Chapter 24 Blood On Pine
BLOOD ON PINE
DANI
Dawn came gray and thin, seeping through the cabin windows like it wasn’t sure it wanted to commit.
No gunshots tearing the sky open. Just wind in the pines and a couple of birds arguing about something that didn’t involve automatic weapons.
Konstantin hadn’t slept. He’d spent the whole night at the window, gun in hand, eyes on the trees. Now he sat at the rickety kitchen table, the set of his shoulders saying he was still on high alert even if his body was running on fumes.
“Maybe they decided to pull back,” I said, dropping into the chair across from him. My voice felt small in the wooden box of the room. “Regroup. Hit us when we’re stupid enough to think we’re safe.”
“Maybe.” His gaze never left the window. “We stay put until I hear from Alexei. Moving in open is worse.”
Nothing about this was safe. One bad decision from any direction and we were done.
But he was right. Better the devil you’d already scouted than the ambush you couldn’t see.
That was when I noticed his bandage.
The white gauze on his shoulder had gone dark and sticky, the blood blooming through it like some grotesque flower. He sat there as if the open wound was an inconvenience instead of a hole in his body.
Stubborn bastard.
“You need that changed,” I said, already standing. The small first-aid kit sat on the counter, looking insultingly inadequate for Bratva-level trauma.
“I’m fine,” he said.
He still didn’t look away from the window.
“You’re not fine,” I said, more quietly this time. “You’re bleeding.”
I grabbed the kit and came around behind him, putting the chair between him and any thought of escape.
“Shirt off,” I ordered. “Now.”
“Dani—”
“Please.” I set the gauze and antiseptic on the table. “Let me at least do this.”
Us.
Me and the baby.
The word still felt both foreign and right, sitting heavy under my ribs.
With bad grace, he set the Glock down and managed to work the shirt off over his head, biting back a curse when the movement pulled at the wound.
Up close, it was worse than I’d let myself think.
The bullet had carved through muscle and tissue, leaving an ugly track that really needed stitches and antibiotics and sterile everything. Instead, he had me, a half-empty bottle of antiseptic, and whatever gods watched over idiots.
“This is going to hurt,” I warned, soaking a pad.
“I have had worse,” he said.
I believed him. Every pale scar and jagged line on his back and chest told its own story. Blades. Bullets. Fists. A lifetime of people trying to end him and failing.
As I cleaned around the wound, a memory flashed—him in that alley, standing over a body with blood on his hands. For weeks, that had been proof in my mind.
Proof that he was the villain.
Now, sitting in this rotten little cabin, seeing how he’d automatically put himself between me and every window, stacked weapons within easy reach, and stayed awake while I dozed in tiny snatches… the scene in the alley shifted.
Context changed everything.
“You saved my life that day,” I said quietly. “In the alley. I thought you were the monster in the story. Turns out you were the one cleaning up someone else’s mess.”
His shoulders went rigid under my hands.
“Heroes do not kill people, kotyonok,” he said.
“Heroes kill people all the time,” I said, starting to wrap fresh gauze around his shoulder. “They just do it so other people don’t die instead.”
He turned his head to look at me, and for a moment I saw something raw flicker in his eyes. A question he didn’t know how to ask.
“What happens after?” I asked, fastening the bandage. “After you hit Maksim. After you burn down whoever else is stupid enough to come for us. What happens to us?”
To our baby. To whatever this was turning into.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The honesty scared me more than any threat.
I slipped around to sit in front of him, studying the pallor under his skin, the way he sat just slightly guarded on one side.
“Then you’d better start thinking about it,” I said softly. “Because I need to know what I’m fighting for here.”
Besides not dying. Besides giving this kid a chance at something better than growing up on the run.
He was quiet long enough that I started to wonder if he’d shut down entirely. When he finally spoke, his voice was rough, like he had to drag the words out through old scar tissue.
“I have never wanted a future,” he said. “Not really. Men like me do not get them. We get few years of power and then a bullet or a cell.”
He lifted his gaze to mine.
“Then you happened,” he said simply. “And suddenly… forever sounded nice.”
The word did something to my chest. Forever. It felt like a promise and a dare.
“You protect me with bullets,” I said, reaching out to touch the side of his face that wasn’t bruised or bloodied. “Let me protect you with truth.”
Something in his expression cracked. Like armor finally giving way.
“What truth?” he asked.
“That you don’t have to carry all of this alone anymore,” I said. “Whatever made you into this beautiful, dangerous man”—his mouth twitched at the adjective—“you can trust me with it. I’m done running from you.”
Let me in. Let me see you, not just the weapon you’ve become.
He leaned into my palm, closing his eyes for a heartbeat like my touch was the first gentle thing he’d let himself feel in a long time.
When he opened them again, they were raw. Unguarded in a way that made my throat hurt.
“My father,” he said. “He taught me that caring makes you weak. That love is liability men like us cannot afford.”
Men like us.
Born into violence. Fed on fear.
“He used to beat emotion out of me,” Konstantin went on, jaw flexing. “Said feelings were good way to get killed. So I buried everything. Buried it so deep I forgot it was there.”
“And now?” I asked softly.
“Now I am terrified,” he said.
The word landed between us like another confession.
“Because loving you—” his voice hitched briefly, like the syllables hurt “—makes me vulnerable in ways I do not know how to guard.”
Loving.
Not fucking. Not tolerating. Not accidentally catching feelings and hoping they’d go away.
Loving me.
My chest squeezed so tight it hurt. I’d waited, in some secret, shameful part of myself, to hear those words. I’d told myself I didn’t need them. That I couldn’t afford to want them.
I’d been lying.
“I keep trying to stop,” I whispered. “To hate you cleanly. To go back to who I was before the lot, before your car, before your bed.”
He held my gaze like the whole cabin might fall away if he blinked.
“But I can’t,” I said. “I don’t want to anymore.”
The admission burned and soothed at the same time.
“I love you, Konstantin,” I said. Saying his name with it felt like setting something in stone. “Through all of it. Through the fear and the blood and every bad decision. I tried not to, and I still ended up here.”
His eyes closed for a second, like the words hit as hard as any bullet. When he opened them again, they were bright and fierce.
“You should be afraid,” he murmured. “Of this. Of me.”
“I am,” I said. “And I still love you.”
Silence stretched between us, thick and electric.
“Konstantin.” His name tasted different now. Heavier. “Are you going to raise this child in madness? Keep us locked in some gilded cage for the rest of our lives?”
Are you going to be a father or a warden?
His hands slid to my hips and tugged me closer until I stood between his knees.
“If you leave,” he said, looking up at me with that terrifying certainty he used for threats, “I follow.”
He didn’t soften it. Didn’t dress it up as romance.
“That is my truth,” he said. “I follow you to ends of earth.”
Mad.
We were both completely mad.
The coffee from the cabin’s ancient tin tasted like something dug out of a bunker, but it was hot and caffeinated. We sat at the shaky little table—him shirtless and bandaged, me swallowed in one of his sweaters that smelled like cologne and gun oil.
In another world, it might have looked domestic.
First aid and weapons checks over bad coffee.
“What if we ran?” I asked suddenly.
The thought had been chewing at me since we left the city. It slipped out before I could decide if it was sentimental or stupid.
“Just… disappeared,” I said. “New names, new haircuts, some nowhere town where no one knows what the Bratva is. Where you’re just some ex-soldier with anger issues and I’m… a girl who makes bad coffee.”
Could we? Could we really walk away?
He didn’t dismiss it out of hand. He looked at me, then at the window, then back at me.
“Where would we go?” he asked. “What kind of life could I give you if we spend all of it looking over our shoulders?”
“The kind where our kid doesn’t grow up dodging bullets,” I said. “Where love doesn’t come with a casualty list.”
I reached across the table, covering his hand with mine.
“I don’t need you to give me a life,” I added. “I need you to share one with me.”
Something softened in his eyes at that. Like I’d said the right password to a door inside him.
He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it again, as if the words weren’t ready yet.
“I’m going to get water,” I said instead, pushing back from the table. The cabin felt too small all of a sudden. Too full of air I’d already breathed.
“There is well out back,” he said, frowning. “You saw when we came in.”
I nodded. “I need to move. Just for a minute.”
He didn’t like it. I saw it in the way his brows pulled together, the way his good hand twitched toward the gun on the table.
“I go with you,” he said after a second. “You do not go past edge of clearing. You understand?”
Relief washed through me, sharp and quick. “Okay.”
Outside, the air bit at my cheeks, scented with pine and cold earth. The sky had that flat, washed-out look that said snow again sooner than later.
The well sat just behind the cabin, old stone ringed in frost. I hauled the metal bucket up, the rope creaking in protest. The simple, repetitive motion helped quiet the riot in my head.
I felt him at my back more than I heard him—warm presence in the doorway of the cabin, gun in hand, eyes scanning the tree line while I filled the bucket.
On the way back, halfway between the well and the porch, it hit me.
The prickle along the back of my neck. The subtle tightening in my gut. The feeling of being watched had nothing to do with his paranoia and everything to do with my own.
I stopped. Turned slowly, scanning the trees.
Nothing obvious. Just trunks and shadow and the whisper of wind.
“You feel it?” his voice came from behind me, low and sharp.
“Yeah,” I said. “Something… feels off.”
Every muscle in his body went alert. He moved off the porch, closing the distance in a few long strides until he was beside me.
Together, we walked toward the edge of the clearing where the trees started, the crunch of snow under our boots too loud in the quiet.
That’s when I saw it.
Nailed to the largest pine at the boundary line was a round piece of wood. Old, dark, rough. About the size of a dinner plate. Carved into it were symbols I didn’t recognize, but someone had drawn over them recently in red.
The lines were still wet enough to glisten.
I shivered.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Bratva sigil,” Konstantin said.
His voice was calm.
Too calm.
“It marks territory,” he added. “Or sends message.”
“What kind of message?” I asked, even though my stomach already knew.
We know where you are.
“‘Run if you want,’” he said. “Rough translation.”
“How long do we have?” I asked.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, fingers already moving, eyes flicking from the sigil to the far tree line to whatever information Alexei was feeding him.
“Not long enough,” he said.
It never was.
That was the story of us—stolen breaths between bullets.