Chapter 15 Yulian
YULIAN
FOUR YEARS AGO
White.
Everything’s too white.
And bright.
And loud.
Not sure why it’s loud in my head, thrumming into my skull through the fluorescent lights and the beep beep beep of monitors that have no business being so goddamn noisy.
My mouth tastes like dust and metal. The back of my throat’s dry enough to spark a fire, and I swear someone poured cement into my limbs while I was out.
I can’t move.
My head feels like I’ve slept through a damn apocalypse—maybe I did. Wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that’s happened to me.
The sheets are stiff and smell overwhelmingly like bleach.
The hospital. Of course, not my first—and let’s be real, not my last—visit to this place.
There’s a tight, itchy bandage on my side, and when I shift even an inch, pain slices through me like a rusty blade.
Right. I got shot.
Strings of memories start pouring into my fogged-up brain.
The cave.
Dark. Cold.
Vaughn.
His face comes back in the brightest flash. His body pressed close, his arms enveloping me, and his all-consuming warmth when everything else was ice.
And the kiss that I stole before…what?
Well, fuck me, I remember nothing after I let myself drift off to sleep with his taste on my tongue and his breath in my ears.
My eyes dart around.
Where is he anyway?
The question hits before I can stop it. Yes, the first question I ask myself after I wake up in the hospital is not how am I alive, not what the hell happened, just where the fuck is Vaughn?
I try to sit up, my teeth gritting, my breath hissing, and my lungs protesting as pain explodes all over my side.
The monitor freaks out six ways to Sunday, beeping like crazy. A nurse yells something from the hallway. I ignore her. My body’s fucked, but my mind’s already clawing its way back to that last moment—me bleeding out, him holding me like I mattered.
Vaughn telling me he’s with me. We live together and we die together, right?
Maybe it’s completely out of left field to have these thoughts about someone I’ve known for such a short time, but Vaughn was there for me like no one else has ever been.
Yes, I took a bullet for him, but he could’ve abandoned me and gotten himself to safety, yet he didn’t. I felt him shaking when he got the bullet out, but he still did it.
Still had my back through it all, literally.
Not even my father or brothers, my actual blood, would ever do that for me.
And maybe it’s clichéd, but I’m truly loyal to my saviors and repay them really well.
Though Vaughn is more than just a savior.
Fuck me, I’d pay whatever price necessary to have a taste of his lips again. Maybe while he’s awake this time.
Because damn, that was an out-of-body experience like I’ve never felt before, and believe me, I’ve fucked enough girls to know this is different.
I need to find Vaughn before someone tells me I imagined the whole damn thing.
“Yulik!!”
I’m half sitting in bed when Alina rushes in, her auburn hair a mess, her eyes bloodshot and surrounded by dark circles. She’s wearing a beige tulle dress with a jacket over it, her appearance that she takes great pride in an absolute mess.
I let the nurse wrestle me into a sitting position on the bed.
I’m back in Chicago, right? I have to be. Dad would never allow my sister to travel away from home.
If I’m in Chicago, then where’s Vaughn?
Alya grabs both my hands in hers, fresh moisture cascading down her cheeks. “I t-thought we’d lost you… I thought you were gone.”
She’s sobbing now, her tears dripping down my hands and onto the mattress.
I groan.
Fuck.
Fucking hell.
If anything were to happen to me, Mom and Alya would be defenseless. Goddamn it, what was I thinking when I took that bullet?
Was it instinct? Fucking recklessness? An inherent, inexplicable need to prove myself to someone who looks down on me?
Daddy issues much, motherfucker?
“I’m completely fine, Alya,” I tell her in a softer voice as a horde of doctors come in and check me left and right.
My sister barely gives them any space, continuing to hold on to my hand for dear life.
“You were abandoned on a mountain and almost died. That’s not fine.” She’s sobbing again, always the sentimental one, my baby sister.
While she’s only two years younger than me, I’ve always made it my mission to protect her. Whether it’s from outsiders, the truth of my mom’s sickness, or from my dad’s wrath—by directing it toward myself.
She and Mom are the only splash of color in my world and the main reason I’ve been in survival mode since…well, ever. So I want to protect her innocence and let her live a completely different life from mine.
“Alya…don’t cry.” I stroke her hair. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“But what if you won’t be here for long?”
“Nonsense. I’ll always be by your side. I promised, remember?”
She nods, a little smile brightening her face.
Alya and I have been inseparable from the moment I first saw her tiny face the day she was born.
I don’t remember it well, but Mama said when she put my sister in my arms as I sat on the bed, I stared in awe at her full head of coppery hair and those impossibly bright blue eyes—so wide, so startling against her delicate features.
Mama said Alya stopped crying the instant she looked at me and even smiled as if she already knew I was her older brother.
From that moment on, I swore I’d always keep that smile on her face. Because when she smiles, she’s everything I’m not—radiant, innocent, carrying none of the weight that’s crushed me since I was a boy.
“You’re finally awake.”
I tense, the pain in my side paling in comparison to the tension that crowds my shoulders in an instant.
Yaroslav always has the worst effect on people. The barely-there smile that appeared on Alya’s face falls, and the doctors line up and then exit one after the other.
“Nothing major, just a bullet.” I plaster on a grin, staring back at my father’s stone-carved expression. “They make a man, right? Injuries and scars, I mean.”
He narrows his eyes at me but then directs his gaze at my sister. “Alina, go to your mother.”
Her grip tightens on my fingers. “But I want to stay—”
“It’s okay.” I show her the smile I always wear when she thinks Dad will hurt me.
It doesn’t matter how much I try to shield her from it—she’s extremely bright and knows exactly who’s behind the fresh bruises on my body, even when I say it’s because I fell or had a fight.
Her fingers linger for a few seconds before she lets go and reluctantly leaves the room.
As the door closes behind her, I tighten my body. I wouldn’t put it past this prick to hit me even when I’m injured.
Time alone with my father feels like a death match I’m destined to lose. There’s no satisfaction, no high, no familiar rush of bone cracking under my fist or the metallic taste of blood.
My muscles coil tight, my brain snapping into survival mode.
I used to wonder why my father despises me so much—why he always looks at me like I’m nothing more than a thorn in his side.
I’m never smart enough, strong enough, good enough.
Just not enough.
Forget about love. I don’t think he even likes me.
The only fatherly love I’ve ever known came from my maternal grandfather during summers at his vast estate in the North Caucasus. He taught me to ride horses, to shoot, to chase the wind as if tomorrow didn’t exist.
But he died too soon, and I was thrown back into the brutal reality of a father who would trade me away in a heartbeat if he could.
“How did I get back home?” I ask, my voice losing its mocking edge, because I don’t think they pumped me with enough painkillers, and my side is throbbing. I don’t want to be dear old Dad’s punching bag on top of that.
He stands tall, his hands in his pockets, his expression solemn, the lines of age around his mouth looking more shadowy. Yaroslav has always looked and seemed like a wall I could never break through.
A fortress no one has ever been allowed to enter—not even his family.
“The more important question is, how the hell did this happen? Not only do you screw up the camp, but you also get involved in this?”
“Sorry, didn’t know being shot at could be avoided, or I would’ve done my best to avert the crisis.”
He strides toward me, and I lift both hands in a motion of surrender. “Wait…fuck…I don’t know. I think it was some other faction who did it…”
“Does that other faction have bases in the heart of the New York branch?
“New York?”
“Yes. My intel tells me that’s where it originated from.”
My eyes widen even as pain throbs in my side and sweat trickles across my brow.
“No way…” I choke on a cough, gritting out a grunt as the sharp pain digs deeper into my side. “Why would they want to kill their…heir?”
“They didn’t, did they? You’re the only idiot who got shot.”
My lips part, feeling dry and chapped, but I still shake my head.
This doesn’t make sense.
No matter how smart Vaughn is, there’s no way he could’ve anticipated that I’d take a bullet for him.
“If he wanted me dead, he wouldn’t have administered first aid and practically saved me,” I rasp to my father, each word torn from me as pain claws deeper.
The man who gave me life watches me struggle yet doesn’t so much as tell the medical team to dull the agony with painkillers.
Again, not a first.
As long as it doesn’t kill me, he doesn’t care how much I suffer.
If anything, he uses it as a form of punishment—on behalf of his fists.
“And you believed that nonsense?” He stares down his nose at me.
“By God, you’re such a fool, Yulian. Always so eager to put your trust in the wrong people, just because they hand you a scrap of kindness for ten minutes.
Vaughn abandoned you and left you to rot on that mountain.
If our men hadn’t scoured every inch of that rock to find you, you’d be a corpse. ”
My ears ring as I sink both my hands into the sheet so hard, I almost rip the IV out of my wrist.
No.
He’s lying.
Yaroslav is lying—