Chapter 8
Maya
Three days.
That's how long I mostly managed to avoid looking directly at Konstantin Besharov. Three days of staring at laptop screens and medical files and the fascinating pattern of wood grain on Maks's desk—anything but those gray eyes.
The kiss haunted me. Not just the kiss—the after. The way I'd melted into his chest like I belonged there. The way his arms had wrapped around me, turning his massive body into a fortress with me safe inside. The way I'd slept, actually slept, for the first time in months.
That terrified me more than Brand's assassins ever could.
The next morning, when I woke, alone, I made a decision.
I would rebuild every wall Konstantin had started to demolish.
Brick by brick, hour by hour, I reconstructed Dr. Maya Cross—competent, clinical, absolutely fine on her own.
I wasn't the woman who'd sobbed in a corner.
Definitely wasn't the woman whose thumb had drifted toward her mouth, seeking comfort she was too ashamed to take.
I wouldn’t talk about the kiss, wouldn’t talk about feelings, basically wouldn’t talk to Kostya about anything.
Maks had given me workspace in his tech room, probably because Nikolai had ordered it.
The room was all screens and shadows, the blue light turning everything slightly unreal.
Perfect for disappearing into work. I transcribed Brand's horror show with mechanical precision—surgical schedules, buyer codes, the careful notation of which organs went to which anonymous monster.
My fingers flew across the keyboard, turning atrocity into data, making it manageable, clinical, safe.
The door opened at exactly noon on the first day. I knew it was Kostya without looking up—something about the way the air changed when he entered a room, like barometric pressure dropping before a storm.
"Lunch." His voice rumbled through the space between us. The plate appeared in my peripheral vision—sandwich, apple slices, a bottle of water with condensation beading on the plastic.
"Thank you," I told my laptop screen. The cursor blinked. Patient 5, bilateral corneal extraction. I kept typing.
He didn't move. I could feel him standing there, all six feet five inches of him. The weight of his attention pressed against my skin like humidity, making me hyperaware of everything—the way my fingers trembled slightly on the keys, the shallow rhythm of my breathing, the heat crawling up my neck.
"You should eat while it's warm," he said.
"I will."
I wouldn't. Not until he left. Not until I could chew without feeling his eyes tracking the movement of my throat when I swallowed. Not until I could exist in this room without my body remembering how it felt to be held, to be safe, to be seen.
He stayed for thirty more seconds. Thirty seconds of his presence filling the room, of his patience radiating like heat from a forge. Then he left, the door closing with a soft click that somehow sounded like a promise.
I knew he wanted to talk to me. I just couldn’t.
The sandwich went cold. The apple slices turned brown at the edges. I ate them anyway, three hours later, alone in the blue light of monitors displaying other people's stolen organs.
He came back at six with dinner. Same routine.
Same weight of attention. Same careful placement of food I wouldn't touch until he was gone.
But this time, he lingered longer. Forty-five seconds.
His breathing was perfectly controlled, but I could hear something underneath it—not frustration exactly, but intention.
Like a predator learning its prey's patterns.
"The pelmeni will get soggy," he said. Russian dumplings. Someone had made them by hand, probably one of the Besharov women who populated the compound like benevolent ghosts.
"I'll heat them up later."
"Maya." My name in his mouth was a physical thing, pressing against the shell of my ear, sliding down my spine. "Look at me."
My fingers stuttered on the keyboard. Patient 8, partial hepatectomy, age 19.
"I'm working," I said to the screen.
Another pause. Then footsteps, slow and deliberate, moving away. The door closed softer this time, like regret.
Day two was worse. He'd adjusted his strategy—three meals, but also coffee at ten, tea at three, a bottle of water at eight when the sun started slanting through the windows. Each time, he stayed a little longer. Each time, his presence pressed a little harder against my carefully maintained walls.
I cataloged the changes in my body's responses like symptoms of a disease.
Elevated heart rate at the sound of footsteps in the hall.
Skin hypersensitive to the movement of air that meant the door was opening.
A hollow ache in my chest when his presence filled the room, and a different kind of hollow when he left.
"Your eyes are getting worse," he observed during the lunch delivery. "The circles underneath. You're not sleeping."
I wanted to tell him that sleep meant dreams, and dreams meant remembering his arms around me, the steady beat of his heart under my ear, the impossible feeling of being protected. Instead, I typed faster. Patient 10, kidney, single mother of three.
Day three, he broke pattern. Dinner came with a chair—dragged from somewhere else, placed deliberately across from my desk. He sat in it, arms crossed, and waited.
The cursor blinked. My fingers hovered over the keys but wouldn't move. I could feel him watching me, patient as stone, inevitable as gravity.
"Eat," he said. Not a request.
"I'm almost done with this section—"
"Eat. Then finish. Or am I going to have to feed you again?"
The command in his voice went through me like electricity, shorting out higher brain function, leaving only response.
My hand moved without permission, picking up the fork.
He watched me take three bites—salmon, rice, vegetables I couldn't taste past the way his attention felt like being held—then nodded, satisfied, and left without another word.
Alone in the tech room, I pressed my thighs together hard enough to hurt. My body was betraying me in ways that had nothing to do with exhaustion or hunger. The space between my legs ached, wet and wanting, responding to his commands like I was programmed for obedience.
This was worse than wanting to be held. This was wanting to be controlled, consumed, taken apart by those massive hands and put back together in whatever shape he preferred.
This was dangerous.
I closed the laptop and fled to my room, but even there, I could feel it—the patient pressure of being hunted by something that knew exactly how long it would take for me to exhaust myself with running. Something that would be there, waiting, steady as stone, when I finally collapsed.
Three days of walls, and they were already crumbling. Not from force, but from the unbearable gentleness of his patience. From the way he gave me exactly the distance I demanded while making sure I knew that distance was a gift he could revoke at any time.
I was being hunted by something that had already caught me. It was just waiting for me to realize there was nowhere left to run.
I'd been transcribing a particularly brutal case—a twenty-two-year-old au pair who'd gone in for a simple appendectomy and come out missing both corneas—when I looked down and found my hands had been busy without me.
It was like the pens had lined themselves up without my permission. Six of them, parallel as railroad tracks, each exactly one inch apart across the desk surface.
The realization hit like cold water. This was how it started, the loss of control. First the small rituals, the soothing repetitions. Then the thumb-sucking. Then the full regression into something small and soft and helpless.
I scattered the pens deliberately, but twenty minutes later they were lined up again.
My body was betraying me in increments. During a file about a teenager who'd lost a kidney while getting his wisdom teeth removed, my thumb found its way to my mouth.
Not in it—I had that much control left—but pressed against my lower lip, the pressure soothing something raw in my chest. I jerked it away so hard I bit myself, tasted copper, and typed faster.
The sweater made it worse. Sophie had left a pile of clothes in my room—soft things, comfortable things, nothing like the practical scrubs and jeans I'd lived in for six months.
This particular sweater was cashmere, oversized, the kind of expensive softness I'd forgotten existed.
It smelled like fabric softener and safety, and I'd been wearing it for two days straight.
Sometime during hour four of transcribing horror, I realized I'd chewed a hole in the sleeve.
Not a small hole. A proper gap where I'd been gnawing at the fabric without conscious thought, the cashmere now damp and ragged around a space the size of a quarter. My body seeking comfort through destruction, trying to self-soothe in the most primitive way it knew.
"Fuck." The word escaped before I could stop it, examining the damage. This was Sophie's sweater. Sophie who'd looked at me with such genuine kindness, who'd made sure I had soft things to wear, and I'd destroyed it like an anxious dog.
"You're hurting yourself."
I hadn't heard him enter. Konstantin stood in the doorway, dinner tray in his hands, those gray eyes tracking from the ruined sleeve to my face with an expression I couldn't read.
"It's just a sweater," I said, tugging the sleeve down to hide the evidence.
"That's not what I meant."
He moved into the room with that dangerous grace, set the tray down, but instead of leaving like he had for three days, he pulled up that same chair. Positioned it across from me. Sat with the kind of deliberate intention that made my pulse spike.
"Show me your hands," he said.
"What?"
"Your hands." He held out his own, palms up, waiting. "Show me."