Chapter 31 Sera
SERA
Oh, God. Stunned, I sit on his lap, my fingers lax around his hand. I re-run everything Alik’s said, piecing together all the reasons why my family locked me up, starved me and tormented me, and tattooed the equivalent of a “for sale” sign on my chest.
“How can you forgive me for that, moya voitelnitsa? I can’t forgive myself.” He presses his face against my neck, crushing me in an embrace. “I failed my sister and I’ve failed you. I can’t ever expect you to forgive me and yet…I don’t know how to let you go.”
I lace my fingers through his hair, manhandling him until he looks at me.
“There’s nothing to forgive, Alik. You did a good thing freeing those women.
You saved them from unspeakable hell. You kept them alive.
You didn’t know what my family would do next.
You didn’t know they’d take me. Hell, you didn’t even know me. ”
“But I know you now, and it kills me that I had anything to do with the fucked-up things they did to you. I was so clueless, so focused on getting information about Rina, that even once I found you in the cell, I didn’t help you escape.
I left you there—” Alik’s groan is pure anguish.
“I am so sorry for leaving you there, for not breaking you out the second I found you. You have every right to hate me. You’ve had every right to hate me from the very start. ”
“Stop. Please.” I press our foreheads together, wanting nothing more than to help ease his pain.
“You did help me. Your visits to my cell saved me. They gave me the strength to keep going when it felt like the only option was to give up. No one was coming for me. No one. But you risked your entire reason for being here, your mission to avenge your sister, to get me free. More than once. You’ve given me my life back, Alik.
I can’t hate you for that. I’ll never hate you for that. ”
I love you.
It’s on the tip of my tongue. Three tiny words trying like hell to fight their way free, but I hold them back.
Everything about our situation is so uncertain, so fragile.
Renzo won’t stop coming for me. Alik still doesn’t know exactly what happened to Rina or where her body is.
I do love him, but saying it out loud will only make things more complicated. Raise the stakes even higher.
We need to survive this first. I’ll tell him after we’ve survived this.
If we survive this.
I release a sigh, let myself fall into the endless blue of Alik’s eyes. “I’ll never hate you,” I repeat. “But you have to promise to stop blaming yourself for things you had no control over.”
“That’s one hell of an ask, sweetheart.”
“But you’ll try?”
Alik stares at me with something like wonder. “For you, yes. I’ll try. It’s starting to become very clear that for you, I’ll do anything. I’d kill for you, die for you. Do anything to protect you. You are mine and I will not fail at protecting what’s mine. Not again.”
God, this man. How could I not love him? I trace his scar. The line is brutal, cutting across his face from eye to jaw, but what comes across as terrifying to others has become beloved to me. “How did you get this?”
Alik taps the fresher section. “Do you remember when I stopped sneaking into your cell for a while? I know you had no way of tracking time in there, but there was a period when I couldn’t come see you. This is why.”
I don’t understand. “Because of a cut?”
Alik gives his head a rueful shake. “Because of a beating. I took on a job, refused to complete it, and had to pay the price. And the price was accepting a beating from the man who’d hired me.”
Now I’m even more confused. “My uncle?”
“No, my real job. At least, one of them.”
I blink at Alik, wondering who this man I’ve become so close to really is. “Which is?”
Instead of answering the question, he traces the longer part of the scar. The faded wound that’s obviously been there a long time. “This scar is a gift from my father. Part of my inheritance.”
There’s no warmth to his voice. No familial pull. It doesn’t sound like Alik likes his father any more than I like mine. “What inheritance?”
Without warning, Alik kisses me, fast and deep, with tongue and hungry heat, then drops me on the sofa and stands up. “It’s easier if I just show you.”
I sit there, dumbfounded, as Alik strips off the sweater he’s been wearing since our conversation in his office.
The poor guy obviously hasn’t had a chance to sleep, let alone change.
Concerns for his wellbeing take a mental backseat when I get my first good look at his bare chest, no pool water or fabric or anything else hiding his heavily muscled torso or the tattoo covering a good portion of it.
“Holy shit.” I don’t realize I say it out loud until a smirk flashes across Alik’s face. Maybe the most well-earned smirk of his life because, oh my God, he’s beautiful.
Lightly tanned skin stretches across broad shoulders, heavily muscled arms hanging powerfully at his sides, their gorgeous cuts and grooves put to shame by the strength of his chest and stomach.
I want to flatten my palms against the curves of his pecs and drag my tongue down the ridges of his abdomen.
Kneel in worship at the angled delineation of his hips.
Just looking at him makes my mouth dry and my pussy wet, and that’s before I let myself take in the intricacy of his tattoo.
He’s watching me trace it with greedy eyes and I indulge in my own smirk when I see the pulse at his throat kick into overdrive. He likes me looking as much as I like doing it.
“You can stare and touch as much as you like, moya voitelnitsa, but only after I finish telling you about this.” Alik indicates to the scalloped lines that dance across his ribcage.
They look like the ends of wings. When he turns to show me his brutal back, I realize that they are.
Giant wings that unfurl from his shoulder blades, frame either side of his spine, and wrap around his chest. Between the wings, running down the length of his spine, is a sword, tip bloodied, blade in flames.
The hilt climbs his neck, ending just beneath the base of his skull.
The handle’s guard forms the black portion that curves around the sides of his neck.
“It’s…amazing.”
“It’s my legacy,” he says, expression closed. “The gift given to the first-born son in every generation. My father has the same tattoo. So did my grandfather. The scar too. That beauty we get when we hit puberty, cut into our face by our fathers. The tattoo comes when—if—we reach sixteen.”
“Why? What are you?”
Eyes latched on mine, Alik drops to his knees at my feet.
His body is all taut skin and temptation and I’m only so strong.
I touch his shoulders, his upper arms, dropping my fingers to his stomach, gently tracing the lines there.
He’s so beautiful my heart hurts, even more because of the darkness he’s trying to hide from me.
“Why did they do this to you? Tell me. Please.”
“My family is the head of our bratva, moya voitelnitsa. Has been for almost a century. My father is the current pakhan, but soon it will be my turn. I’m his heir and this is what we do to our heirs.
We mark them, cut them, train them to be vicious warriors.
Killers. Merciless protectors of the family.
Before taking the role of pakhan, the heir-apparent must prove his worthiness.
He has to take on the most feared role in the bratva: the assassin Arkhangel. ”
We’re face to face and Alik looks at me, all shields gone. Nothing but brutal honesty on display. “I’m a trained killer, Sera. I have been since I was a child. I had to prove my strength to my family, my worth. My value. Something I think you know a little about.”
He finds my knees, grips hard. “My father showed me nothing but cruelty. He said it would make me stronger, more effective. Both at killing and at leading. And I’ve done everything that my father demanded of me until the day Rina disappeared.
After that, everything changed. I put my life on hold, came to the US, and started hunting her abductors, only taking jobs as the Arkhangel on the side.
I told myself it was because I needed to stay busy, stay sharp, but I think it’s just who I’ve become.
But something happened recently that changed even that. ”
He grips me harder. “I was so pissed that I wasn’t making progress with Rina.
I was so restless, not thinking straight, and I took a job without doing my usual due diligence.
I didn’t research the target thoroughly at all, just showed up at the time and place indicated, only to discover the hit was on a woman.
A young one, with no apparent ties to anything criminal.
The realization didn’t dawn on me until I’d already fired the first shots, and then my brain stopped short.
I’ve broken a lot of rules in my life, but one I’ll never break is no killing innocent women or children.
So, I intentionally fucked it up, left her alive, and allowed the man who’d hired me to beat me bloody so the name Arkhangel wouldn’t be tarnished for good. ”
Alik bows his head, like he’s paying some sort of penance.
“Losing Rina changed something inside me. Broke the chains of the unyielding loyalty I always felt I owed my family. I did everything I was supposed to, survived every trial and test my father set out for me, and I still couldn’t save her.
I followed his rules, and fate laughed in my face. And then, with Lena—”
“Lena?”
“Hmmm, the woman I let live. Rem Cosenza’s wife.
She was the one I didn’t kill that night, the reason I accepted the beating as punishment.
I realized I didn’t have to live by my father’s rules anymore.
I’m not the same man he is. I’m not going to be the same kind of pakhan.
That’s why I’m so sure about my promise, moya voitelnitsa.
Life with me will be nothing like what you’ve lived up until now.
You’ll have space to breathe, to live, to find yourself.
” He lets a smile pull at the corner of his mouth.
A glimmer flashes in his gorgeous blue eyes.
“Maybe even a pool where you can swim naked, any time you want.”
“I do like swimming.” My smile turns thoughtful. “Speaking of swimming—why did we leave the apartment to come here? It can’t possibly be because of the pool. Did you just need enough space to house all your minions?”
“Yeah. There was that.” Alik draws a finger down my face before tucking strands of hair behind my ear. “But it was pretty much for you.”
I gape at him, astonished. “I’m the reason you moved us to this absolutely enormous house?”
“You couldn’t handle being confined,” he answers with a small shrug.
“You were suffering so much in that little room, moya voitelnitsa. The night terrors and running yourself ragged in the gym. And the thing with the knife… You needed more space, so I found you this house. And filled it with guards. As much good as it did us.”
My heart is lodged so firmly in my throat I struggle to get the words out, but he needs to hear them.
I need to tell him. “You’re a good man, Alik Valentin.
” Alik’s forearms are rigid, veins prominent, his grip on my legs punishing.
I run my hands up and down his muscles and feel myself go even gooier when he relaxes under my touch.
“The world could use a few more like you.”
“A battered boy, trained killer, and failure of an older brother?”
“No.” I trace my hands up to his shoulders, rub the muscles that jump beneath the skin. “A man who has survived a brutal childhood. A man who did what was right even when it cost him. A man who will do whatever it takes to protect—and avenge—the people he loves.”
I love you.
It almost slips out a second time. It’s harder to hold back, so I give in and tell him the only way I can.