12. Kirill
CHAPTER TWELVE
KIRILL
I was on cleanup duty when he rang.
We didn’t do that, Yarik and me. Over the last few years, we’d fallen into the habit of texting around the clock, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I’d heard the sound of his voice. It was my fault. I’d grown used to dealing with men like Petr Volkov, who expected that I—along with all the other lowly soldiers in his well-oiled cog—be seen, not heard. Against all better judgment, I’d turned into a glorified mercenary. Good for killing but otherwise told to blend in with the wallpaper.
Some days I never spoke at all.
I forced myself to put my mobile away. I’d phone him back, I would. First, I had to get rid of a body.
My hands slid over bloodied flesh as I dragged Jocle Stevens onto a large, black tarp. Fuck, he was heavy. Didn’t help that, thanks to being shot point-blank by yours truly, he was the literal definition of dead weight. I arranged his arms down by his sides, tucked the tarp under his still-warm body, and rolled him over until he was cocooned by the material. Sitting back on my haunches, I wiped the inside of my wrist across my sweaty forehead.
I hated this part.
With a grunt, I hoisted good ol’ Jocle over my shoulder, only to stagger sideways under his bulk, barely catching myself before I went down with him on top of me. Tightening my core, I dug my fingers into what might have been his thighs and then shuffled my way toward the warehouse’s exit. Just because I didn’t have Artem watching my every move tonight didn’t mean that I couldn’t hear him reaming me out in my head.
The fuck are you doing taking so long?
Move faster, Volkov, before I get rid of you.
Stop being a lazy cunt.
I wasn’t a lazy cunt. I was the youngest soldier in Volkov’s entire organization and still took on more responsibilities than men twice my age. Artem had long since beaten any trace of hesitation out of me. He seemed to take pride in it—the way I no longer thought twice about pulling a trigger or palming a blade. But still, he found ways to provoke me, always speaking down to me as if I was the dirt caked on the bottom of his shoe.
It did something to me, that barely concealed revulsion. Lit a fuse in my soul that never went away, not even when I was doing grunt work like this, disposing of the body of some nobody drug lord whose only mistake was thinking that he could do business on territory Volkov coveted but didn’t own. Didn’t own yet , at any rate. There wasn’t much of London that Petr didn’t have his eye on.
I had the body half-loaded into the car when my back pocket vibrated. The vehicle groaned with Jocle’s added weight as I dumped him the rest of the way in, then slammed the boot shut. Snagging my phone, I checked the cracked screen and immediately felt myself stiffen as I answered.
“I’m on my way.”
Artem didn’t miss a beat. “You’re late.”
I wasn’t. This was just another one of his pointless mind games where he poked and prodded, hoping I’d do something stupid enough to get my arse handed to me by the boss. There weren’t such things as angels in the Bratva, but sometimes, I thought that Pavel Sergerov was as close as I’d ever come to meeting one. Artem, on the other hand, was a self-righteous prick.
I slid into the driver’s seat, making sure he could hear the engine starting as I fired the old bird up. “Don’t say you’re missin’ me, Art. We’ll be reunited soon.”
“Watch your fucking tongue.” His voice lowered. “You have an hour.”
The call ended.
I cursed under my breath. I hadn’t been late, but I would be now that he’d moved our meeting up by forty-five minutes. It’d take me that long just to get out of London, never mind dump the body before getting my arse down to Arundel. Biting back another curse, I was just about to toss my phone onto the passenger seat when it vibrated again.
Fucking Artem .
“What?” I growled into the receiver.
“It’s me.”
Yarik.
Two little words and it felt like I’d taken a sledgehammer to the chest. He didn’t sound at all the same. ’Course, he wouldn’t. He wasn’t twelve anymore, shyly knocking on my door in the middle of the night, hoping to hang out even when we both knew his father would beat him black and blue for acting like I hung the moon. Petr had hated that about his son, how he used to follow me around, the hollow look in his dark blue eyes a silent confession that he was desperate for friendship, a connection, anyone that wouldn’t treat him with icy cold disdain.
So, yeah, he wasn’t twelve anymore. It was just that I hadn’t expected to hear the rasping timbre that would probably only deepen more with time. For a second, I almost mourned the loss of the kid I once knew, the boy who sat on top of a closed suitcase and dared me to uncover all his secrets.
I’d known that Yarik like the back of my hand.
I knew this one, too, through the texts we sent back and forth. But it was one thing to read his words on a screen and something else entirely to hear this new soft rasp in my ear. It was . . . unnerving, to say the least. What else didn’t I know about my best mate?
“Kirill? You there?”
My name was laced with a hint of anxiety he couldn’t hide, and it took me ten solid seconds to realize that even though I was driving on autopilot, my body knowing exactly where it had to go, I still hadn’t said a word. Clearing my throat, I tried for a smile, hoping he’d hear it in my voice. “Sorry, yeah. Been a long day.”
“Might end up being a little bit longer.”
That got my attention. “What did you do?”
He tried for a laugh, but it came out sounding all wrong. “What makes you think I did something?”
“Yarik.”
“Kiryusha.”
At the Russian pet name for Kirill that only he ever used, I rolled my eyes. “Don’t even try.”
“You’re no fun.”
“So you’ve told me a hundred times. ”
“A hundred?” There was a real laugh. No longer soft, but gruff, as if it came from the beating heart of his soul. The sound scraped down my spine like a whisper of lost time. “Make that a thousand. More than that, probably. I’ve never met anyone as allergic to fun as you are.”
“You done being a brat?”
“No.”
“Yaroslav—”
“I’m here.”
“What?”
“In London. Well, I’m at Heathrow but?—”
My heart lurched, the organ suddenly pounding so loud, I couldn’t hear anything over the deafening roar in my ears. Yarik, here in England? Here in London ? The motorway ahead of me blurred, and I had a stray worry of driving straight into the crash belt, the car wrapped around twisted metal like an accordion, the dead body in the boot being found by the police when they arrived on scene.
Fuck.
Fuck —
“Volkov didn’t mention you coming home.” Don’t know how I managed to get the words out past the knot in my throat, but I did, only to feel dread take its place as the silence on the other end of the line lengthened. “Yarik,” I said slowly, and I wasn’t the kind of bloke who begged, but there was no mistaking the edge of panic in my voice when I repeated, “He didn’t mention you coming home.”
Don’t say it.
Please, don’t say ?—
“He doesn’t know.”
Fuck.
“I was hoping you might give me a ride?”
A ride to where ? Straight into a fucking grave? Just dump his body in alongside Jocle Stevens like he wasn’t worthy of a better ending? I knew that Yarik hated Moscow. I could read between the lines to all the things he never said out loud, to the pieces of his heart that he broke off in shards, never knowing how much they made me bleed. Whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not, Moscow was better than London. For him. It was better for him.
Away from Petr Volkov.
Away from this life.
Away from me, even, because I hid things, too, and as much as Yarik liked to pretend that I was the same kid he’d found washed up on the banks of the River Thames, the pieces of my heart, if I ever shared them with him, would cut so deep, they’d bleed him dry.
I gripped the steering wheel hard, struggling to put words to the riot of emotions swarming my brain. Finally, I said, “I have a dead body in the boot right now.”
“Oh.”
Yeah, oh . This was the life he’d managed to escape for the past three years. The killing, the deception, the rest of it. Moscow probably wasn’t a utopia, but it had to be better than the monotonous grind of being the Bratva’s bitch. Although maybe being the Bratva’s prince made things different. I didn’t think so, but what did I know? “Artem is expecting me in Arundel in an hour. I don’t know how long it’ll be.”
“Right.” That rasp had softened to a careful whisper, and I could almost picture him now, standing in front of the airport, his arms wrapped tight around his chest as he watched families come and go out of Heathrow while he stood alone. “No worries. I’ll, uh . . . I’ll figure something out. I shouldn’t have thought you would—I mean, I shouldn’t have expected you to drop everything and?— ”
“I need you to find a place to camp out.” The slight hitch in his breathing told me that I’d startled him a little. Good. He gave me the shock of a lifetime ringing me out of the blue on a bloody Tuesday evening, ready to turn my world upside down all over again. “If I don’t show up, Artem will be the least of my problems. Yours, too.”
Maybe he could read between the lines as well as I could because he didn’t argue with me, just said, “I know, I’m sorry,” like his showing up was only a massive inconvenience and not the one move on a chessboard that could send his father spiraling out with rage.
Or maybe he did know.
That was the thing about Yarik; he was impulsive, but he was razor-sharp, too—the kind of smart that would one day raze whole cities to the ground if anyone dared to get in his way. He was sly and quick-witted, stubborn as hell, and?—
“I need you to stay out of sight. I’ll text you when I get close—tell you where to meet me.”
He released a soft sigh, and it sounded like relief. “Okay.”
“I mean it, Yarik. Out of sight.”
“Boo,” he quipped, and it was so like him to say something so randomly ridiculous, that I didn’t know whether to laugh or tell him to piss off. “Like a ghost, I got it, Kiryusha. Now you see me, now you don’t.”
I cracked a smile. A real one, this time. I wondered if he could tell, if he could hear it when I said, “I’ve got to go; I’ll see you soon,” as if my hands weren’t sweating on the steering wheel and my heart wasn’t racing with the near-forgotten thrill of doing something that I knew could get me killed but I’d do it anyway because there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Yaroslav Volkov even if it meant saving him from himself.
Before I could hang up, he said, “Hey, Kirill?”
“Yeah?”
“I missed you.”
And then he ended the call.
By the time I got to Heathrow, it was after one in the morning.
The place was eerily empty, the night sky still but for the heavy clouds that misted over the city and blocked out the stars. And then there was Yarik, striding toward me with his shoulders thrown back as if he had no reason at all to hide, his blond hair illuminated to a pale-gold sheen under the lampposts.
I wanted to throttle him.
I also wanted to drag him into my car and never let him out of my sight again.
I was out the door in the next second, moving before my brain could catch up with my muscles, my limbs, which were already putting me on a direct path to my best friend. He met my gaze in the last second before I crowded close and pulled him in for a hug that I hated as much as I craved. He must have sensed my internal struggle, though, because he stood there like a life-sized doll, arms limp where they rested down at his sides, his body quivering but held unnaturally still—except for the shallow puff of air against my neck that told me he was alive, that he was giving me this moment, even when it went against every part of his nature not to throw his arms around me and hug me back.
My skin felt tight.
My heart was pounding, thrashing, within its cage .
Then I was stepping back and letting the brisk autumn air rush in between us, whisking away the rare display of affection like it never happened at all. I turned away before he could see the reel of emotion play out across my face, but red-hot embarrassment still dogged my heels as I gestured to the car. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” We’d tempted fate by staying too long as it was.
He tossed his rucksack into the backseat, then got in the front with me. “Are we going to talk about that? I think we should.”
“No.”
“You hugged me.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “A temporary lapse in judgment.”
“You missed me.”
With one hand on the steering wheel, I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, only to find him sitting in the passenger seat with his hands tucked beneath his chin while he batted his eyelashes at me like his life depended on it. I tried to look away, back to the road, but he caught on to the aversion tactic too quick. Suddenly, he was swaying his whole body forward, pose still going strong, so that he could stay in my line of vision.
“You missed me,” he pressed in a sing-song lilt that should have grated my nerves but only made me bite my cheek harder, this time against a smile. “Admit it. You. Missed. Me.”
“Yarik—”
“It could be my last night, you know.”
It could. We both knew it. Still, I rolled my eyes just to mess with him. “That’d be unfortunate.”
“ Unfortunate ? I could die tomorrow, and that’s all you have to say? You’d be wracked with guilt for the rest of your life.”
“Would I?”
“ Yes .”
“Good to know all the indigestion will have a root cause.”
Stagnant silence landed between us for only a second before it was devoured by the sound of laughter—mine, his, ours. It bubbled up in a way that I’d forgotten it could, warm and unbridled. I only ever laughed like this with him. It burned my chest. Heartburn. A medical condition without a cure, and even if it had one, I still wouldn’t choose to numb the pain. It felt too good.
“Fucking wanker,” he muttered, but the smirk riding his lips said that he didn’t really mean it, and I cared about him enough to make myself confess, “Sometimes I missed you.”
You know, if “sometimes” was just a less pathetic way of saying, “I missed you every second of every day.”
Which was true.
I’d missed him every second of every day of every year that he’d been gone.
“I’m assuming you have a plan?” I asked as I pulled away from the curb. When he didn’t answer right away, I spared him a quick glance. “Yarik. A plan. Tell me you have one.”
“Sort of.”
Sort of . Fucking hell.
If I weren’t keen on keeping us alive, I’d have closed my eyes, just out of frustration. As it was, I stared out at the spot-lit road ahead of us and counted to ten. Not that it helped much. “You’re telling me that you hopped on a plane without—” Hold on. My gaze cut to his profile again. “How did you afford the fare?”
He visibly squirmed. “About that . . .”
We hadn’t even left Heathrow yet, but that didn’t matter. I pulled over, cut the engine, and turned to stare at the kid in the passenger seat. Because maybe he wasn’t twelve anymore, but he was still that—still just a kid . Older, sure, and physically bigger, definitely, but the same boy who made reckless decisions left and right, the kind that always got him backed into a corner with no way out.
No way out aside from me , that was.
“Was I your plan?” I bit out the question before it had even fully formed. “And don’t lie. I’ll see right through it.”
As he fiddled with the drawstring on his black hoodie, I was struck with the sudden visual of him slipping through the streets of Moscow with that hood drawn up over his head, hoping that his father’s spies wouldn’t catch sight of him as he made his way to the airport on his own. A mafia prince on the run. It could almost be the start of a bad joke except that there was nothing funny about what Petr would do to his only son the moment he found out that Yarik was back on British soil, uninvited.
“Yaroslav . . .”
“I know what you’re thinking.” There was a vehemence to his voice that I hadn’t expected. “That I’m selfish?—”
I’d thought a lot of things about him over the years, but that had never been one of them. Selfish implied that he thought of no one but himself. That he would always put his own wants and needs first, fuck everyone else. Yarik wasn’t selfish. He was the furthest thing from it. I opened my mouth to tell him that, except he was already on a roll, his dark blue eyes flashing with so much ire, I felt scorched alive.
“—Like some pampered little prince who can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.” He slung an arm around the headrest of his seat, but it was only so he could thrust his face close to mine without needing to use the center console or my thigh for balance. Even now, with him spitting fire the way he was, he was still so careful not to touch me, to keep his distance, however he could. “The prince decides to come home on a whim,” he added, lashes fluttering fast, not teasing this time, but like he was desperate to keep his walls from crumbling. “The prince decides to leave everything behind just because he’s bored .”
He was unraveling before me.
I could see it—could feel the electric current in the air, the way he was hovering on the precipice of something dark and turbulent.
“Maybe I was bored,” he sneered. “Maybe I did come home on a whim. Maybe this has nothing to do with you .”
“You weren’t bored.”
“You don’t know that.”
“And this wasn’t some whim ,” I said, talking right over him. “I told you not to lie to me, that I’d see right through it.”
There was just enough light in the car for me to see what my words did to him. His shoulders shuddered and his expression fractured and before I could stop him, he threw open his door and clambered out of the passenger seat.
I followed him.
There wasn’t any other option.
It didn’t matter that we hadn’t breathed the same air in close to three years. We were bound, the two of us, and if I had to chase him down, just to keep him from doing something irreversibly stupid, I would. A million times over, I would.
“Yarik!” I shouted into the wind. “Yarik, stop. ”
He didn’t stop. He was walking fast with his head down and his hood up. I rushed to catch up to him. Instead of laying a hand on him when I got close, I threw myself directly in his way. Even now, he was taller than I was. He probably always would be. But I’d started to fill out in every other regard, and if he planned to bowl me over to keep on running, he’d have a harder time now than he would have when we’d first met.
We were both breathing fast and not from the exertion. Beneath the fabric of his hood, I could see indecision play out across his features. When he fell back a step, his shoulders already twisting in retreat, I growled, “Don’t run away from me.”
Still, he stepped back.
I immediately closed the gap. “Don’t.”
“Kirill—”
“You know what selfish is?” I was stalking him now, closing in as he fell back step after step. “Selfish is pretending I don’t give a fuck about you when you know that’s not true. Selfish is acting like I don’t understand when you won’t tell me what’s going on. Selfish , Yaroslav, is running the fuck away instead of asking me to fix the problem.”
The wind tore his hood down.
It left him exposed.
To the elements, to my gaze, to the truth that I’d thrown down at his feet.
He backed up another step, but I’d cornered him right up against my car, exactly where he’d tried to flee. He looked shell-shocked. Or maybe it wasn’t shock so much as it was fear. But it couldn’t be me that he was afraid of, so what had made him react like this? What had put him on an airplane without his father’s blessing, prepared to step into the lion’s den instead of staying far away where he was better off?
I stepped right up to him. Mere centimeters separated my chest from his. Though my nerves clawed at me to put more space between us, I held my ground and stayed right where I was. “You gonna say something to that?” It was a taunt as much as it was a plea. I’d dangle him right over the edge of a cliff if I had to, but I’d pull him back long before I ever let him drop into the churning sea. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you aren’t a selfish little brat, thinking you know better than everyone else.”
“Shut up.” The demand tremored in the wind. “Just shut up .”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why ?”
“You have something to say, then say it. Tell. Me. I’m. Wrong.”
“I couldn’t stay!” Part of me thought he shouted it, but maybe that wasn’t right. Maybe it only felt that way because he said it with every fiber of his being, as if he’d screamed the words into the void a thousand times before, only for them to never be heard. “Are you happy now?” Breathing hard, he scrubbed the heel of his palm across his face. Too late, I realized that he was crying. “I couldn’t stay.”
The way his voice cracked . . . “Yarik, talk to me. Please. ”
Frantically, he shook his head.
“You were fine,” I said, but even as I did, I wondered if that was true. Over the years, I’d suspected that something was wrong. Yarik had a way about him; he could throw off a scent with the best of them, always skirting around topics that made him jumpy. But that didn’t make him impossible to read, and just because he could radiate sunshine didn’t mean that he wasn’t also cloaked in shadows. “Please. Just say something .”
“It wasn’t safe.”
I felt my entire body go rigid. “Someone put their hands on you.” It wasn’t a question, and neither were the thoughts tumbling through my head. Someone had hurt him. Or threatened to, at least. That was enough to make me see red. “Who?” I bit out. “One of your guards? The Zharkov?—”
Yarik slid out from between me and the vehicle. “No.”
“You said that it wasn’t safe.” I didn’t chase after him, but he also wasn’t trying to run. He paced in front of me, back and forth, his fingers clawing at his hair like he fought demons no one saw but him. Down at my sides, my own fingers curled into fists. “Give me a name.”
“I don’t have a name.”
“But you?—”
“It wasn’t safe for me , okay? No one touched me. No one hurt me.”
“I don’t understand.”
He spun around so suddenly, I experienced whiplash. There was something in his stance that felt . . . fragile. Glass threaded through with hairline fractures. Maybe the crack had always been there, only made obvious thanks to us reuniting after years apart, or maybe it was new. Like he hadn’t yet adjusted to existing in skin that no longer fit him. There was a slump to his shoulders, a tremble in his fingertips, just before he hid them in the front pocket of his hoodie.
I didn’t like it.
It all felt wrong .
I have loads of secrets, he once told me. I hadn’t believed him then, but I believed him now.
Softly, he said, “I know you don’t.”
Understand, he meant. He knew that I didn’t understand.
Instead of bothering to explain, he muttered, “C’mon, we need to go,” and then he got in the car without another word.
There was a strange, hollow feeling in my chest that told me I’d missed something big just now, and that I wouldn’t get this moment back. But when I sat in the driver’s seat and turned to look at him, it was clear that the conversation was over. He’d thrown his hoodie back up and curled his big frame against the door, huddled as far away from me as possible.
Confused, I rasped out his name.
“It’s okay, Kiryusha.” He smiled, but it was a brittle, tragic thing. “And you’re right, as usual. I didn’t have a plan.” His low chuckle was grim. “I guess I just wanted to see you before he found out that I was back, and you need to fake-hate me again for the rest of our lives.”
“For the rest of our lives is a really, really long time.”
Even saying it out loud had my lungs seizing tight. Yaroslav Volkov was my best friend, the only family I had. More than a thousand text messages between us proved that there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him. He’d reached for the stars in Moscow, and I’d scoured the skies for them here in London. I needed him to be okay.
“Maybe.” He offered me a small shrug that I didn’t believe for a second. “But with how I expect Father to react to me coming home, you’ll only have to fake-hate me for, oh, probably another twenty-four hours. ”
I stared at him, wishing he would meet my gaze. “I worry that you’ll regret coming back.”
He looked out the window, his profile silhouetted by a streak of moonlight. “I won’t,” he said solemnly. “I promise you, I won’t.”