Dariy
I should have killed her.
She should be dead.
The thought echoes through me as I guide her into the private elevator, her pulse fluttering beneath my fingers like a frightened animal desperate to break free.
It would be simpler to end this now, to put a bullet between those wide violet eyes and erase the problem she has become.
Clean. Efficient. Exactly what I’ve built my entire life around.
But I didn’t kill her, and I’m not entirely sure why.
I watched her terror twist into something else…defiance, maybe. Acceptance? Fear didn’t make her collapse or beg or fall apart. It lit a spark behind those impossible eyes. Then she snatched the scotch from her tray, toasted whatever comes next, and swallowed it down in three big gulps.
People break in predictable ways when they face death.
They plead, bargain, soil themselves, make promises they can’t keep.
But she didn’t. She looked at me like she already understood the price and had accepted it long before she walked into that room.
I know that look. It’s the look of someone who’s been carrying their own grief for so long that dying almost feels like rest. You don’t kill someone like that.
You protect them. Or you claim them. Or, God help me, you do both.
Now she stands here with her back pressed tightly to the mirrored wall, trying to make herself smaller even though she has the kind of curves a man could break his hands worshipping. Her lashes tremble. Her breathing is shallow. She believes she’s heading toward execution.
“You’re shaking,” I murmur.
“I’m…cold.”
She’s lying. She’s afraid. I should prefer that, fear is useful. Fear makes people compliant, predictable. But on her, it irritates me. It doesn’t belong.
She’s too soft for this world. Too bright. Too breakable.
And I have always been a man who fixes what is broken…or buries it.
“That will be the last lie you ever tell me, Callie.” I keep my voice level but my tone is firm.
The elevator doors slide open to the penthouse, the lights from the Strip glittering like a thousand opportunities for people to have fun or ruin their lives. I step aside, expecting her to move. She doesn’t. She seems rooted, as though crossing that threshold will seal her fate.
I place a hand at the small of her back. She jumps from the contact and looks up at me, startled. That rabbit in headlights look that undoes me. I clench my back teeth together to keep from saying or doing something stupid. Because God knows my sanity is fraying with every second I spend near her.
Inside, the vast sweep of windows reveals everything the city pretends to be.
Money. Power. Control. I own this view. My brothers and I own every quiet deal made in the rooms below.
I clean the stains they leave behind. I’m a Fixer.
That’s my job. I’m good at my job. It could even be argued that I’m the best Fixer in the Bratva.
But the woman in front of me? She is something bigger than what I am, and I don’t understand it.
I should call my brothers. I should tell them what happened, and I should clean up this mess, too. But instead, I ask, “Who is caring for your grandmother tonight?”
Her head snaps up. Surprise. Suspicion. She narrows her eyes, trying to find something in my question that isn’t there.
“No one,” she whispers. “No one who actually cares.”
That flicker of pain in her voice digs under my ribs and lodges there like shrapnel.
“Give me her full name again.” My phone is already in my hand even though I don’t remember taking it out of my pocket.
“Juliet Marie Hind,” she says, closer to a breath than a sound. “I got her a room at York Bridgeway Care Facility. I only came in tonight for the overtime.” She lets out a gasp of laughter that sounds all too close to hysteria.
I send a message. One I never send. One that signals involvement. Responsibility.
My responsibility.
She watches me, confusion playing over her features. She doesn’t understand that she has already sealed her fate more brutally than a bullet ever could.
She belongs to me now.
Her knees buckle slightly, the crash of adrenaline fading.
I catch her elbow, steadying her. She stiffens at the contact but doesn’t pull away.
I guide her to the plush sofa, and she folds into it, curling in on herself like a little pill bug.
The dress she is wearing slides further up her thighs, and the glittery gold panties flash in the low light of the room.
Temptation floods me, foreign and uninvited, as my blood heats and surges to my groin.
I’m not the type of man who gets tempted by anything.
Not gambling, drink or drugs. Not even beautiful women.
But here she sits in this ridiculous glittery uniform made to encourage higher spends and bigger tips, and I can’t bear to think of any other man putting their eyes on her. Much less their hands.
“You can sleep in my room to the right.” I step back before I do something irrevocable. “You’ll stay there until I decide what happens next.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong,” she says, and there’s iron under the words this time. A will to understand and survive whatever this is.
“No,” I agree, my voice low. “But you were in the wrong place and the wrong time, and in my world, that’s just as bad.”
“I know how to keep my mouth shut.” Those eyes of hers, so impossibly deep blue they look purple in the artificial light, flash with offense that I could ever believe she would tell anyone about what she saw downstairs.
But people do talk. They will say anything to survive and then they will tell everyone what happened. They can’t help it. It’s human nature. Relief mixed with shock equals confession.
“I’m keeping you alive because you saw something you shouldn’t have. That doesn’t make you safe. It just makes you mine to handle. Don’t forget it.”
Her lips part, but no sound comes out, a protest strangled by confusion.
I turn away before she sees too much in my eyes. The conflict, the restraint, the urge to touch and destroy and claim all in the same breath.
I need distance. I need clarity.
But all I can see when I close my eyes is the way she stood in front of a gun and asked me to take care of her grandmother. The way she didn’t beg for herself. The way she looked at death, like she’d already made peace with it. A woman who values everyone except herself.
It fractured something inside me.
The wave of lust that hit me when I turned and found her staring at the body on the floor…
The way her eyes met mine with shock, yes, but something else too.
Curiosity, maybe? The way she gasped when I pressed the length of the silencer against her thigh because I knew that if I touched her with my hands again, I wouldn’t be able to stop what followed.
The way she leaned into my touch and refused to close her eyes in the face of imminent death…
I’m already fucking done for, and I know it.
I leave her in the penthouse, door closing with a soft click that feels far too final for a temporary measure.
My steps down the private corridor are measured, controlled…
but inside, I’m a storm ripping free of its cage.
This shouldn’t be affecting me like this.
She shouldn’t be affecting me like this.
I pull out my phone, navigate to my brother’s name.
I need you in the back, room 4, something has come up.
The reply comes almost instantly, because Adrik is always close when trouble breathes.
I saw her head down. I’m on my way.
The elevator sinks, the sensation barely noticeable compared to the pressure building behind my ribs.
I replay the moment again, her lips parting, her eyes going wide, the way she only wanted her grandmother safe and looked after.
That innocence is a dangerous resource in my line of work. It can turn ruthless men into fools.
The basement corridor stretches out like a tunnel of decisions I haven’t made yet.
The metallic tang of gunpowder still hangs in the air when I re-enter the room.
The body lies where it fell, the stain spreading beneath him already drying.
I’ve seen thousands like this. I’ve caused hundreds.
But for the first time, the cleanup feels like an inconvenience rather than a necessity.
I crouch beside the corpse, gloved hands already assessing what needs to be done. But my mind is upstairs, wrapped in soft curves and violet eyes and a pulse too brave for a girl who’s had to survive all her life already.
“If she had begged,” I murmur to myself, “this would have been simpler.”
But she didn’t beg. Not for herself. She fought quietly. She challenged me.
That makes her the most dangerous kind of witness, the most dangerous kind of woman.
Bootsteps behind me. Adrik’s signal knock.
He doesn’t enter fully, doesn’t need to. He pushes the door open and leans against the frame. His voice, smooth as smoke, slides into the room.
“You didn’t kill her, did you?”