15. Renat
RENAT
I pace the narrow space between the bed and the window in my loft, feeling like my boots are wearing grooves in the floor.
Each footstep makes a rhythm that matches the restless energy clawing at my insides.
The walls close in around me, and I can't shake the image of Mira's glare, the way she looks at me like I'm diseased now.
I didn't ask to be born to this life. Even had my parents lived, I'd still have been brought into the fold, just much later in my life.
This was my destiny, my fate, not something I could control—just like meeting her.
Just like the way she crossed my path and now I have to have her.
She doesn't know the wall of fire I'm holding back just to try to save her and this God-forsaken ranch, and if I told her, she'd think I was exaggerating things to manipulate her emotions.
I turn at the window and start another lap. My reflection catches in the glass—dark eyes, the stubble I haven't bothered to shave, the tattoos that mark me as Vetrov property. What woman in her right mind would choose this? Would choose me?
But Mira isn't most women. She bargained with me when she should've run. Stood her ground when I towered over her. Worked beside me in the stables without flinching from the violence written across my skin.
Still, the idea of her choosing another man makes something dark and possessive rise in my throat. Something that has no place in a business arrangement. Something that could get us both killed if Vadim suspects I've gone soft.
I clench my fists and force myself to stop pacing. This is madness. I'm an enforcer, not some lovesick boy chasing after a woman who's too good for him. I have a job to do here. Orders to follow. A family to serve.
But the knot behind my ribs tightens anyway.
Orange light flickers across the wall, and I stop mid-thought. The warm glow seems wrong for this time of night—too bright, too wild. I cross to the window and my blood turns to ice as I see the south barn engulfed in flames.
Fire licks up the sides of the wooden structure, turning the night into hell.
Smoke billows black against the stars, and the heat reaches me even through the glass.
This isn't faulty wiring or a knocked-over lantern.
After the way those sick fucks tried to beat me senseless and the altercation I saw between them and Vadim, I know this is either the work of the Karpins or Vadim is heating things up.
My phone is in my hand before I think. Vadim answers on the second ring, his voice thick with sleep.
"What the fuck did you do?" I snarl into the receiver.
"Renat? What are you talking about?"
"The barn is on fire. Don't play games with me." I'm moving, angry and charging toward the door already. I can't save the barn, but we may be able to loose a few of Mira's horses. Thankfully, Rusalka isn't in that barn.
"I didn't order any fire." His voice carries confusion, not guilt. "This isn't from us."
The Karpins. Those bastards couldn't wait for orders or negotiations. They came to finish what we started, to make sure there's nothing left worth fighting over.
"Renat?" Vadim's voice crackles through the phone. "What's happening?"
Yuri's scream cuts through the night air with raw desperation. "Mira! Mira, where are you?"
My blood turns to ice water. I drop the phone and bolt down the stairs, taking them three at a time. The steps groan under my boots as I race toward the horror unfolding outside.
The heat hits me as soon as I burst through the door, waves of burning air that steal the oxygen from my lungs. The flames tower above the barn roof, reaching toward the sky with hungry fingers. Sparks rain down around me, hissing when they hit the damp earth.
Yuri stands in front of the inferno, his face twisted in anguish. Soot streaks his cheeks, and his hands shake, fisted in his hair, as he stares at the burning building. When he sees me, his eyes are wild with panic.
"I don’t know where she is!" he shouts over the roar of flames. "She's not in her room."
His panic becomes my own, punching me in the gut and triggering my fight or flight. Mira is in there, in that furnace? Because she couldn't leave the horses to burn… Of course she couldn't. She'd rather die than abandon them.
I don't even hesitate for a second. The flames roar around the main entrance, but I lower my head and charge through the wall of fire. The heat sears my exposed skin, singeing the hair on my arms. The thick smoke fills my lungs immediately, tasting of burned wood and some sort of chemicals.
Inside, the world has become a maze of orange light and black smoke. I can barely see two feet ahead, but I hear her voice—weak, coughing, somewhere deeper in the building.
"Mira!"
"Here!" She sounds close to collapse. "Renat!
I'm here." Her voice is weak and hoarse, and I move instinctively toward the sound, following her voice through the nightmare, dodging falling debris and walls of flame.
The smoke burns my eyes, makes them water until I'm nearly blind.
But I keep moving, keep calling her name, because the alternative is unthinkable.
I look frantically but see nothing. The stall doors are closed, but Anton and Boris are at the side door guiding a few colts out, faces covered with the collars of their T-shirts. The smoke is heavier near the back of the barn but the flames are fewer, and I hear the whimper again.
"Help me! I'm scared!" she chokes out, and the coughing fit feels like a knife in my chest. I race that direction, and still seeing nothing, I start unlocking stall doors.
I find Mira in the last stall, curled into a ball with her shirt pulled up over her face. " Fuck," I grunt, scooping her up without another word. She weighs nothing in my arms, all muscle and bone and stubborn determination. "Hold on to me."
Stepping out to meet Boris, who's turned a few more horses out, I guide the panicked horses toward the main entrance with my free hand, slapping their flanks to get them moving.
The flames have grown higher, but there's still a gap we can push through if we move fast. The heat is unbearable now, turning the air itself into fire.
The horses bolt past us into the night air, their hooves thundering against the earth as they flee the burning building. I carry Mira through the gap just as a section of the roof collapses behind us, sending up a shower of sparks and burning timber.
The cool night air welcomes us like salvation. I stumble away from the barn, my lungs screaming for clean oxygen. Mira coughs against my chest, her body shaking from smoke inhalation and shock.
Her father meets us halfway to the house, tears streaming down his weathered cheeks. "Is she…?"
"She's alive," I manage, my voice hoarse from smoke.
Yuri leads me, and I don't stop until I reach her bedroom, where I lay her carefully on the bed and check her over for serious burns. Her hair is singed, and there are angry red marks across her palms. She smells of smoke, and her breathing comes too fast, too shallow. But she's alive. She's here.
"Get wet rags," I bark at Yuri. "And ice for her hands."
There isn't much I can do personally, so I bark at Anton, who has since followed us into the house, and order a doctor.
Then I kneel by the bed, pressing her knuckles to my forehead, probably a lot more tightly than I should be, but I pray.
To the god of my mother, to the universe, to any thing out there that may be listening, to save her.
To not let the smoke she inhaled take her.
Because I don't want to see the bloodshed that will follow if she dies tonight.
The family physician arrives within twenty minutes, a thin man with steady hands and no questions. I pace the hallway while he works, my rage building with every passing second. The Karpins crossed a line tonight. They didn't just attack property—they tried to kill her.
They tried to kill Mira.
I'm going to destroy them for this. Every last one of them.
When the doctor emerges, he nods at me with his professional demeanor, but I can't respond with anything other than my pent-up rage. "She'll be fine. Some minor burns on her palms, smoke inhalation, but nothing serious. Her lungs are clear, but she needs rest and plenty of fluids."
I want to go back in, to sit beside her bed and watch her breathe. But Yuri appears in the doorway, and I can see he needs to talk.
"Thank you," I tell the man gruffly, my own throat still choked with the soot that now stains the sky. He gives a curt nod and retreats out the back, past the flashing lights of emergency vehicles that arrived at some point in my chaos. I follow his movements, and my eyes catch sight of my cousins,
Rolan and Maksim. They're barking orders at the first responders, trying to save one of our assets. I'm sure I'll hear about this from Vadim later.
After the doctor is out of sight, Yuri and I walk to the front porch in mutual understanding. The barn still burns, though the flames have died down to angry embers. The smell of smoke and ash fills the night air.
The old man's eyes are red-rimmed from smoke and fear, but his voice is steady when he speaks. "If you're playing games with my little girl's heart," he says, meeting my eyes directly, "you'll regret it."
I turn to face him fully. The threat should amuse me—this aging rancher trying to intimidate a Vetrov enforcer. Instead, I find it touching. He's protecting what he loves, the same way Mira protected him.
"That sounds personal," I say.
Yuri shakes his head, a small smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
"It's not a threat from me." He looks toward the house, where Mira is sleeping off the smoke.
"I just know my daughter…" His jaw sets and his eyes become stone-cold serious.
"If you cross her, you'll regret ever looking at her. She's that strong of a woman."
The old man's words settle into my chest. He's right. Mira isn't someone who needs protecting. She's someone who protects herself. And anyone foolish enough to underestimate her will learn that lesson the hard way.
The way I learned it.
"The Karpins did this," I tell him.
His jaw tightens, and for a moment I see where Mira gets her steel. "What happens now?"
I look at the smoldering remains of the barn and the flashing lights around it, then back at the house where she's recovering. The rage in my chest has crystallized into something cold and final. Something that will make the Karpins wish they'd never heard the name Petrov.
"Now they pay."