Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
KIRILL
The moment that padonok escapes from the table, he nearly trips over his own feet trying to reach the door. I watch him go without moving a muscle, even though every part of me wants to drag him back by the throat and make him understand exactly what happens when someone makes her cry.
He is lucky Lev is here, or things would have been a lot worse. He should know better than to speak like that to one of my employees. But there’s no denying that she’s not just any employee. She means more to me than she realizes.
Sloane, of course, doesn’t know I own the diner. Her boss is merely a puppet who acts on my behalf. Legitimate business helps us with our cash flow. It’s important.
Lev’s small hand squeezes mine, and I immediately lower my head a little, bringing myself into his line of sight.
“Vsyo khorosho,” I tell him. Everything’s fine.
He studies my face, and I can see that he accepts what I said. He always trusts me more than I deserve.
When I lift my gaze, Sloane is still standing beside the table, trying to pull herself back together. She swipes a hand beneath one eye, pretending she’s only brushing something away instead of wiping tears that svolich put there.
“Are you all right?” My voice comes out softer, like I’m trying not to scare her.
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “I’m fine. Really. And…thank you. You didn’t have to defend me.”
“Of course I did.”
The words come out rougher than I mean them to, and her eyes widen a fraction, like the idea of someone coming to her aid is foreign to her.
Though it fits with the kind of life she’s had.
Sorry excuse of an alcoholic father, her useless mother, and a sister, though I don’t know much about their relationship. But I suspect she was nothing great.
Sloane bites the inside of her cheek, and the longer I look at her—those big hazel eyes, the brown hair sprawled over her shoulders—the more the color creeps into her face like she can’t help it.
I doubt she understands what that quiet shyness does to a man like me, how it pulls at something dark and possessive I keep locked down, especially when it comes to her.
Blyat. I’m forty-one, and she’s only twenty-three. Too young for me. Too untouched by the kind of world I live in. There’s still a softness to her, something the world hasn’t managed to strip away yet, and the thought of being the one to ruin that makes my muscles coil.
I shouldn’t look at her the way I do. I sure as hell should not be thinking about her in my bed, wrists wrapped in rope, that soft, strained voice whispering all the things she wants me to do to her.
But the thoughts come anyway. They always do. Especially at night when the house is quiet, Lev is asleep, and there’s nothing stopping me from imagining what it would be like if she was mine.
But that fantasy stays exactly where it belongs: in my subconscious. For her sake and mine.
Lev is my priority, and it will be a cold day in hell before I let another woman get close enough to hurt him the way his mother did.
Mother. That word never should’ve belonged to her.
Every time I think about that woman and how she left him after we got his autism diagnosis, how he cried for her and clung to the hem of her shirt, it makes my rage grow.
I swear that closed him off even more. It tore something in him, something I don’t think I will ever be capable of healing.
How dare she hurt him? I spent many nights planning the way I would kill her—not quickly, either—but in the end, I didn’t do it.
Not because I cared that she came from another powerful family, but because one day, Lev would be old enough to find out, and I didn’t want him to look at me like the monster I know I am.
I didn’t love her. The pregnancy was an accident, and as soon as she found out, she used it to trap me. I did the right thing and married her, and as soon as Lev was born, he was my entire world. He always will be.
Sloane steps back, brushing her hands against her apron. “How about I get you guys your usual table?”
I nod, and she leads us toward the booth.
She looks over at Lev, his headphones around his neck, and gives him a smile, the real kind.
He simply watches her at first before his mouth slowly curls. I try not to react because he rarely smiles, but she is different somehow. I see how much she means to him. How much he wants to talk to her every time we’re here.
He has words, and they have grown in the last few years, but he still is reluctant to speak to people outside the family.
Last week, he thanked her for extra curly fries, then gave her something he never shares: his chocolate bar.
The one I get him every weekend. I don’t know what it is about Sloane, but she matters to him, and that means she matters to me.
Then again, she’s mattered to me for a while now…except she has no idea who I am or the connection we share. There’s no reason for her to know. Let her think this is how we met, here in the diner.
“Do you want your usuals?” she asks as we settle into our booths.
Her fingers slip a loose strand of hair behind her ear. My fist curls beneath the table as I wonder how soft her skin is, how warm and tight she would feel around my cock.
I nod, and her mouth quirks…and I curse myself for my thoughts as they continue into dangerous territory. The feeling of her lips, the way she would sound when my tongue is inside her.
“Okay. I…” She hesitates, like she has something more to say.
“What is it, Sloane?”
When I say her name, her brows arch before she shifts like she’s uncomfortable. “I just…I don’t know, needed to thank you again. I’ve never…”
Leaning forward, I lock her with a stare. “Never what?”
“Never had anyone defend me like you did.” Her face falls, and it’s like a knife to my chest.
I knew her sister was a waste just like the rest of that family.
“Unlock your phone and give it to me.”
Her wide-eyed appearance almost makes me chuckle.
“Uh…okay?” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her cell, pressing her thumb against it before handing it to me.
It’s old, at least ten years, with a crack running across the glass.
I open her contacts and add my number, then text myself so I have hers too. When I hand the phone back, her fingers close around it like it suddenly weighs a hundred pounds.
“If you ever need anything, I’m a call away.”
Her mouth parts, and she just gapes at me like no one has ever offered her that.
“Oh…wow. Thank you, but I’m…I’m fine.” Another quick shrug, like she can make the lie believable if she keeps saying it over and over. “Anyway, I should go put in your order.”
She practically flees while I stay where I am, watching her disappear behind the counter, the same question pressing harder the longer I sit with it.
What kind of trouble is she in?
I know all about what happened back home and why she ran with her sister and nephew. But I don’t know what happened once she got here and what may have caused her to leave her house.
Maybe I misunderstood what I saw last week. The way she brushed her teeth and hair in the diner parking lot before her shift, like she’d slept in her car.
My focus stays on her as she whispers with her friend, probably about the incident with Ben.
Lev keeps watching her too. His gaze tracks her movements, his fingers tightening around mine, like he’s checking whether I’m seeing what he’s seeing. If she’s okay.
But I don’t know the answer. Not yet.
I can’t stop wondering where she goes at night. Who she goes home to. If she even has a home at all.
And if she doesn’t, I need to know why. I need to help her. I would put my men on her, but if she notices and gets scared, she might do something reckless and desperate.
That leaves me, even though I haven’t had a second to spare. Lev’s nanny quit last week and flew back to Russia due to a family emergency, and he refuses anyone new. Between therapy appointments, work, and my son needing me, everything else has been pushed aside.
But I’ll have to make time. Lev would want me to.
She comes back a few minutes later, balancing a tray. A burger slides in front of me, followed by a basket she sets carefully in front of Lev.
“Chicken nuggets,” she says to him. “And curly fries. I made sure they added extra, like always.”
Lev’s mouth trembles first, the way it does when he’s deciding whether a feeling is safe enough to show. Then it curves into a small smile. Again. And it does something to me to see him this way with her. He reaches for his backpack as she starts to go.
“Wait,” he says, barely louder than a breath.
She turns back to him just as he pulls out a piece of paper, being careful with the edges, and holds it up between them.
My gaze fastens on it. He drew something, and it’s good. Drawing is how he makes sense of the world when words don’t come, how he takes what’s too big in his head and puts it somewhere his hands can control.
Three figures stretch across the page. A strip of sand. A sun in the corner. A woman in a yellow swimsuit with a big hat, kneeling near the waterline. Lev is beside her, focused on a castle, and I’m in the background stretched out on a chair, watching them.
Her name is written above the woman in careful, uneven letters.
Sloane.
Her breath catches, and those hazel eyes shimmer as she looks between the picture and my son. “Is that…us?”
Lev nods.
She swallows, then grins at him. “It’s beautiful. Thank you so much. I’m going to put it on my fridge.”
Does she even have a fridge right now?
She turns back to Lev, voice thick. “You’re really special. Your dad is very lucky.”
My jaw tightens. “I am.”
Her eyes flick to mine, and my gaze stays locked on her, on the way her fingers curl around the paper like it’s something precious. There’s a crack in her, a fracture she keeps hidden beneath politeness and smiles.
Something in her is breaking. And I will be the one to fix it.