Chapter 4 – Anya
The first thing that pierced through the haze of sleep was the buzz of my phone—sharp, insistent, and completely unwelcome.
I blinked against the unfamiliar shadows dancing across an unfamiliar ceiling, my body registering warmth and weight and the lingering scent of something distinctly masculine before my mind caught up to where I was.
Lev’s bedroom. Lev’s bed. Lev’s arm draped across my waist like he owned me.
The phone buzzed again, and reality crashed over me like ice water.
I slipped out from under his arm, careful not to wake him, and wrapped the sheet around myself like armor.
The silk felt foreign against skin that still tingled from his touch, still bore the invisible marks of everything we’d done in the dark.
My dress lay crumpled on the floor beside his discarded shirt, evidence of the moment I’d let my carefully constructed walls crumble. I grabbed my phone from where it had fallen, the screen showing three missed calls and two text messages, all from the same name that made my stomach drop.
Maxim.
I tiptoed out of the bedroom on unsteady legs, closing the door behind me with the kind of care reserved for defusing bombs. The hallway stretched before me like a gauntlet, all dark corners and the ghost of last night’s desperation hanging in the air.
The phone rang again before I could reach the living room, and I answered it with hands that shook more than I cared to admit.
“Where the hell have you been?” Maxim’s voice cut through the silence like a blade, carrying that particular edge that meant he’d moved past worried straight into furious. “I’ve been calling for hours.”
“I was sleeping.” The lie tasted bitter on my tongue, but the truth would have been so much worse. “My phone was on silent.”
“Bullshit.” He knew me too well, could read the tells in my voice even across an ocean. “Anya, I need you to listen to me very carefully. Pack a bag. Eleanor’s assistant will pick you up in two hours. You’re flying to Milan tonight.”
“What? No.” The word exploded out of me before I could stop it. “Maxim, I can’t just drop everything and—”
“Things are serious.”
His voice was flat, but there was something else beneath it this time—weariness, maybe, or the weight of too many nights without sleep.
“Things have been…unstable since Mike’s death. Everyone’s scrambling for territory, debts are being called in, and old enemies are starting to circle. It’s not safe for you right now, Anya.”
The phone felt heavy in my hand. I’d already known about Mike—everyone did—but hearing Maxim talk about the aftermath, quiet and controlled, made the chaos outside feel closer. Realer. Wars were brewing, and if he was calling me, it meant they were already spilling over.
While I was in Mike’s son’s bed, giving him the one thing I’d sworn no Bratva man would ever touch.
“I have the show,” I whispered, my voice barely audible over the sound of my own heartbeat. “The investors, the venue, everything’s been arranged. I can’t just—”
“Postpone it.”
“I can’t postpone it!” The words came out sharper than I’d intended, born from panic and guilt and the desperate need to maintain some control over a life that was spinning away from me. “Do you have any idea how much money is riding on this? How many people are depending on me?”
I added, “I won’t run.” The words surprised me with their strength, their finality. “I’m not twelve years old anymore, Maxim. I won’t spend my life hiding from shadows.”
“Then you’ll spend it dead.” The line went quiet for a moment, and I could practically hear him pacing, could imagine his jaw set with that stubborn determination that had kept us both alive this long. “Two hours, Anya. Don’t make me come home and drag you to the airport myself.”
The call ended with a click that felt like a door slamming shut. I stood in Lev’s living room, wrapped in his sheets and drowning in the implications of everything that had changed in under twenty-four hours.
Mike was dead. Lev was alone. And I was standing in the aftermath of the biggest mistake of my life, trying to figure out how to pretend it had never happened.
The bedroom door opened behind me, and I turned to find Lev leaning against the doorframe. He’d pulled on a pair of black jeans but nothing else, and the sight of him—all lean muscle and dangerous grace and those gray eyes that missed nothing—made my breath catch in my throat.
“Maxim?” he asked, nodding toward my phone.
I nodded, not trusting my voice to remain steady.
“He wants you gone.” It wasn’t a question. Lev had always been good at reading between the lines, at understanding the currents that ran beneath surface conversations.
“He thinks I’m in danger.” I pulled the sheet tighter around myself, suddenly aware of how exposed I was in more ways than one. “Because of your father.”
Something flickered across his face at the mention of Mike—grief, maybe, or rage, or some combination of emotions too complex to name. But it was gone so quickly I might have imagined it, replaced by the kind of careful neutrality he wore like armor.
“You probably are.”
The casual way he said it, like he was commenting on the weather, made anger flare in my chest. “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”
He straightened, moving into the room with that predatory grace that had always made my pulse race. “What do you want me to say, Anya? That you should stay? That I can protect you from the kind of people who put bullets in men like my father?”
“I want you to—” I stopped, the words dying on my tongue because I didn’t know what I wanted from him. Didn’t know what I had the right to want after one night that was supposed to mean nothing.
“You want me to what?” He stepped closer, close enough that I could smell his skin, could see the way his jaw was set with tension. “Fight for you? Beg you to stay? Tell you that last night changed everything?”
The words hit like physical blows because they were everything I wanted to hear and everything I knew I couldn’t have. I’d spent five years telling myself that Lev Antonov was exactly the kind of man I needed to avoid—dangerous, violent, tied to a world that had already taken too much from me.
But last night, in his arms, I’d forgotten every reason why we were impossible. Had let myself believe, for a few stolen hours, that maybe love could be stronger than the violence that surrounded us.
“Last night was a mistake.” The words tasted like ash, but I forced them out anyway because they were the only truth that made sense in the harsh light of morning. “We both know that.”
He went completely still, and for a moment I saw something raw and wounded flash across his features before the mask slammed back into place. When he spoke, his voice was carefully empty.
“Get dressed.”
That was it. No argument, no fight, no desperate declaration that would give me an excuse to throw caution to the wind and damn the consequences. Just cold acceptance that cut deeper than any angry words could have.
I turned away from him and gathered my clothes, my hands shaking as I struggled with the zipper of my dress.
Every movement felt heavy, weighted with the knowledge that I was getting dressed to leave, to walk away from something that could have been extraordinary if we’d been different people living different lives.
He didn’t watch me dress, didn’t try to touch me or change my mind. Just stood by the window like a statue, staring out at a city that looked gray and unwelcoming in the morning light.
When I was ready, he walked me to the door in silence. The hallway felt different now—not charged with possibility but hollow with endings. My heels clicked against the marble floor like a countdown, each step taking me further away from the man who had shown me what it meant to burn.
We stopped at the elevator, and I found myself hoping he would say something, anything, to make this moment feel less like a funeral for something that had barely been born.
Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his car keys.
“I’ll drive you home.”
The ride to my mansion passed in suffocating silence.
I kept my eyes on the passing scenery, watching Chicago blur past the windows like a life I was leaving behind.
Every few blocks, I could feel Lev’s gaze on me, heavy and unreadable, but when I glanced his way, he was always looking straight ahead.
My house came into view—all clean lines and pristine landscaping, a monument to the safe, sanitized life I’d built away from the chaos of my brother’s world. It had always felt like a sanctuary before. Now it looked like a prison.
Lev pulled into the circular driveway and put the car in park, but he didn’t turn off the engine. The message was clear: this was a drop-off, not a goodbye that required conversation.
I reached for the door handle, then stopped. There were things that needed to be said, apologies that needed to be made, explanations that would probably fall on deaf ears but deserved to be offered anyway.
“Lev—”
“You should have told me you were a virgin.”
The words hit me like a slap, not because they were cruel but because they were said with such clinical detachment. Like I was a problem he’d solved, a box he could check and file away.
I turned to look at him, searching his face for any sign of the man who had whispered my name like a prayer in the dark. But all I found was the same cold control he’d worn like armor for as long as I’d known him.
“Would it have changed anything?” I asked.
He finally looked at me then, and for just a moment I saw something fracture behind his eyes—regret, maybe, or the ghost of what we’d shared before morning ruined everything.
“No,” he said quietly. “It wouldn’t have.”
I nodded and got out of the car, closing the door behind me with the kind of careful control that kept me from slamming it hard enough to shatter the windows.
I didn’t look back as I walked to my front door, didn’t watch him drive away, but I heard the engine fade into the distance like the end of a song I’d never hear again.
Inside my house, surrounded by the familiar comfort of my own things, I finally let myself feel the full weight of what had happened. Not just the sex—though that had been a revelation I was nowhere near ready to unpack—but everything that came after.
The way he’d held me like I was something precious, then let me go like I was nothing at all.
The way I’d felt, for a few hours, like I belonged somewhere other than the careful distance I’d maintained from his world.
The way I’d lied to his face about it being a mistake when the truth was that it felt like the first real thing I’d done in years.
I sank onto my couch and buried my face in my hands, trying to sort through the tangle of emotions that threatened to drown me. Guilt over betraying everything I’d sworn about Bratva men. Fear about what Maxim would do if he ever found out. Anger at Lev for making it so easy to walk away.
And underneath it all, a grief so sharp it took my breath away. Not just for what we’d lost, but for what we’d never had a chance to find.
My phone buzzed with a text from Maxim: Car arrives in thirty minutes. Don’t make me worry about you more than I already do.
I stared at the message until the letters blurred together, then deleted it without responding. I wasn’t getting on that plane. Wasn’t running from shadows that had already taken too much from me.
But I also wasn’t naive enough to think that staying would change anything between Lev and me. He’d made his position clear with that empty politeness, that casual dismissal of something that had rearranged the architecture of my heart.
I was alone in this. Just like I’d been alone when my parents died, when I’d sworn off love to keep myself safe, when I’d built a life that looked perfect from the outside but felt hollow at the core.
The only difference was that now I knew exactly what I was missing. Now I knew what it felt like to burn.
And somehow, that made the cold so much worse.