Chapter 11 Bella #2
“Oh my god,” Maya breathes into my shoulder. “What the hell, B? You scared the life out of me.”
I cling back for a second, then step away before I fall apart. “Sorry,” I rasp. My voice sounds raw. “I—there wasn’t time.”
She pulls back, hands on my upper arms, scanning me the way you’d check for fractures. “Where did you even come from? I thought you were still in Paris. That’s what your last message said.”
Guilt flickers in my stomach. “Yeah. About that.”
She narrows her eyes. “What did you do?”
“A very stupid, very on-brand thing,” I say. “Can we…not do this on the sidewalk?”
Maya glances around. Her instincts are good; they always have been.
“You’re right. Come on. My car’s around the corner. I left work early for this, by the way, so you better have a story.”
We’ve been quiet for a few minutes. Lily is in the back in a borrowed car seat Maya wrestled out of her trunk, half-dozing, clutching a crumbly cracker.
“So,” Maya says finally, glancing sideways at me. “You want to tell me what’s going on, or should I just assume you joined a cult and this is your dramatic escape?”
I huff out a weak laugh. “It’s not a cult.”
“Okay, good. That was my worst-case scenario.” She pauses. “Second worst was prison.”
“Not yet,” I mutter.
She gives me a longer look. “Bella.”
I stare at my hands for a second, then the words come out before I can talk myself out of it. “Do you remember that guy from four years ago?”
She snorts. “You’re going to have to be more specific. I meet all your disasters secondhand.”
“The one from the hotel,” I say. “At the gala. The…Russian.”
Her face clears. “Oh.”
She thinks for a moment, eyebrows lifting. “Oh.”
I know the exact memory she’s pulling up. Me, showing up at her apartment two days later, hair a mess, voice shot, saying things like “I don’t think I’ve ever…” and “I can’t feel my legs…” and “This has ruined me for everyone else.”
“You mean,” she says slowly, “the guy who gave you ‘the best sex of your entire life’?” She even does the air quotes.
I groan, dropping my face into my hands. “Please don’t quote me back to myself.”
She grins, merciless. “Oh, I remember the exact words, sweetheart. You said, and I quote, ‘My brain left my body, I saw God twice, and if I die now, at least I know what good sex is.’ That guy?”
Heat creeps up my neck. “Yes. That guy.”
She cuts me a side-eye. “You’re telling me you got on a plane with that guy.”
I swallow. “Maya…you know how I told you Lily’s dad was a one-night stand and it was complicated and I didn’t want to talk about it?”
Her head snaps toward me so fast the car swerves half an inch. “Oh my god.”
“Eyes on the road,” I say weakly.
She corrects, knuckles white on the wheel. “You’re telling me…that guy. Hotel guy. ‘Saw God twice’ guy.” She gestures between me and the back seat. “That’s Lily’s dad?”
I nod, once. “Yeah.”
She just stares for a second, then lets out a low whistle. “Wow. When you do drama, you really commit.”
I laugh, but it sounds brittle. “It was supposed to be one night. Then it became two. Then I ran. I didn’t know how to find him, and I didn’t want him to find me.”
“And now you’re here,” She shakes her head. “So what happened? You just…bumped into him in Boston?”
“On a plane,” I say. “First class. He was there. With me. With us.”
“So you saw him. Again. And…?”
“And I made a series of bad decisions in a very short time,” I say. I don’t tell her the part where we had wild sex in the bathroom. Something tells me that she wouldn’t approve. “We talked. We…caught up. It got complicated fast.”
“Define complicated.”
“There was a murder on the plane,” I say instead.
That shuts her up.
“You’re joking,” she says.
“I’m not.”
She stares at me. “Like, actual dead person?”
“Actual dead person,” I say. “Security, diversion, Boston instead of New York. It was…a lot.”
Maya is quiet for a few seconds, processing. “And hotel guy was just…chilling in first class while someone died on his plane.”
“He knew the victim,” I say. “They’d fought before. Publicly.” I rub my temples. “He’s not just some rich guy, Maya. Do you remember I told you he felt…dangerous?”
“You said he had ‘I own the building, not the room’ energy,” she says. “And that his smile made you think of crime novels.”
“Yeah,” I say faintly. “That part wasn’t a metaphor.”
Maya pulls up at a light, looks both ways, then looks at me. “Bella. Start at the start.”
I grip my knees. “His name is Aleksander Antonov. His family is…involved. Russian. Old money, old power, old something. He told me straight out he works for the Bratva.”
She blinks. “I’m sorry, the what now?”
“Russian organized crime. The real one, not Netflix.”
Maya lets out a low breath, then barks a disbelieving laugh. “So you’re telling me the guy who gave you the best sex of your life is also an actual mafia guy.” She’s quiet for a beat. “Oh my god.”
I tell her how he pulled strings to get us through that mess with the dead man on board. How there was a car waiting. How he carried Lily like she weighed nothing. How he told me the truth in that hotel suite and the world tilted.
I tell her about the shooting on the highway, the glass exploding, his body over ours like a shield, the way he moved like he’d done it before. Too many times. I tell her about the sticker on his sleeve and how domestically absurd it all looked for five minutes in that diner.
I don’t tell her every detail. Not the way he tasted between my thighs. Not the way my name sounded on his tongue when he was inside me. Some things I can’t say out loud without falling apart.
But she’s not stupid. She hears it in the spaces I leave.
When I’m done, my throat is dry and my hands ache from how hard I’ve been twisting them in my lap.
Maya exhales through her teeth. “So he’s not just some rich guy with a mysterious past.”
“No,” I say.
“He’s…mafia,” she says carefully.
I nod, feeling ridiculous saying it out loud. “Yeah.”
“Like…actual mafia. Not ‘my uncle is sketchy and sometimes launders money through his bar’ mafia.”
“Actual mafia,” I say. I make a face.
She’s silent for a moment. The only sound is the turn signal clicking as we change lanes.
“So,” she says eventually, in that slow, deliberate tone she uses when she’s trying not to freak out, “you reconnected with your one-night stand, who turns out to be your child’s father, who also turns out to be a Bratva boss, and your solution was to…climb out of a bathroom window with a toddler?”
“When you say it like that, it sounds insane,” I say.
“It is insane,” she replies. “It’s also exactly what I would expect from you.”
I let out a broken laugh. “Maya.”
She glances over, softer now. “Hey. You did the only thing you could do. You got her away. You got yourself away.”
I stare at my reflection in the glass for a moment. I look tired. Older than I feel. “It doesn’t feel like we got away,” I say quietly. “It feels like…borrowed time.”
Maya doesn’t argue. She just nods. “Maybe. But for now, borrowed is better than gone.”
We drive the last few blocks in silence, the word Bratva hanging between us like something toxic.
When we pull up in front of her building, she kills the engine and turns to me fully.
“Okay,” she says. “We’re going upstairs.
You’re taking a shower. Lily’s getting food that isn’t crackers.
And then we’re going to sit on my couch and figure out what the hell to do about your homicidal Russian baby daddy. ”
Despite everything, a tiny, hysterical laugh bubbles up in my chest. “Don’t call him that.”
“What, Russian?”
I press my fingers to my eyes. “All of it.”
She grins, a little vicious. “Too late. I’m adopting it.”
She gets out, comes around to my side, and opens my door before I can. “Come on. You survived him. You survived a highway ambush. You can survive my third-floor walk-up.”
I take her hand and step out, Lily warm against my shoulder, my life in tatters and something sharp and stupid still twisting in my chest at the thought of Aleksander.
“Yeah,” I say softly. “We’ll see.”
Maya’s apartment smells like garlic and something tomato-based by the time I get out of the shower.
I feel a little less like roadkill and more like a person—damp hair, Maya’s oversized T-shirt hanging off one shoulder, bare legs, socks that don’t match. Lily is on the living room rug surrounded by blocks and a stuffed animal I’ve never seen before. She looks more relaxed than she has all day.
Maya hands me a mug of tea and nudges her laptop toward me on the coffee table. “Here. Wi-Fi password is the same. Don’t look at my search history. Or do, actually, maybe it’ll distract you.”
I manage a weak smile. “Thanks.”
She disappears back into the tiny kitchen, humming under her breath. I sit on the couch, tuck one leg under me, open the laptop.
For a minute I just stare at the blank browser bar. Part of me doesn’t want to know anything. The other part can’t help it.
I type the flight number.
A few results pop up. News blurbs, mostly copy-pasted from the same source.
“International flight diverted to Boston due to onboard incident.”
“Authorities investigating death of passenger on transatlantic route.”
There’s a grainy photo of the plane on the tarmac. That’s it. No names. No details. Comments are locked on most of the articles. The official statement calls it “an unforeseen medical situation” and “a matter for law enforcement.”
It’s strange, seeing something that felt so loud from the inside turned into a two-paragraph filler story between election polls and celebrity nonsense.
My fingers hover over the keys.
Then I type: Aleksander Antonov.
The search results load and my stomach does a slow, unpleasant flip.
There he is. Over and over again.
Business sites, finance pages, glossy profiles with headlines like “The Quiet Force Behind Antonov Holdings” and “The Reclusive Shipping Magnate Diversifying Into Tech.” Photos from conferences, charity galas, a black-and-white magazine cover with his face half in shadow.
In every picture he looks…contained. Expensive suit, watch I’m afraid to even guess the price of, expression neutral in that practiced way powerful men have when they know cameras are on them.
There’s always a sense of space around him, even in a crowd—as if people instinctively don’t stand too close.
I click one at random.
It’s an article about a donation to some children’s foundation. There’s a photo of him shaking hands with a politician, a tight half-smile on his face. The caption refers to him as “Russian-born American entrepreneur” and “logistics and infrastructure investor.”
No mention of where he really comes from. No mention of the word he said so calmly in that hotel: Bratva.
I scroll through more images. Him at a podium. Him getting into a car. Him standing on a stage with other men in suits, all of them laughing at something just off camera. In one photo, his hand is lifted like he’s mid-gesture, and I can almost hear his voice.
It doesn’t feel real that the man in these photos is the same one who knelt between my legs on a cheap diner table, who shielded my daughter with his body in a shower of glass.
There’s a faint scar near his eyebrow I never noticed before, thin and pale.
I zoom in without thinking.
His eyes are the same steel gray I remember. Focused. A little tired. Like he’s always watching four steps ahead of everyone else.
My hand lifts. Before I realize what I’m doing, my fingertip is tracing the outline of his nose on the screen, the line of his mouth, the curve of his jaw.
It’s ridiculous, tracing pixels on Maya’s scratched laptop like a teenager with a crush. But for a moment it’s like touching the thought of him is easier than thinking about the real man—guns and blood and choices that can’t be undone.
“Wow,” Maya says behind me.
I jump. My finger leaves a faint smudge on the glass.
She’s leaning over the back of the couch, staring at the screen. “He really is stupidly hot,” she says. “I thought you were exaggerating.”
I close the tab too fast. The empty browser looks accusatory.
“It’s just research,” I say, which sounds weak even to my own ears.
“Uh-huh.” She rounds the couch and drops onto it beside me, tucking her feet under her. “You traced his face, Bell.”
Heat crawls up my neck. “I was…thinking.”
“Clearly,” she says dryly. “So. Billionaire businessman. No criminal record. No scandal. Not so much as a messy divorce. Publicly, he’s cleaner than my search history.”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” I murmur. “If anything, that makes it worse.”
Maya studies my face instead of the laptop. “What are you feeling right now?” she asks, and the question is so direct it makes my throat tighten.
I look down at my hands. “Like I’m an idiot,” I say. “Like I’m lucky. Like I’ve just jumped off a building and haven’t hit the ground yet.”
“And about him?” she presses gently.
I think of his mouth on my skin. The way he showed that faintest trace of vulnerability. The way he looked at Lily without even knowing what she was to him.
“Too much,” I say quietly. “That’s the problem.”
Maya sighs and leans her shoulder into mine. “Okay. Then for tonight, you’re going to eat, sleep, and not stalk your maybe-murder-adjacent Bratva ex on my laptop. Tomorrow we can freak out strategically.”
I let out a breath that’s half laugh, half sob. “Deal,” I say.
But later, when she’s busy making up a bed on the couch and Lily is finally asleep down the hall, the image of his face on that screen stays burned behind my eyes.
And I know, even here, even now, I’m not done with him.