Razvan #2
“I said send her away.” I don’t look up. Not now. Not today. Not when I have blood on my hands and Vasik’s teeth marks on my patience. “I don’t care what she says. Send. Her. Away.”
“Sir.” The guard’s voice does something. A small fracture in it. “She gave her name, sir. She said to tell you specifically.” A pause. “It’s Lena Sokolova.”
Everything stops.
The room. The air. The blood moving through my body.
It’s as if the earth has suddenly ceased its rotation.
What.
I look up slowly. The guard is trembling. Mike has gone into a lethal, carved-stone stillness beside me. Dmitri has actually put his phone down. The silence is so heavy it’s deafening.
“Say that again,” I say. My voice is a low, dangerous rasp.
“Lena Sokolova, sir. She’s at the front gate. She’s asking for you by name.”
Lena. Five years of chasing a shadow. Five years of dead ends, empty graves, and hollow reports. Five years of waking up to cold sheets and the echoing silence of the drive she stole from me. And now she’s at my gate? Using her real name like she’s coming home from the market?
What the fuck is happening?
What the fuck.
I put the bloodied cloth down. My heart is thundering against my ribs.
“Put her in the east sitting room,” I say. “Don’t touch her. Don’t speak to her beyond what’s necessary. Leave her there.”
“Sir, should I—”
“Leave her there. I’ll come when I’m ready.”
I am not a man who runs. Not for business, and certainly not for a woman who gutted my pride and vanished into the night.
I take twenty minutes. It’s the hardest twenty minutes of my life.
I change my shirt because the blood of a lesser man shouldn’t be near her.
I wash my hands until the skin is raw. I pour a drink, staring at the amber liquid, then set it down untouched.
I stand at the window and stare at the grounds, waiting for the “Wrath” to return, waiting for the cold machine to take over.
Get it together. I press my knuckles against the window frame until the glass groans. She’s a loose end. She has the drive. That’s all this is. That’s all she is.
But the lie tastes like ash.
I walk through the door anyway.
The east sitting room is at the end of the main corridor and I open the door. She’s standing with her back to me, looking at the window, and for one second I see her before she knows I’m there.
Five years have been cruel. She’s lean—too lean.
There’s a hollowed-out quality to her that speaks of a life lived on the edge of exhaustion.
Her hair is longer, darker at the ends, pulled back with a desperate carelessness.
She’s wearing a jacket with a shredded sleeve, her right hand wrapped in a makeshift, blood-stained bandage.
She’s holding herself with a rigid, brittle uprightness, like a glass statue one second away from shattering.
She turns when she hears the door.
And my entire world collapses.
That’s the only way to describe it. Everything I’ve built, the power, the fear, the walls, it all just falls in on itself. Her face comes around and I feel a physical blow to my solar plexus. She’s exhausted, her eyes rimmed with red, dark circles like bruises beneath them.
She’s been crying. Recently.
She is the most beautiful thing I have seen in five years and I hate myself for it with a ferocity that surprises even me.
I hate that my pulse is singing her name.
I hate that I want to burn the world down just because she looks tired.
I want to kill whoever made her cry, and then I remember that I’m the one she’s been running from.
Her eyes go wide.
She looks at me the way a person looks at a high-speed train just before the impact, paralyzed, fully aware, and utterly helpless to stop it.
Her gaze tracks across my face, searching for a ghost of the man she knew, then flickers down to my hands, then back up.
There is something in those eyes, a raw, jagged desperation, that I force myself not to name.
If I name it, I might have to feel it, and I am not ready to feel anything but the cold, hard weight of my own power.
Fuck.
I stay pinned to the doorframe. Every fiber of my being is screaming at me to bridge the distance, to put my hands on her just to prove she isn’t a hallucination made of amber light and shadow.
I lean against the wood and let a smirk pull at my mouth. It’s a shield. It’s the only part of my armor that hasn’t cracked yet.
“Five years,” I say, my voice sounding like gravel. “And you walk back through my gate.” I let my eyes travel over her slowly, like a predator cataloging wounds. “You’ve got guts, zayka. Either that or you’re very eager for me to finish what I started.”
She wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist, using the hand wrapped in that filthy, blood-soaked bandage. The gesture is so small, so devoid of the calculated elegance she used to carry, that it hits me harder than any of the punches I threw at Vasik. It’s real. She’s real. And she’s breaking.
“I need your help,” she says.
Her voice is wrecked. Actually wrecked, the voice of someone who has been running on empty for hours and has nothing left to filter themselves with.
“My son.” Her throat moves. Her eyes fill up again and she doesn’t look away, doesn’t try to blink it back, just stands there with all of it visible on her face. “Someone took my son. I need your help.”
I go completely still.
Her son.