20. Twenty #3
I wanted to say something. Apologize. Scream.
Laugh, maybe. But the kitchen had gone quiet, nothing but the thick copper smell of blood hanging in the air.
I dragged the sleeve of my nightgown over the spatters on my face, only managing to smear it wider in clownish arcs across my mouth and jaw. I must have looked rabid.
Arrow’s eyes flickered up at me—nothing there but distance. He didn’t offer anything. Instead, he knelt, moved Natalya’s hair from the wound, and closed her eyes.
A small, ancient gesture.
“She said you were good.” His eyes were still on Natalya. “She didn’t lie . . . much.”
I stared at the body, fighting the urge to kneel next to her, emptying the soft wailing noise in my head onto her face. Instead, I stepped back, hand fisting in my hair, pulling until it hurt.
“She was going to kill me,” I said, still unable to understand my role in the death, or its meaning. “She would have, if you hadn’t—”
He snorted, a bitter, almost fond sound.
“Everyone in this family was always going to try,” he said. Standing, he wiped his hands on one of the kitchen towels, then tossed it into the sink. “Natalya just wanted to see if you’d let her.”
Wary, I shook my head, waiting for the next move.
Arrow regarded Natalya’s body for a long moment, then shrugged like a man who’d disposed of worse. He stepped over her without ceremony and walked toward me, hands loose at his sides.
My body tensed, bracing for a slap, a breaking, some retribution. The reaction was involuntary—muscle memory from too many men closing the distance with violence in their hands.
He stopped mid-step, eyes narrowing, and studied me like I was evidence at a crime scene. Reaching around me, he gently grabbed my trembling hands and pressed a seltzer water into my palm, all while keeping my hand firmly in his grip.
“Drink,” he ordered.
Tender hands, possessive grip.
The fizz washed the copper from my tongue, as he leaned against the counter beside me.
God, he was as beautiful as he was terrifying, but in that instant, he looked almost bored by violence. Maybe hunger, like pain, was a currency that diminished each time you spent it.
“She’ll need cleaning up,” he said, voice flat, perfectly neutral.
Natalya lay sprawled below me—stranger in death. Stranger still that I was the one still standing. I felt all the weight of being alive when no one expected it. Decades of being told that in this city, loyalty was just slow-motion suicide.
“You killed her—your own cousin.”
“Family doesn’t point guns at what’s mine.” His voice was flat.
I laughed hysterically. “What’s yours?”
He didn’t answer, just looked at me with that unreadable expression that made me want to claw his eyes out. Trembling seized me, the adrenaline from the fight with Natalya still coursing through my system, now compounded by the shock of watching her die.
“You’re going into shock,” he observed, reaching for me.
“Don’t fucking touch me.” I jerked away.
“Harlowe.” Just my name, but it carried weight.
“No. No. No. You don’t get to do this! How can you kill someone and then act like it’s normal? Like it’s nothing?”
“It’s not nothing,” he said quietly. “But it is normal. At least in my world.”
My eyes returned to Natalya, tracking the blood pooling beneath her head.
It was already congealing, turning darker around the edges. My stomach lurched, and I barely made it to the sink before throwing up. The water ran pink as I rinsed my mouth.
Behind me, Arrow’s voice came low. “You should go back upstairs.”
I gripped the edge of the sink, my knuckles turning white. My brain kept replaying the sound of the gunshot, the spray of blood, the way Natalya’s face had stayed frozen in that horrible smile.
“I can’t,” I whispered. “I can’t just—leave her there.”
He moved beside me, careful not to touch me. “I’ll handle it. This isn’t your mess.”
“Isn’t it?” I turned to face him, suddenly furious. “She was trying to kill me. You shot her because of me. How is this not my mess?”
Arrow studied me, his features betraying nothing in the dim kitchen light. “Because you’re not the one who pulled the trigger.”
“But I’m the reason you did.” I gestured wildly at Natalya’s body. “What happens now? You call someone to clean this up? Make her disappear like she never existed?”
“Yes.” His answer was so matter-of-fact that it made me want to scream.
“And that doesn’t bother you?” I demanded. “She’s your cousin—your blood. Your family.”
A brief, haunted look flashed across his face, and vanished so quickly I might have imagined it. “Family doesn’t mean what you think it means to us.”
I laughed, the sound cracked and hollow. “Clearly.”
He moved toward the body, and quick, silent curses punctuated his phone call as he summoned a team I would never see arrive or leave.
Within minutes, two men with dead eyes and hazmat suits materialized, bagged Natalya’s body without a word, and zipped her into a black cocoon, dragging her through the kitchen as if she were a rug with a minor stain.
One paused to sop up the pool of blood with a powder-blue towel, swabbing around my bare feet with the care of a surgeon.
The linoleum was sanitized before my shock even solidified.
Not a trace of her remained but her blood and brain matter splattered across my face, my neck, my chest, and smeared across my nightgown.
I flinched when Arrow inspected my neck and saw the cut Natalya had left me with. His hands were unhurried, pressing the pad of his thumb to the shallow groove her knife had carved.
Funny, how quick desperation becomes conviction when you lean hard enough into it. He wrapped his palm over my throat, not to choke but to measure, and in that touch, I felt an uneasy intimacy that curled inside me like a parasite.
“Breathe,” he said.
I tried, my chest heaving against his arm. His thumb traced the edge of the cut, not pressing hard enough to hurt, just enough to remind me it was there.
“She could have killed you.” His voice was strained.
“But you got to her first,” I replied, my words hoarse. “Is that your thing? Making sure you’re the only one who gets to hurt me?”
Arrow’s eyes darkened. “I didn’t save you so I could hurt you.”
“Then why did you?” I asked, suddenly desperate to understand.
His hand moved from my throat to my face, his fingers leaving trails in Natalya’s blood. “Because she wasn’t supposed to be here. My father sent her to test us both.”
“Test us? What kind of test involves murder?”
“The only kind my father knows.” Arrow’s face was a mask of control, but something flickered beneath the surface. “He wanted to see if I’d choose you over family.”
The implication hit me like a fist to the gut. “And you did.”
“I did.”
We stood there, the kitchen gleaming as if nothing had happened.
Arrow Romanov had killed his cousin to protect me, and the weight of that fact pressed against my chest while I stood, motionless.
Tears stuck to my lashes—pain, relief, rage tangled too tight to separate. Blood threaded my lip, but the trauma had scrubbed the rest of me clean, left me feeling new and strange in my own skin.
Any other man would have kissed me, would have whispered something reassuring. “You’re safe now,” or “I’ve got you.”
Would have offered the comfort of certainty.
Arrow only leaned closer, nose grazing my jaw, and whispered, “You can sleep now. No one else will try again.”
He released my throat, and the print of his fingers still pressed into me as I stumbled upstairs, my legs not quite working.
My hands were white-knuckled from holding the water bottle so tight I’d split the label.
When I got to my room, I slammed the door, slid down its calm face, and, for the first time in years, sobbed like something in me was worth releasing.
I slept hard enough that the early morning sunlight already peeked through the curtains when I woke, the house silent around me. I showered, then washed my face twice, then three times, before scrubbing under my nails with a brush until the meat tore and bled again.
The house felt hollow as I padded through it—a different hollow than before. No cameras tracked my movement. No gaze prickled at the back of my neck.
I’d expected to find Arrow at the table with a new plan or a leash. But the kitchen was empty, the fridge restocked.
At the site of last night’s violence, I traced where Natalya’s body had collapsed. No stain remained. Not even a ghost of one. The only evidence was the raw guilt that had settled in my chest.
Eating felt like a choice, so I made a show of it, devouring cold eggs and crusted bread and sucking down two glasses of orange juice.
I licked my fingers clean and watched the sun choreograph shadows up and down the length of the kitchen island.
For an hour, I existed, staring into nothing, not waiting for anything to break.
Arrow found me like that, an hour past noon, a scabbed cut on my neck, and a dark purple bruise on my cheek. He wore a blue shirt, collar open and sleeves rolled, his hair slicked back in a controlled mess. His gray eyes had the glassy shine of someone who’d been awake for days.
We surveyed each other in silence for a full ten seconds. He set down his phone and splayed his hands on the counter, knuckles white. I expected an order, a demand, or even a threat. But he just stood there, letting the tension fan out between us until the world narrowed to only us.
“You’re shaking.”
“You’re a killer,” I countered.
He sighed, moving to the fridge, opened it, pulled out a bottle of water, cracked it open, and set it in front of me.
“Drink. You’re dehydrated.”
I stared at the water, then back at him. “How can you be so calm? You shot someone in the head last night, and now you’re worried about my hydration?”
“One has nothing to do with the other.” He leaned against the counter, posture relaxed but eyes sharp. “Natalya made her choice. I made mine.”