Chapter 31
Ilya
If I didn’t adore the woman as I do, I think right now, I could kill her.
What had she been thinking, telling Irelynn of my Bratva heritage? I’d been making progress. Good fucking progress. Now?
Fuck, now I’m back to square one.
The way she’d looked at me in the kitchen—the fear—it had been raw and ugly. The acrid taste of it still lingers on my tongue. And when she closed her eyes, shutting me out, I’d felt something snap inside her.
I’d felt it snap between us.
All the land I’d covered in my trek to claim her heart and soul for my own fell out from under my feet, the earth scorched by a dark and ugly truth. I am more than the monster she thought I was.
I am more than the demon that haunts and hunts her.
I am the devil who controls all the demons. I’m the darkness that spreads and consumes, and I will consume her.
But I will never harm her. I may be a devil, born of sin and shadow, but for her I want to be more. For her, and her alone, I will be more.
She’s stopped trembling again, but I’m not sure how long that will last. I’ve seen men far bigger than her collapse in panic. Sometimes it’s a quick overtaking. Sometimes it can last days. Sometimes, a truly bad attack, can linger for years.
I’ll love her no matter.
Her soul calls to mine, a siren song I am powerless to ignore. One day, she might understand the depths I feel for her. One day she might look beyond the impossibility of it and recognize that I’m a rare breed. A man who simply knows that he’s found his woman. The one crafted for him, and him alone.
Like father, like son.
Until then, I’ll just have to keep showing her.
Rising, I set her on the seat in the shower under the spray of hot water. With her wary eyes on me, I set to stripping from my own sopping clothing. She worries her bottom lip and even though she’s still in her underwear, she does her best to curl into herself. To hide herself from me.
I feel my jaw harden even as I remind myself that sometimes scorched earth yields better, more lush regrowth.
We can move on from this. The beating of my heart depends on it.
Stripped bare, her lovely blue eyes on me, I step from the shower. Even as I close her inside the glass and stone, she watches me as though she believes that at any moment, I’ll decide to end her life.
It—it hurts.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met someone with the power to wound me with just a look. Until her.
“I’ll be back,” I tell her as gently as I can. Then I walk from the bathroom.
I slide into a pair of black pyjama pants before I set to starting the fire in the fireplace. With a blanket folded over my arm, I re-enter the bathroom to find her as I left her.
Her black cat sits on the toilet seat where he planted his nosey self when I first brought her in here. Judgement flares in his yellow eyes, and I’m confident, even though he’s a cat and it’s impossible, he’s telling me to fix this. To fix her.
Even crazier, I want to vow to him that I will.
I nearly laugh. As it is, I do smirk.
My Little Blue is right when she says I’m crazy. The levels of insanity I would fall to for her is damn near shameful.
I shut off the water and hold my hand to her, feeling a quick lash of hope when she takes it. She lets me remove her sopping underwear and towel her down without protest, but she begins to shiver again. Still, when she does it, there is a clarity to her eyes that tells me it’s not from panic, but because she’s cold.
Wrapping her in the blanket, I lift her into my arms again. Then I take her to the chair by the fireplace. I settle into it with her in my lap, holding her close. She is tense for long minutes before she settles against me.
My heart swells when she does.
Finally, after very long minutes where nothing but the crackle of wood in the fireplace sounds, she speaks, “Bratva is like—another word for mafia, right?” Her voice is so small, dripping with fear.
“Yes,” I confirm.
She releases a shuddering breath. “And your dad is a part of it.”
“He was the bratva.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“He was the Pakhan for a very long time. Before him, my grandfather was Pakhan.”
“T-the—I don’t know what that word means.”
“My father was the head of the bratva, Irelynn.”
Now, it’s her entire body that shudders. I tighten my hold. “That makes you—some kind of—what?” She giggles, but it’s unhinged. “A mafia prince?”
I chuckle. She’s so freshly, innocently adorable. “You could say that.” I grow quiet, contemplating the truth, the whole truth, or easier to swallow versions for now. I decide to go with the truth. “My father was a very successful man both within the criminal world, and outside that world. As you know, he had three sons. My older brother Kirill, myself, and my younger brother, Kane. You know what Kane does for a living.” I huff. “I’m pretty sure the entire world knows what Kane does for a living. Kirill heads Volk Vault Bank and I—” I pause when she twists in my lap to look at me. “I am now the Pakhan.”
Her puffy pink lips, lips I think near constantly about kissing, part. I see the moment she absorbs the meaning of my words, her blue eyes widening with alarm. “Y—you. You’re the—that means—you’re not a prince. You’re a?—”
I lift a wry brow, because I know where she’s heading. I tease darkly, “I think the word you’re looking for is king.”
Her eyes flit quickly back and forth between mine. The color drains from her face, even her freckles pale with her shock. She whispers, “You’re the head of the Bratva?”
I nod. “I am.”
I see the moment she realizes she’s being held by a true devil. A crime boss. A monster, as she’s so accurately called me.
She’s naked, wrapped in a blanket in my arms, horrified.
“Ilya.” The sound of my name on her lips is a decadency I’ll never tire from. “I need you to let me go.”
“No.”
“I need space.”
“Why?”
She huffs an exasperated sound. “To think.”
“There is nothing to think about. Thinking will do nothing but cause you undue stress regarding a situation you have no power to change. I am a crime boss, and you are mine.”
“It’s—” She’s breathing fast again. “It’s not that simple.”
“It is.”
She lifts her hands to cover her face, shaking her head. I continue to hold her, determined to be a pillar of strength as her foundation begins to crumble.
It takes her a moment, but she gets control over her breathing. Then she looks at me over one shoulder.
Fuck, but she’s lovely. “Your father took your mother like you took me?”
“Yes.”
“Is it—is that like some family tradition or something?”
A smile quirks my lips. “No.”
Her brows dip. She looks adorably frustrated. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“What do you need me to explain?”
“Why am I here?” It’s a question she’s asked before, more than once.
“There is a reason I took over as Pakhan. A reason my father entrusted me with the crueler side of things.” I think she’s holding her breath as she waits. I continue, “The first time I saw a man killed, I’d been six. He’d stolen something from my father, although I don’t recall what. I do recall the way he begged when he realized what would befall him. My father showed mercy then, as he put a bullet between the man’s eyes. That was the moment I understood there was something different about me, because I’d not only been unaffected—I’d been bored. Disappointed, even. I believe that’s when my father suspected that difference, too. Because next to me, my older brother was pale and sticky with sweat. I left the office with my brother next to me, and in the hall, I remember the way he leaned against the wall. The way his hand left a mist of sweat on the wall, and how he gasped for air. His composure had been stripped away the moment we were no longer standing before our father. Through his gasps, he’d told me that his heart was racing so fast, he feared it might rip from his chest.” I look deep into her blue eyes; certain I could lose myself in them, if only she’d let me. “I remember being confused by his words, even as a six-year-old boy. Because I couldn’t feel my heart beating in my chest at all.”
“You weren’t afraid?” She shakes her head in slow horror. “You were just a baby, Ilya, that’s terrible.”
She’s missing the point.
“The first time I killed a man, I was eleven. The man had been one of my fathers’ trusted soldiers. He’d had a syringe in his hand, and he’d been about to stick it in my younger brother’s neck. I’d thought it had been an assassination attempt.” I pause, regarding the still way she holds herself in my lap. “My hobby of collecting knives began as a young boy. Hunting knives, mostly.”
“I’ve seen them in your office.”
I smile, because I like knowing she’s taken note. That she doesn’t simply sit and stare into space when she’s sitting with me in the evenings. “It had been a Damascus blade I’d carried that day. I didn’t think, I threw the blade and caught him in the soft spot between his shoulderblade and spine. He’d made a noise then—a roar. It alerted the other men to the commotion, but he dropped the syringe. My father tortured the truth from the man. It hadn’t been an assassination attempt, but a kidnapping attempt. Whatever was in the syringe was meant to make Kane sick enough to be taken to the hospital, where my father’s rival would be able to take Kane.”
She gasps, a shaky hand lifting to her lips. “Oh, my goodness.”
I remind myself that our lives growing up were very different. Even though her life has been anything but easy, she was still innocent to the horrors of the underworld. The betrayals. The games.
I keep my voice soft. “As a show of my father’s appreciation, he offered me the honor of killing the man. He walked me downstairs, to a room that looked, and felt, and was often used, as a dungeon. There was blood on the floor. The man naked, and he was missing fingertips and toes. Cables dripping blood rested on a steel table next to an open case of implements used for torture.” Her face pales, but I need for her to understand, so I press on. “My father watched as I took it all in without a blink. I felt nothing but a spark of curiosity. You see, my first obsession was the heart. My own, to be specific. Why did my heart not race with excitement? Why didn’t it skip with fear? Or thunder with arousal? I looked at that man who was as good as dead, and then I looked at the gun my father handed me. I knew what he intended, for me to shoot him between the eyes as he had the man in his office that day all those years ago.”
“Ilya—I don’t—I can’t?—”
“I saw my blade laying on the table, dry blood painted the swirls of the Damascus steel. I traded the gun for my blade and split the man in two down the middle. He took his final breath when I shoved my hand up under his ribcage, closing around his beating heart. The way it raged, Little Blue—I could feel it in my palm before it went still. It was magnificent, and yet I felt nothing in my own chest.”
Her hands cover her ears now as tears stream silently from her eyes. My soft, sweet, innocent Little Blue.
Circling her wrist with my hands like cuffs, I pull them from her ears. She’s trembling again as she stares at me in horror, her body twisted to the side in my lap. The blanket has fallen to expose the delicately pale skin of her shoulders, and the swell of her breasts.
She’s beautiful even in her fear.
“Ilya…” she pleads.
“I’ve killed more men than I’ve bothered to count, fucked more women than I care to admit, and ran more miles than I’ll ever be able to track—all in the attempt to feel my own heart beat in my chest. To feel alive like every other living being I’ve ever encountered, feels.” I pause to hold her eyes that shimmer and shine. That unfeeling organ squeezes in my chest. I smile. Her eyes drop to my lips. “I took you, Irelynn, because when I first saw you in the casino that night, it was like my heart had been gripped by a fist. When I sat next to you, inhaling the sweet scent of cookies, my heart thundered. When I stood next to you and watched you sleep, my heart skipped with every breath you breathed. When your blue eyes land on me, my heart races. When you kiss me, I. feel. Everything.”
Her lips are parted now, but I think she’s holding her breath.
“I took you, Irelynn, because you’re the first person—the first thing—to make me feel alive.”