Chapter 5 – Lev
I felt her slip away from me before I was fully awake—the absence of her warmth against my chest like a physical wound. She moved through my bedroom like a ghost, gathering her things with the kind of careful silence that spoke of regret louder than any words could have.
The buzz of her phone cut through the morning air like a blade, and I watched from behind half-closed lids as she wrapped my sheet around herself and tiptoed toward the door.
Even in retreat, she was beautiful—all tousled hair and kiss-swollen lips, looking like she’d been thoroughly claimed by a man who had no right to touch her.
But she had been a virgin. The thought circled in my mind like a vulture, picking at details I should have noticed, should have handled differently.
The way she’d tensed when I first touched her.
The sharp intake of breath when I pushed inside her.
The tears that had leaked from the corners of her eyes before pleasure replaced whatever pain I’d caused.
I should have asked. Should have taken more time, been gentler, made it everything her first time deserved to be, instead of the desperate, consuming thing it had become. But she hadn’t told me, and now the knowledge sat in my chest like a weight I couldn’t shift.
Her voice drifted in from the hallway—careful, controlled, lying through her teeth to whoever was on the other end of that call. Maxim, most likely. The brother who would put a bullet in my skull if he knew what I’d done to his precious sister.
My phone rang as I was pulling on jeans, the shrill sound cutting through my thoughts like a knife. I grabbed it without looking at the screen, expecting Casandra or Drew with some crisis that couldn’t wait until I dragged myself into the office.
“What?” My voice came out rougher than intended, gravelly with sleep and the aftermath of everything that had happened in this bed.
“Hello, brother.”
The world stopped. Literally stopped, like someone had reached into my chest and squeezed my heart until it forgot how to beat.
That voice—slightly deeper than mine, carrying traces of an accent I’d never learned—was impossible.
A ghost speaking from beyond a grave I’d visited for twenty-seven years.
“Trev?” The name felt foreign on my tongue, like a word from a language I’d forgotten how to speak.
Silence stretched between us, heavy with decades of separation.
Then: “I know you thought we died in the fire.” His voice cracked slightly.
“Dad told Mom and me that you both survived, made us swear never to contact you. Said it was the only way to keep us all safe. But you…you didn’t know, did you? ”
My mind reeled. “He told you we were alive?”
“Twenty-seven years, Lev. Twenty-seven years of knowing you and Dad were out there somewhere, forbidden from reaching out. And now—” He broke off, struggling for composure.
“Now he’s dead.” His voice broke. “One of my contacts told me. After everything—keeping us apart, making Mom live in hiding, forcing us to stay silent while you thought we were gone—he’s just…
gone. And we never got to be a family again. ”
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t process the reality that my twin brother had known I was alive all this time while I’d spent nearly three decades believing I’d failed to save him. That our father had let me carry that guilt, that grief, for reasons I still didn’t understand.
“Lev? Are you there?”
I took in a deep breath, careful not to show the gut-wrenching anxiety I felt. “Things are dangerous. There’s a reason Dad kept us separated all this time.”
“Fuck danger. He’s dead. Whatever threat he was protecting us from killed him anyway. Mom and I are flying in for the funeral. We land this afternoon.”
I ended the call.
My hands were shaking as I set the phone on the nightstand, the tremor traveling up my arms and settling somewhere deep in my chest where it felt like my ribcage was coming apart. Trev was alive. Had been alive this whole time while I’d carried the weight of his death like a stone in my heart.
She didn’t know I was there, standing just outside the door, listening to her talk to Maxim. His name had barely left her lips before I knew what the call was about. Maxim never reached out unless something was burning. And lately, everything was.
The city hadn’t stopped bleeding since my father hit the ground.
His death tore through the streets like shrapnel—every deal, every alliance, every man who once called him boss now looking for a way to crawl higher over the bodies.
The balance he’d built was gone, and the vultures were circling.
Wars didn’t just brew in our world—they boiled fast.
When I finally stepped into the doorway, she turned, eyes still glassy from the call. The phone was trembling in her hand, like she was holding a live wire. I didn’t need to ask, but I did anyway. “Maxim?”
She nodded. Didn’t say a word.
“He wants you gone,” I said. It wasn’t a guess. Maxim always moved fast when the streets turned ugly, clearing out the people he thought could get caught in the crossfire. If he’d called her, it meant things were already worse than anyone was admitting.
“He thinks I’m in danger,” she said quietly, clutching the sheet tighter around herself. “Because of your father.”
I felt something twist in my chest at the mention of him—grief, maybe, or rage. Hard to tell the difference these days. I shut it down before it could show. “You probably are.”
The words came out colder than I meant them to, and I saw the flash of anger in her eyes. I couldn’t blame her. She wanted more—reassurance, something human—but I didn’t have it in me to give. Not when I couldn’t even promise myself I’d make it out of this alive.
When she asked if that was all I had to say, I stepped closer, trying to keep my voice steady. “ You want me to what? Fight for you? Beg you to stay? Tell you that last night changed everything?”
She didn’t answer. I could see the war happening behind her eyes—wanting to fight me, wanting to stay. I almost reached for her. Almost.
But I’d learned a long time ago that almost could get you killed.
But then she opened her mouth and destroyed what was left of my world.
“Last night was a mistake,”
The words hit me like a physical blow, each syllable driving deeper into wounds that were already hemorrhaging.
I went completely still, every muscle in my body locking down as something dark and twisted unfurled in my chest. Not just hurt—though that was there, sharp and vicious and completely unexpected.
But rage. Pure, incandescent fury that she could reduce what we’d shared to a mistake.
A mistake. Like it had meant nothing. Like I had meant nothing.
I wanted to grab her, to pin her against the wall and make her take it back. Wanted to remind her of every sound she’d made, every way she’d clung to me, every whispered plea for more. Wanted to show her exactly what a mistake felt like compared to what we’d actually done.
Instead, I locked it all down. Buried the rage and the hurt and the devastating knowledge that my family had been alive while I’d been dying slowly from their loss. Buried it all under ice and control and the kind of emptiness that had kept me functional for most of my adult life.
“Get dressed.” My voice came out flat, emotionless, carrying none of the storm that was tearing me apart from the inside. “I’ll drive you home.”
She flinched like I’d slapped her, and some small, vicious part of me was glad. If she wanted to call it a mistake, if she wanted to pretend that what happened between us was nothing, then I’d give her nothing. No arguments, no pleas, no desperate attempts to change her mind.
Just the cold, clinical distance she was clearly looking for.
I didn’t watch her get dressed, didn’t trust myself not to do something that would shatter the fragile control I was barely maintaining.
Instead, I stared out the window at a city that looked gray and hostile in the morning light, counting seconds until I could get her out of my space and deal with the wreckage of everything else.
The drive to her mansion passed in suffocating silence.
Every few blocks, I could feel her looking at me, could sense her wanting to say something, but I kept my eyes on the road and my jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth.
What was there to say? She’d made her position clear.
Last night was a mistake. I was a mistake.
When I pulled into her driveway, I kept the engine running. Message delivered without words: this wasn’t a conversation, it was a drop-off.
She reached for the door handle, then stopped. “Lev—”
“You should have told me you were a virgin.”
The words came out harsher than I’d intended, edged with all the frustration and self-loathing I was trying to keep buried. She turned to look at me, and I saw something vulnerable flash across her features before she asked, “Would it have changed anything?”
I met her eyes for the first time since she’d called us a mistake, and for a moment I let her see past the walls.
Let her see the man who would have worshipped every inch of her skin if he’d known what she was giving him.
Who would have made it perfect instead of desperate.
Who would have treated her first time like the sacred thing it was instead of using her body to try to forget his own pain.
“No,” I said quietly, because the truth was that nothing would have changed. I still would have taken what she offered. Still would have claimed her with the same consuming hunger. Still would have fallen deeper into something I had no right to feel.
“It wouldn’t have.”