and when she wipes them away, I spot the bright red markings around her wrist.
My heart squeezes. I can’t imagine the terror she suffered at Vasili’s hands.
Her frame shakes so violently she can barely keep her footing. Leonid keeps a heavy, protective arm anchored around her shoulders, keeping her against his side.
Without breaking his stride, he glances toward the darker corner where Ace and Mikhail help one of the men into a chair.
“Ace,” Leonid barks, his voice a low, gravelly baritone that cuts through the room with authority. He gives what I assume is a swift, commanding order in fluent, rapid Russian, before ending it with English. “Tati needs medical care. Take her now.”
The younger man, with bloody scratch marks on his cheeks and a busted lip, steps forward into the light to gently guide her toward the back wing of the safe house. Tatiana lets go of her brother’s sleeve, and their footsteps fade down the corridor.
Then the heavy silence of the room collapses entirely on me.
Leonid turns his head. Steel gray, piercing eyes lock onto mine from across the expanse of the room, cutting right through the space between us.
My breath catches in my throat at the intensity of his gaze, and my heart does that familiar, erratic dance against my ribs as he begins to walk forward.
He moves with a slow, deliberate pace, his boots leaving faint crimson smudges on the polished floor. As he gets closer, the stench of metallic copper precedes him, wrapping around me before he even reaches my side.
I stand frozen, trapped in the sheer gravity of this moment and everything we know it signifies.
His jaw ticks and his fingers flex at his sides. There’s overwhelming anger in his eyes, but also conflict. I recognize it. I’ve lived with it from the first moment I set my eyes on him.
The tension between us thickens until it’s suffocating. Unable to bear it any longer, I step forward, and he shocks me by moving back.
I frown. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You’re moving away from me and…and you’re hurt. Let me take a look.”
“It’s a surface wound. It’s not deep. I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.”
He sighs and drags a hand through his hair. “Ptichka, look, it’s best we talk after we get back to the house. You need to eat, and I should probably take a shower.”
“I need to eat? At a time like this? A shower…Leo…” My voice breaks and my heart stings. “I don’t…I don’t understand. You can come close. You can touch me, you know that, right? It’s me.”
“I know it’s you.” His eyes glaze over with an iciness that terribly contrasts the warmth I’ve slowly grown used to. “I know it’s you, Elena, and that’s why you have to see it. You have to see me, all of me, for you to understand.”
“I have, and I—”
“You think you have, but you have no fucking idea how far this goes,” he grits out, barely able to control the venom seeping into his tone. “I shot him.”
I know he’s referring to Vasili, but I don’t understand why he feels the need to reiterate what he—
“I shot him right between the fucking eyes.”
Shit.
It’s not an exaggeration. It’s real. He raised a gun to that horrible man’s head and pulled the trigger.
The mental image forms in deep dark depths of my mind: Vasili lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood with a hole in his face. A hole put there by Leo.
I swallow the urge to gag.
Leo must see the look that crosses my face, but he immediately misreads it.
“I know that you’re an actual human being, very warm-blooded with a beating heart.
You feel. You’re empathetic, and that’s okay.
That’s what makes you even more beautiful.
” There’s a beat of hesitation and a brief smile that doesn’t reach his eyes before he continues. “Not me, ptichka. I’m dark—”
“Leo—”
“No, listen to me,” he says firmly. “I’m dark, broken, and scarred for the rest of my fucking life. I shot him between the fucking eyes, and I’d do it again if I could. No regrets. No apologies. No fucking feelings clouding my judgment. I could do that. I could do a whole lot worse. Look at me…”
Hot, stinging tears quickly spring to my eyes and blur my vision, but I blink them away and drag my gaze across his bloody clothes.
Leonid gestures around, to nothing in particular. “This is my world, Elena. It’s fucked-up. It’s bloody, brutal, and it’s not for fragile hearts. It’s not something you or anyone else can just fix, especially not when the victims don’t see anything broken. That’s what you need to understand.”
His chest heaves as he stares at me with conflict in his eyes, like he can’t bear to lose me, but will do whatever needs to be done to protect me.
Despite the rage in his expression, I can also see the care, the fierce protectiveness, and something else that we’ve both denied ourselves from fully experiencing for far too long.
My mind screams at the danger of the monster before me, at the danger of his unapologetic confession, while my body burns with a terrifying, helpless relief that he made it back to me alive.
Call me crazy. Maybe I am really insane to hear everything he just said and not budge. But I’ve come to accept that nothing could ever make me want to run from this man.
He thinks he’s fucked-up? I wonder what made him believe I’m any better.
I take a breath, my heart pounding, but understanding for the first time the scale of his world.
Angrily and without hesitation, I march forward, closing the distance between us. I stop right in front of him, where his hot breath fans across my forehead and his chest brushes my chin.
I tilt my head backward, glaring at him.
“You know I’ve been here, waiting in agonizing silence except for a stupid cricket that won’t stop chirping?
I’ve been here, counting down the seconds until you and Tati came back home to me.
You’re saying I went through the most suspenseful period of my life, only to have you come back with crap about my fragile feelings? ”
His brows furrow, but the iciness slowly begins to fade. “Did you even hear a fucking word of what I said?”
“Oh, I did.” I nod, feeling the burning tears finding their way back up. Sniffling, I stand my ground. “I heard you loud and clear, Mr. I-get-to-decide-the-fate-of-everyone’s-lives. I heard you, oh king of—”
“Elena, this isn’t the fucking time for jokes.”
“Jokes?” I nearly choke on the tears that well up, and I laugh to force them down. “You think I’m joking? You think I’m finding your rant about how much I don’t understand you funny? Leo…you’re trying to push me away!”
My voice echoes so loud that silence falls in the room, and a few of the men glance our way. But I’m beyond caring about whether they hear me.
All my emotions merge into a huge, disastrous wave that comes crashing down, wrecking all of me in one sweep. It breaks my restraint and the tears come rushing out, pouring down my cheeks with no shame.