Chapter 14 Dimitri #2
“Keep digging,” I order. “Find out where this came from. Who has access to these components? I want every supplier tracked, every sale verified. Someone built this bomb. Find them.”
Roman nods and leaves, taking the evidence with him.
I’m alone again with Alexei’s file and the inconsistencies that don’t add up. I can’t help but feel I’m missing something crucial, something obvious.
The attacks on Vera and me. The professional execution. The inside information required.
The inconsistencies in Alexei’s death scene. The timeline that doesn’t work. The forensics that don’t match.
My uncle’s dismissals of my concerns. His insistence that I’m seeing patterns that don’t exist. His suggestion that Vera is acceptable collateral damage.
There’s a pattern here. I can feel it. I just can’t see it yet.
But I will. I’ll figure this out.
I have to.
Because the alternative—that my brother died for reasons I don’t understand, that someone close to me betrayed us all, that the attacks will keep coming until everyone I care about is dead—that’s unacceptable.
I glance at the clock. Nine thirty. I should sleep, but I know I won’t. Not until I have answers.
Instead, I find myself climbing the stairs to the second floor. To her room.
I need to check on her and make sure she’s really okay. I need to make sure with my own eyes that Dr. Petrov didn’t miss anything and the baby is still safe despite everything we went through.
That’s what I tell myself as I walk down the hallway.
I’ve been thinking about her constantly since the explosion. Not just with the terror of almost losing her, but with something else. Something that started yesterday in the car, in those minutes before everything went to hell.
The teasing. The laughter. The way she smiled at me like I was a person instead of her jailer. The way my (debatable) terrible taste in music made her giggle, made her eyes light up, and made her look at me with something that wasn’t fear.
The way she leaned closer when she mocked me. The way her hand almost touched mine on the center console between us. The way my thumb traced circles on her skin when our fingers finally brushed, and she didn’t pull away.
She didn’t pull away.
That keeps echoing in my head. She let me touch her. She wanted me to touch her. There was no fear in her eyes in that moment, just warmth and playfulness and… something else.
I’d been about to do something stupid. I was going to lace my fingers through hers and hold her hand properly.
Then the bomb went off, and the moment shattered.
But I can’t stop thinking about it and replaying those few minutes when everything felt different. When she felt like mine not because I’d forced her, but because she chose to.
It’s getting harder and harder to stay away from her. She’s like a siren, pulling me toward rocks I can see clearly but can’t seem to avoid. Every time I’m near her, every time she looks at me with those warm brown eyes, every time she smiles or laughs or touches my hand—I feel myself slipping.
Falling.
I reach her door and pause, my hand on the doorknob. The best thing to do is to come back in the morning when I’m less likely to do something we’ll both regret.
But then I hear movement inside. She’s awake.
I open the door quietly.
She’s lying in bed, but she’s not sleeping. She’s staring at the ceiling, one hand resting on her stomach. The moonlight streaming through the window catches in her hair, turning it nearly red and my mouth grows dry.
She turns her head when I enter, and even in the dim light, I can see the exhaustion in her face along with the bruises forming on her shoulder where the seatbelt caught her. My eyes linger on the small cut on her forehead that Dr. Petrov bandaged.
She could have died yesterday. The thought steals my breath.
Your fault, your fault, your fault, my brain hisses at me.
I ignore it.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask quietly, moving into the room.
“No,” she says hoarsely. “Every time I close my eyes, I see it. The explosion. The flames. I hear the sound of metal twisting.” She swallows hard. “Your men. The ones in the second decoy car. Did they—”
“They didn’t suffer,” I lie. I have no idea if that’s true, but she doesn’t need that image in her head. “It was instant.”
She nods, but I see tears sliding down her temples. “They had families? The guards?”
“Yes.” I sit on the edge of the bed, maintaining distance even though everything in me wants to reach for her. “I’ll take care of their families. They’ll want for nothing.”
“Of course you will.” She says it with such certainty, that it makes emotion well in my throat and I clear it before continuing.
“You should rest,” I say, even though I’m not leaving. “Dr. Petrov said you need to—”
“I don’t want to rest, Dimitri.” She turns to look at me fully, and there’s something in her gaze that makes my breath catch.
“Every time I try to sleep, I see it happening again. I feel the car flipping. I hear you shouting my name.” Her voice drops to barely above a whisper.
“I keep thinking about what if you hadn’t swerved.
What if we’d been in that other car. What if—”
“We weren’t.” I don’t mean to move closer, but suddenly my hand is reaching out to brush tears from her cheek before I can stop myself. “We’re alive. We’re here. That’s what matters.”
Her breath hitches at the touch, and I should pull back, but her skin is warm and soft beneath my fingers and I can’t make myself let go.
“Someone wants us dead.” She says it matter-of-factly, like she’s stating the weather. “They’re not going to stop, are they?”
“No.” There’s no point in lying about this. “They won’t stop until they succeed or we stop them.”
She sighs. “So what do we do?”
The question hangs in the air between us. We. Not you. Not what will you do to protect me. We.
My heart clenched at that single word.
“We find them,” I say quietly. “And we end this.”
She studies my face in the moonlight, her eyes tracking over the bruises, the bandage, the evidence of how close I came to dying beside her. Then, slowly, her hand moves across the space between us.
An offering. A choice.
I take it, my fingers lacing through hers before I can think better of it. Her hand is small and delicate in mine, but her grip is strong. Certain.
“I’m scared,” she whispers.
“I know.” My thumb traces slow circles on the back of her hand, continuing what I did yesterday. I have no right to do this but I can’t make myself stop.
We sit in silence for a moment, existing in this space where the rules don’t seem to apply and we’re just two people who almost died and are trying to make sense of still being alive.
“Yesterday,” she says softly. “In the car. That was…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence, and I’m grateful because I don’t know how to finish it either. Nice? Easy? Fucked up? All of the above?
“Your music is still terrible,” she finally says, and there’s the ghost of a smile on her lips.
Despite everything—the fear and the weight of what we’re facing—I feel my own mouth twitch. “Noted.”
She snorts. “I’m serious. Nickelback? Creed? What’s next, Limp Bizkit?”
Damn, why is she hitting all of my favorites right now? “What’s wrong with Limp Bizkit?”
Her smile widens slightly and it makes my heart warm. “Everything. Everything is wrong with Limp Bizkit.”
“You have very strong opinions about music,” I say dryly, running my thumb over her knuckles.
“Someone has to save you from yourself.” She shifts slightly, and suddenly we’re closer. We’re not quite touching beyond our joined hands, but we’re close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating from her body. “You’re a crime lord. You should have better taste.”
“I’ll work on it.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend, because she’s so close and she smells so good and I’m drowning in it.
Her eyes meet mine, and whatever playfulness was there fades into something else. Something heavier. More complicated.
“I keep thinking about—” She stops, bites her lip. “Never mind.”
“What?” I shouldn’t push but I need to know what she was going to say. “Tell me.”
“The way you smiled when I was teasing you.” Her free hand comes up, fingers brushing along my jaw so gently it leaves a trail of fire in its wake. “I’ve never seen you smile like that. I’ve only seen the ones you use for business. It’s like you forgot to be—” She searches for the word. “Guarded.”
I should move away from her touch but her fingers are tracing the line of my jaw, and I’m leaning into it like a starving man offered bread.
“You make me forget,” I admit, the words escaping before I can stop them and her fingers still.
“Forget what?”
Everything. Every rule I’ve built my life around. Every reason I should stay away from you. Every promise I made to myself about keeping distance.
“To be careful,” I say instead, nearly sighing when her fingers continue their dance over my face.
Her thumb brushes the corner of my mouth, and the touch sends desire straight through me. “Maybe being careful is overrated,” she murmurs.
I swallow, focusing solely on her touch. “Careful keeps people alive,” I counter.
“We almost died yesterday,” Vera says, her eyes trained on her fingers touching my face. “We were as careful as we could be, and it almost wasn’t enough.” She glances up at me. “So maybe—maybe careful isn’t as important as…”
She doesn’t finish, but I see it in her eyes the way she’s looking at me like I’m something other than what I’ve tried so hard to be.
“Vera.” Her name comes out like a warning. Or like longing. I don’t even fucking know anymore.
Her hand slides from my jaw into my hair, fingers threading through the strands, and I have to close my eyes against the sensation. It’s too much. She’s too much.
When I open them again, she’s closer. So close I can feel her breath on my face and can see every detail of her features in the moonlight—the flush on her cheeks, the rapid flutter of her pulse in her throat, the way her lips are slightly parted.
My hand comes up, cupping her face, my thumb tracing her cheekbone. She leans into the touch, her eyes falling half-closed, and the trust in that gesture undoes me.
I’m leaning in. We both are. The distance between us shrinking with every breath until I can almost taste her—
I pull back sharply, my hand dropping from her face like I’ve been burned. This is Alexei’s girl—what am I doing?
“You should rest,” I say, but my voice is too rough and strained to be convincing. My heart is hammering so hard I’m sure she can hear it.
Disappointment flashes across her face before she can hide it, and that small glimpse of vulnerability makes me hate myself. “Right,” she mumbles, her face reddening. “Of course.”
I swallow heavily, hating that I’ve embarrassed her, but if I cross that line, there’s no going back. “I should—I probably need to go.”
She says nothing and I don’t move. We’re still so close, the air between us charged with everything we’re not saying and everything we almost just did.
“Dimitri?” Her voice is small and uncertain.
“Yeah?”
“Will you—” She stops and licks her lips and I track every movement of her tongue. “Will you stay?”
There’s a pause as she waits for my response. The correct answer is to tell her no, that I need to leave. That I can’t be this close to her and maintain these much needed walls.
But she looks so vulnerable and I want so badly to comfort her.
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “I’ll stay.”
Relief floods her features, and she shifts over, making room for me in the bed. I lie down beside her, and immediately she moves closer. Her head finds that space against my shoulder like it was made to fit there and she presses her body against mine.
My arm comes around her automatically, pulling her against my chest. She makes a small sound of contentment, her hand splaying over my heart, and I know she can feel how fast it’s beating.
“Thank you,” she murmurs against my shirt. “For yesterday. For swerving when you did.”
My arm tightens around her, my other hand finding her hair, fingers threading through the silky strands. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I can feel her looking up at me in the dark. “You can’t control everything.”
“Watch me.” My fingers move through her hair in slow, soothing strokes. "I can and I will.”
She snorts something intelligible but she settles against me, her breathing gradually evening out. But I can feel the tension still in her body, the way she’s holding herself slightly rigid like she’s afraid to fully relax.
“Sleep,” I murmur against her hair. “I’ve got you.”
That seems to be what she needs to hear, because she melts into me then, all that tension draining away. Her hand fists in my shirt, holding on, and I can feel the moment her breathing deepens into something closer to sleep.
And I lie there in the darkness, with Vera in my arms, my fingers tangled in her hair, breathing in the scent of vanilla and flowers and I realize something.
We almost kissed.
Another few seconds, another inch closer, and I would have crossed that line. I would have kissed her, tasted her, shown her with my mouth what I can’t seem to say with words.
And she would have let me. I saw it in her eyes, felt it in the way she leaned in, in the way her hand tightened in my hair like she was pulling me closer.
The truth is written in the way I’m holding her now, how my fingers won’t stop moving through her hair. In the way my heart is still racing beneath her palm and how being close to her feels like both salvation and damnation.
I’m drowning in this. In her. And I don’t know how to stop.
I don’t know if I even want to.
So I just hold her, memorizing the weight of her against me, the sound of her breathing, the way she fits perfectly in my arms.
And I lie awake long after she’s fallen asleep, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing.