Chapter 40
Chapter
Forty
Kirill
I had plenty of things to say to my wife and I couldn’t wait to get her alone. Luckily for her, sanitizing the scene at the King mansion took precedence over everything else. Although Kolya was in charge, I left him instructions, especially since he was working with King’s own cleanup crew.
It was Maksim who called me. Apparently, King wasn’t bluffing when he said getting rid of the brothers would have a ripple across our organization.
The loud helicopter ride on our return wasn’t ideal for conversation either. Dom was eyeing his sister pensively. Lucy’s head was on my right shoulder while Aralina was on my left. My hand was holding Lucy’s, and I alternately cupped her cheek to plant a kiss on top of her head.
I couldn’t stop touching my wife. I gnashed my teeth at the stretch of time when I was unable to reach her.
As for Chloe, Trevor was taking her back to Manhattan in one of the SUVs.
We landed on top of the De Lucci Transnational building. After we disembarked from our flight, Lucy shared a moment with her brother.
It was my turn to look on pensively.
Aralina tugged at my shirt.
“I’m sorry,” she signed. “It’s my fault. Don’t be mad at Lucy.”
“What gave you the idea that I’m mad at Lucy?”
She gestured to her face.
“That’s not me being mad. That’s me giving myself dental problems.”
She laughed silently.
“Jury is out on whether it’s your fault. Did you fall for Jeremiah’s lies, or were you the one playing him?”
Aralina’s eyes widened in surprise. “He’s handsome. I didn’t know he was dangerous. But…”
Then she shrugged. Whenever my sister shrugged, she didn’t want to discuss the topic further.
The default for our family was not to push her.
Also, she didn’t seem to be out of sorts after being terrorized by Jeremiah.
Maybe she wasn’t as shielded from bratva activities as I’d thought.
She’d been truly corrupted underneath all that sweetness.
This pleased me.
Her arms tightened the coat around her. Between the attic and the helicopter ride, my sister had shed her outerwear and was only using Theo King’s coat.
I didn’t know why I zeroed in on that detail and connected it with the time Aralina told me about her ideas of romance and wearing a boyfriend’s clothes.
This bothered the fuck out of me.
“Ready?” Lucy came up to us.
I tipped my chin at Dom before once again reeling Lucy to my side.
“Yes. Sato’s waiting with the car.”
It was a teary reunion at my parents’ house. Ivan and Irina were all over Aralina. They thanked Lucy for connecting the dots and going after my sister.
I also received a text from Kolya that he was wrapping up cleanup at the King mansion.
Maksim was arriving soon, and I needed to get everything off my chest.
Lucy was so wrapped up in the animated conversation between my parents and sister, she failed to recognize the tension that had reclaimed my body.
I tugged her out of the living room.
“Kirill?”
“Now we talk.” I walked across the foyer and went right to the staircase leading to the second floor, where there were vacant rooms. I led her into one of the guest bedrooms and slammed the door behind us.
I caged her against the wall and searched her face. “Are you really all right?”
“Ye…yes.”
“No headaches, dizziness, anything?”
“A little headache…but I took a pain pill earlier.”
My jaw clenched. “This has to stop, Lusenka.”
She stared at the collar of my dress shirt. “I’m sorry. I was more impulsive than usual.”
“Impulsive?” I derided. “This goes beyond impulsive. It was reckless. What if it was Theodore King who was the serial killer?”
“It wasn’t him. He was in Hong Kong when Anya was murdered. And Dom just told me it was Jeremiah’s Mercedes near Anya’s house at the time of her murder.”
I cupped her face and tilted her chin up so she would look at me.
“I can’t lose you.” My words scraped my throat hoarsely.
All the fear and anxiety at the thought of Lucy dying clogged my throat with the one emotion she would understand.
Seeing her hanging out that window, knowing she was dizzy and might plunge to her death, was an image that wouldn’t leave my imagination.
I had more confidence in Aralina because when she was younger, my sister loved to climb trees, and it was not the first time she’d gone on roofs, giving my parents a near heart attack or two.
“I won’t lose you. I can’t. I refuse.”
“Kirill…” Her eyes gleamed with tears.
“I’m in love with you,” I whispered.
At my declaration, the tears spilled down her cheeks.
“I love you seems inadequate to express what’s here.
” I clasped her uninjured wrist to guide her hand over my chest. “For the longest time, I lived with nothing inside this heart. But since you came along, I’ve been getting stabs of pain in it like someone is performing witchcraft on me. ”
Lucy laughed lightly, but her tears continued to fall.
I caught a stream of her tears with the crook of a finger.
“I don’t know when it happened.” I inspected her tears with wonder.
It was giving me chest pains again. “When I went from wanting to destroy you to wanting to burn the whole damn world for you.” Then I cupped her face again.
“So please, Lusenka. Please, no more running off and jumping into cars with strangers to chase serial killers.”
“But Aralina…”
“I am thankful you saved my sister, but I have a feeling you would do it for anyone you think is in danger. Please have some self-preservation. Because if you got hurt, I don’t think I would have left that mansion standing.”
“Oh?”
“I would have burned the Kings down in it. The bratva be damned.”
She stilled. Her eyes blinking rapidly, mouth parting.
My jaw hardened. “It’s who I am. I need you to be okay with it.”
“I’m in love with you, Kirill Zahkarov. All of you. Even the unhinged ways you show your love.”
I let out a quick chuckle. “Truly? You’re not just saying that and devising ways to escape me later?”
“Try to get rid of me.”
“So that’s it? No divorce?” Gruffness roughened my tone.
She offered a brief nod and smiled. “No divorce.”
“No more secrets?”
Her brows furrowed. “Are you sure you have no more secrets you want to confess?”
I paused and searched my mind for anything I might still be keeping from my wife. “Not that I’m aware of.”
She pursed her lips.
“That’s the thing…I’m not sure what I might be keeping from you.
Like that fiasco with the state troopers, it didn’t matter to me because that was before I started falling for you.
” He blew out a breath. “But a secret like that—purposely kept from you or not—almost had fatal consequences. That was a lesson I learned the hard way.”
“Fair enough.” She pushed me away. I protested losing her closeness, but she only bent down to reach for her purse that had fallen to the floor. She slipped out her phone and showed me a string of messages from this Mr. Anonymous.
“I have a feeling it was Jeremiah who sent me these.”
Fury surged through me again as my eyes narrowed on the messages, the videos showing my secret meetings with Anya. Fuck. This was what my wife endured.
“You didn’t say a word about it,” I seethed. But I wasn’t mad at Lucy. With the way I was feeling about her now, I was devastated at what I’d put her through.
“What was there to say? You were hell-bent on revenge, and I was hell-bent on surviving this marriage until we divorced. Since I thought it was from Anya, maybe even with your blessing, I wasn’t giving you or her satisfaction that they affected me.”
“It backfired, you know that, right?”
I returned the phone to her. She had a glint of triumph in her eyes.
“Are you saying I won the marriage wars?” she asked.
I reeled her in and kept our bodies flushed with each other. “You know you did. The best revenge was yours. Being happy while being ignored by your husband? Now that was an insult delivered with class. I was miserable while you were happy with my family.”
She laughed.
Minx.
I lowered my head. “I love you. I have a feeling I’m going to get used to saying it. But not as much as showing you.”
I lowered my head, my lips getting close to hers. “God, Lusenka. I haven’t sunk inside your body for weeks,” I growled. It probably also explains the high level of my frustration because my favorite way to release that tension wasn’t available. “But once you’re fully recovered, watch out.”
I felt her shiver.
I grinned devilishly. “But for now, give me that mouth.”
And she did.