6. Yarik
CHAPTER SIX
YARIK
“ T his is paradise .”
Across the bare dorm room, Kirill dumped his bag on an equally bare bed. His face was stony and unreadable, but that was kind of his thing. “You’re delusional.”
“I’m not. I just?—”
“Have low standards?”
I narrowed my eyes. Then, because I knew he’d let me get away with it—he let me get away with almost everything, honestly—I grabbed a pair of rolled-up socks and chucked them at the back of his head. They didn’t make a sound as they dropped harmlessly to the bed. Kirill didn’t either, for that matter—just tilted his chin ever so slightly so that he could side-eye me over his shoulder.
I flashed him my most brilliant smile.
His expression didn’t even crack, the arsehole.
With a sigh, I flopped backward onto my own bed. So what if the room was barely big enough to fit one person, let alone two, and so what if we were both stuck in Moscow for the foreseeable future? I knew that Kirill didn’t lay the blame at my feet even though I secretly thought he should. Instead, he’d been the first to agree that Father’s attempt to civilize me—after years spent beating every ounce of civility out of me—was bound to end in disaster.
And it had.
The kind of beautiful disaster that included broken bones, an impromptu fire, and my name blacklisted from every boarding school in England.
I bit my bottom lip to keep from grinning.
Not that my paltry attempt at hiding my satisfaction did much good because the next time I blinked, it was on account of Kirill having lobbed the sock-ball back at me. He had great aim. It rebounded off my forehead just as he said, “Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”
No point in pretending otherwise.
I was pretty pleased with myself.
I flipped over onto my stomach, the left side of my face cushioned by a flat, lumpy pillow, and settled in to watch him unpack. “Oh, come on. We both know you’re happy to be away from Father.”
“I’m only here long enough to get you settled in.”
“Maybe I’ll take forever, then.”
“I can’t stay forever. I can’t even stay longer than a month.”
“A month’s a month, isn’t it? Better than nothing.”
His shoulders flinched at that, and then the ramifications of broken bones, impromptu fires, and my name being blacklisted from now until eternity seemed to hit him all at once, the way it hadn’t on the flight over from London, because he abruptly turned around and sat down on the edge of his single bed.
“Fuck,” he breathed out, with a slightly flustered glance around the room. “Not much to look at, is it?”
“It’s perfect.”
He snorted. “Only you’d find perfection in a place like this.”
“What’s not to love? The wall’s crumbling over there.” I pointed to his side of the room, which included the doorway that led to what had to be the smallest lavatory in the history of lavatories. “And there’s some mold growing, I think, on the window.”
Kirill flicked a dubious glance toward the window in question.
“Oh, and there’s water damage, too. Look.” When he lifted his dark eyes to stare up at the ceiling, and therefore the telltale brown ring of discoloration near the light fixture, I could tell that he was nearing the end of his rope. Which was the only reason I let out a happy sigh—because if I wasn’t the one tipping him right over the edge, who would? Half the time he showed all the emotion of a plank of wood. “It’s beautiful ,” I gushed, just to mess with him.
For a second, he said nothing.
And then in small, precious increments, the stiff set to his features began to crumble away.
His black brows furrowed, and his dark eyes flashed, and he kicked up his chin the same way he had last year just before he’d tackled me to the ground for daring to put a mouse in his shoe.
“You’re taking the piss out of me.”
“I’d never.”
“ Idi na hui ,” he growled without any real heat before grabbing the spare pillow from his bed and throwing that at me, too. I sat up long enough to catch it mid-flight and then made a show of curling back into my spot and tucking it under my head. It was just as lumpy as mine, but whatever. The corner of Kirill’s mouth curved. “This place really is shit.”
I was suddenly glad for the lumpy pillows. They hid most of my smile. “At least you don’t have to deal with Nina for a month.”
Dropping his face into the cradle of his hands, Kirill groaned. “Your sister is a menace.”
He wasn’t being dramatic, either; from the moment he’d entered our lives, my little sister had latched onto him. Two years later and she still wasn’t showing any signs of yanking her claws out of his hide anytime soon. It’d become a running joke that if Kirill ever disappeared, Nina would simply evaporate into thin air.
Secretly, I couldn’t really blame her.
I’d been following Kirill around for just as long.
I swallowed past the sudden lump in my throat and then did my best to seem casual as I plucked at a loose seam on Kirill’s surrendered pillow. “And now you don’t have to pretend that you hate me.”
The silence that followed was wretchedly oppressive.
Instead of letting his hands drop away from his face, Kirill pushed the heels of his palms against his closed eyelids. I knew that I gave him headaches, sometimes. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t do to get his attention on me, but I also knew that it wasn’t anything I did on purpose that actually irritated him—just my general disposition that made him look like he was fourteen-ish going on forty.
“Tell me that you didn’t break Gordon Bethel’s arm on purpose,” he finally said.
He hadn’t moved his hands yet.
That was fine. We could both hide. Wasn’t like I’d lifted my face out of my mound of pillows, either.
“I didn’t break Gordon Bethel’s arm on purpose,” I lied .
“Yaroslav.”
“And before you ask, I didn’t set his room on fire, either.”
“ Yaroslav .”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The truth.”
It was my turn to snort. “You never like the truth.”
“Give it to me anyway.”
“Fine.” I swung my legs off of the bed so I could sit up and look him dead in the eye. Or it would have been dead in the eye had he bothered to remove his hands. “You don’t like to be stuck on your own as Father’s little henchman for long. You hate that whenever I’m sent away to school, all you’ve got is Nina for company. And Vera, too, I guess, but you hate her as much as I do. Anyway, I made it so that you’re not alone.” Frowning a little, I gave the room a half-hearted glance of my own. “I mean, I got us sent to what I’m pretty sure is a prison, not a school, but beggars can’t be choosers and all that.”
That did it.
Kirill’s hands fell away from his face, and he stared at me in that earth-shattering way he had. Only seconds under his gaze and I already felt flayed open, skin peeled back from muscle and bone so he could peer into the deepest, most desperate parts of my soul. I always worried about what he might find. I did my best to keep the shadows away from him even when they were wrapped so tight around me, I could hardly breathe.
He gave a disbelieving shake of his head. “You broke a kid’s arm .”
“Technically, he did it himself.” Sort of. If by himself meant that he’d walked into the cricket bat I’d intended to use on his roommate .
“You lit a fire in his room .”
Also intended for the roommate, who’d made the unfortunate mistake of trying to bully me whenever we were both in the showers after football practice.
“You got us sent to Moscow ,” Kirill added as if this was my gravest sin, which maybe it was, in his book. In the two years that he’d lived with us, he’d never shown any inclination to visit Russia whenever Father issued an invitation even though he was practically fluent now, and even though not coming meant he stayed behind whenever the rest of us were shepherded onto Father’s private jet to make the trip.
Then again, maybe he stayed back because it meant that he was free to look for his family—though he’d never had any luck, from what I knew.
Anyway. Because I was who I was, and Kirill was who he was, I only hitched my arms open, as if I was welcoming him into the grandest of palaces. “I got us sent to a prison in Moscow,” I amended.
His lips twitched as he cut his gaze away.
The silence, this time, was soft and introspective. I could only imagine how he felt to be away from the Volkov compound. Not that we were here alone—I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without my bodyguards, especially not in Russia, where Father’s enemies circled like hungry sharks—but he was finally out of Petr Volkov’s reach, and there was a chance, even small and temporary as it was, for him to be a teenager for a few weeks instead of the cold-hearted soldier my father was already shaping him into.
When he finally spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “Thank you, Yaroslav.”
I remembered the first time he’d thanked me after I’d saved him from the River Thames. He’d pulled me into his arms, then. Hugged me so tight that I actually felt my heels come off the floor. He hadn’t touched me since.
“You’re welcome,” I returned just as softly.
Always , I thought, when he went back to unpacking. And if my heart gave a little squeeze at the thought that it had all been worth it—the broken bones, the fire, the banishment—just to end up here in this tiny room with him halfway around the world, I didn’t let myself linger on the feeling for long.
I never did.