8. Yarik
CHAPTER EIGHT
YARIK
I t was almost two in the morning when the door finally cracked open and a sliver of light from the hallway spilled into the room.
I’d turned off the overhead light almost an hour ago. It was easier to not look so desperate in the dark.
I held my breath as Kirill stumbled his way into the toilet. The door closed behind him, and seconds later, the shower went on. He’d been gone for hours. I wasn’t sure where, and he hadn’t given much information besides meeting up with one of Father’s brigadiers. It was ridiculous to think that he’d come all this way to Moscow and wouldn’t be expected to work.
Ridiculous, but somehow, I’d tricked myself into thinking just that.
Father had an entire enterprise here in Russia, the same as in London. His currency of choice was guns. Big ones, small ones, automatic ones. He told me that I was still too young to know anything about his clients, which always struck me as a weird thing to say because he clearly didn’t think I was too young to know what it felt like to kill someone.
That was Petr Volkov logic for you, though. Totally warped.
Still, I was smart enough to put the pieces together. I knew that on certain days of the week, there were foreign politicians who stopped by, dressed in their crisp suits with their shiny watches that peeked out from beneath starched cuffs. They brought bodyguards, too, which never really seemed to put them at ease. On other days, there were still men in crisp suits and shiny watches, but they always came alone and they rarely, if ever, looked anything short of arrogant. These men breezed in, offered back-thumping hugs for my father, and left an hour or two later with a pep in their step.
I figured that my father had a way of either making your dreams come true . . .
Or making you wish that you’d never been born.
So, I should have known that he wouldn’t let Kirill come all this way just for me. Father kept him on a short leash—no school, just real-life lessons that pertained to business, paired with rigorous physical training that had already started to thicken Kirill’s shoulders. I was still taller, but in every other way, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d remain bigger. Something about that made me feel good. I didn’t like the thought of Kirill always looking underfed, like wherever he’d come from had made food hard to come by.
The sound of running water cut off, followed by the near-silent thump of feet hitting the old, uneven flooring.
When he opened the door a few minutes later, I slid a closed fist under my pillow. I watched silently as he shuffled around in the darkness, tugging on clothes, throwing back the thin bedsheet. He hovered there a second as if he was debating getting into bed, before I heard him swallow and sit down heavily. The old mattress squeaked as he lay down.
There was barely any space between us.
If I reached out a hand, I could almost touch his nightstand.
Something was wrong. From the moment I’d found him, I’d developed a weird sort of sixth sense to everything that made him him . Most of the time, it meant that I could predict his moods as easily as I could predict the possibility of a gray, London day. Had something happened when he’d gone to meet Artem? Or was it something else, like that one time I’d found him pacing in the middle of the night, anxious over a dream he’d had that made no sense?
He flipped over onto his back.
I clutched my pillow even tighter like it was the only thing grounding me to the bed.
Moments later, he turned onto his side to face the wall. If I tried hard enough, I could almost see the shape of his shoulders?—
Was he crying?
“Kirill.” In the quiet of our room, my voice was a breathless, vibrating mess. When he didn’t answer, I nearly threw myself at him. “ Kirill .”
“Not right now.” It was barely above a whisper. Barely . “Please.”
Yeah, not happening.
I launched out of the bed and nearly got taken out by a rogue pair of trainers I’d forgotten to put away. Kicking them aside, I crossed the four measly steps that separated our living quarters, but all my bravado fled the moment I was close enough to touch him. Because that was the one thing my sixth sense never failed to pick up? —
Kirill did not like to be touched.
It went against every human instinct, but I slid down to the floor, pressing my spine against the side of his bed and wrapping my arms tight around my knees.
The mattress squeaked again. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
“For you to tell me who hurt you.”
The sheets rustled like he was tucking himself into a tight ball. He was still facing the wall. I only knew it because when he spoke, his voice was muffled as if he was speaking in the opposite direction. “No one hurt me. Go to bed.”
“ Someone did,” I said, a little more angrily than I’d intended. “You don’t cry—ever.”
He hesitated, a long, heavy pause that bled from one second into the next. And then, stiffly, like he was desperate to make it true: “I’m not crying.”
“Sure.”
“I’m not .”
“We’re mates, aren’t we? I’m not going to make fun of you if you are. Promise.”
I didn’t know what I expected when it wasn’t as if Kirill ever gushed over me. I annoyed him, I knew, and I frustrated him to the point where sometimes I felt how badly he wanted to shut me up, but that didn’t mean we . . . that we weren’t . . . “We are friends, aren’t we?”
The silence that followed made me want to crawl out of my skin. It wasn’t just heavy, like the other day, but something perilously close to pure torture. If there’d been a Grandfather’s clock in here, like there was back home, I could have counted every passing second. As it was, there wasn’t anything for me to do but try not to squirm as I fell into the awful decision of counting out our breathing instead. We weren’t in sync. Every time I inhaled, he exhaled, and every time he drew in a breath, I seemed to choke on mine as I let it out in a rush.
I swallowed. “Kirill?”
“You don’t let me call you Yarik.”
“What?”
“You said, family and friends call you Yarik. It means something to you, you said. So, no, we aren’t mates.”
My jaw dropped open. “I didn’t—what I mean is?—”
“It’s fine.” More shuffling came from behind me. “ I’m fine. Go to bed.”
“ No .” I whipped around. Before I could stop myself, I’d sat myself on his bed, as far away from him as I could possibly get without falling off the mattress. “No, it’s not fine. You think that I don’t know how many times you’ve gotten into trouble for me? You think I haven’t noticed how you watch me whenever Father is around, like you’re one step away from throwing yourself between us, just to keep him away from me?”
“Yaroslav—”
“ No , Kirill. No. I’m tired of feeling like I have to beg you to pay me the slightest bit of attention when we both know that you already are!” I was breathing too fast, worked up with no outlet but the boy who now sat back against the headboard, the sheets pooled around his waist while he watched me unload two years of feelings into the empty space between us. “And you don’t think—you don’t think that I notice everything about you, too? Who do you think got Pavel to take you on when it was obvious to everyone that the moment Father looks your way, you shrivel up? And who do you think convinced Pavel to let you?—”
“He’s dead. ”
I jerked my chin back. “What?”
“He’s dead . Pavel. He’s dead and I—” There was a terrible noise. A high-pitched whine, not unlike a dying animal. Kirill clapped his hands over his mouth as if he could keep the sound locked inside his soul, tamped down and forgotten.
Slowly, I shifted onto my knees.
If it was possible, he angled himself even farther away until he was shoved into the corner of the bed where the frame met the wall. But he never took his hands away from his mouth, and the wide-eyed look in his gaze told me that he was terrified to make that sound again.
Pavel was dead.
The news pinged around my brain. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Pavel Sergerov was—had been—a gruff, middle-aged man whose bark was just as bad as his bite, but I’d always liked him anyway. He’d never hit me. He’d never yelled at me—much—and whenever I pestered him with questions, he’d always dropped to his haunches, looked me dead in the eye like I was worth something, and gave me his all.
I’d begged him to take Kirill away from Father.
Begged and begged and begged until he’d grabbed me by the scruff of my shirt, hoisted me in the air, and dumped me in a spare room with a lock on the door. The last thing I’d heard before he’d walked away was, “Volkovs do not beg, patsan .”
But he’d done it, hadn’t he? Whatever he said to Father worked because the very next day, Kirill was permanently assigned to be Pavel’s shadow, and that was a big thing, seeing as Pavel was my father’s right-hand man.
I worried my bottom lip. “What happened?”
Kirill shook his head almost frantically .
Nerves wound their way down my spine, unraveling like a ball of electricity until even the tips of my toes felt tingly. Somewhere, in the back of my head, I knew where this was going, but I needed him to say it. To own it. He’d never get past this if he couldn’t.
Carefully, I said, “Did he do something bad?”
That animalistic whine again, followed immediately by Kirill slamming his eyes shut.
I licked my dry lips. “Did you do something bad?”
He sank down into his place against the wall, his shoulders creeping up toward his ears, like he could disappear if only he tried hard enough. He gave a painfully slow nod that I almost missed.
“Okay,” I whispered gently. “Okay. Did you . . . Did you have a choice?”
Instead of answering, his fingers seemed to grip his mouth even harder. If the lights had been on, I knew there’d be prints left on his skin when he finally pulled away. As it was, there was just enough illumination from the curtain-covered window for me to see how his black eyes glistened with unshed tears.
I licked my lips again. “Will you let me come closer? I won’t touch you. I won’t, I promise.”
The moment he nodded, I scooted as close as I dared. There was still a good two feet between us. But it felt close enough— safe enough—for me to keep my voice soft and soothing as if I was telling him a secret.
“I didn’t have a choice, either. It wasn’t . . .” I closed my eyes for just a second, trying to breathe steadily past my thundering heart. “It was a gun that felt too big in my hand, and Father standing right there behind me—I could feel his breath, you know? On the back of my neck. He didn’t think I’d do it, but we both knew that if I didn’t, bad things would happen. I was crying. It made him angry. Nothing new there, I guess. I always make him angry.”
I shifted so I could sit cross-legged with my hands resting on my ankles. “I didn’t know the bloke’s name. I wondered about that, whether it was easier not knowing. But then I got thinking, what if he’s got someone he loves? What if he’s got a whole family? And I said it, without thinking, Do you love someone , because it seemed like something I ought to know, but what was I really gonna do? Go to his house and say a nine-year-old killed your dad? Stupid.”
Stupid, stupid, stupid .
“It didn’t matter, anyway, in the end. Father got so bloody angry, I could—I could feel it, and then he wrapped his hand around mine and made me pull the trigger. Bloke died before he could tell me.”
Kirill was watching me closely. It wasn’t one of his earth-shattering stares but something else entirely. Like he didn’t know whether to close the gap between us or go running for the door. I wondered if he ever laid in bed at night wishing for a hug.
I did.
No one ever hugged me, and I felt starved for it.
“So, I know how you feel right now, and it’s okay if you?—”
“It’s worse.” The ragged confession emerged like it’d been torn from his soul. “It’s worse to . . . to know like I knew.”
That made sense. The knowing was always worse than the wondering. “It gets easier.”
“You’re lying to me,” he said, still burrowed in his corner. “Don’t lie to me.”
“Fine. Okay.” I ran my sweaty hands across my thighs. “ It gets worse, but you also get better at putting the Bad Things into a box. That’s what I do. I put it all in a box in my head, and I turn the key, and then, I walk away.”
Or I try to find you .
I didn’t say that, though. I didn’t have the balls. But just because I knew how to keep my mouth shut didn’t mean that I didn’t think it, that I didn’t feel it. And I felt a whole lot when it came to Kirill Volkov.
Something about him drew me like a moth to a flame, which was only a problem because most of the time, he looked at me as if he couldn’t ever trust me, as if he didn’t even like me, when all I saw in him was safety. A place to lay down my head and rest, knowing that he’d have my back while I slept.
I wanted to know what that felt like—to sleep without worry. It sounded like an impossible dream.
Feeling strangely empty, I got off the bed and wrapped my arms around myself. “Put it in a box, okay? And I’m here, you know. For the next month, at least.” I tried for a crooked grin but doubted it got anywhere past a grimace.
I’d just gotten a knee on my mattress when I heard his squeal in protest. I looked back at him, because of course I did, only to find shadows sliding over his frame as he reached out a hand toward me.
If it had been daylight, he never would’ve done that. Too vulnerable. Too exposing. A thin strip of moonlight illuminated the curve of his hand, the trembling stretch of his fingertips. So, it was a good thing that it was the middle of the night when secrets spilled out into the open and nightmares rose up from the grave. It made the fact that I wanted to take his hand in mine okay. We could forget all about it tomorrow, couldn’t we? My heart pounded so hard, it threatened to steal the breath right out of my lungs .
“Don’t go,” he whispered. “Please . . . don’t go.”
The plea was desperate, soft. I didn’t have the willpower to stay away when all I’d ever wanted was for him to need me the same way I almost always seemed to need him.
I didn’t utter a word in return.
Just grabbed the blanket from my bed and took my place at the foot of his, content to guard him while he slept. It felt right, sitting here. It felt like fate.