18. Titus
TITUS
She sets the photo down in the drawer, her face going pale. I step into the room, closing the door behind me. “You are unbelievable,” I growl at her. She turns around to me fully.
“I’m unbelievable?” she says. “These letters—”
“You had no business going through my things. What in the hell possessed you—”
“The D.A., Titus? You were sleeping with the D.A.?”
The accusation nearly stops me in my tracks. I walk over to her and close the drawer. There’s part of a pen stuck in the keyhole. Dammit, I’m going to have to put these letters in a fucking safe.
“That is none of your business,” I say to her as calmly as I can. “Get out of my room.”
She stares up at me with those big baby blue eyes and gives me a firm, “No.”
“No?” I scoff. She’s lost her fucking mind. “Get. Out.”
She shakes her head. “No, I think we need to talk about this.”
I grab her by the arm and yank her to her feet. “I don’t need to talk about any of this with you—”
She twists her arm out of my grip and takes several steps back from me, her feet falling in a defensive stance and her hands are up, palms to me. “Titus, she’s Luka’s mother, isn’t she? The girlfriend who was killed for being too close to you?”
I go to grab for her again, but this time, she slaps my hand away and takes another step back. Her training has kicked in and she’s ready to defend herself against me.
“You really want to do this?” I say. “You want a fight with me?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t want to fight you, Titus. What I want is to talk.”
“There is nothing to talk about. You broke into my room—”
“The door was open—”
“And then you broke into my desk and started sticking your fucking nose where it doesn’t belong. Those letters are nobody’s business but mine, Sofia.”
“Okay!” she shouts back. “I shouldn’t have gone snooping around in your room. I was wrong for that and I’m sorry.”
I stare at her for a long moment, studying her face, trying to figure out if she’s just saying that to talk her way out of a punishment.
The way she’s standing, however… This isn’t a game of submission.
It’s not her accepting the rules of our arrangement.
This is something else entirely. If I try to grab her again, she will defend herself.
And if I don’t know anything else about her, I know she knows her way around a fight.
She could give me one hell of a time if she wanted.
“Sorry?” I repeat. “That’s all you have to say? I should throw you out on your ass.”
“You’re not going to do that.”
“Don’t you tell me what I won’t do.”
“Titus, if you throw me out of his house then you’ll have to worry about me telling everyone that you had a child with the fucking D.A. If that’s your big plan, you’d better consider burning these letters.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “You don’t get to blackmail me, Sofia. I’ll have your head blown off before you can breathe a word to anyone.”
“Tough talk from inside your house,” she says with a little smirk. “How easy do you think it would be to catch me once I’m in the wind? The only reason you caught me the last time was because I came to you.”
I clench my jaw angrily. “Sofia, you do not want to fuck with me.”
“I’m not trying to fuck with you, Titus. I just want…” She sighs and shakes her head exasperatedly. “Your son wants a normal life.”
That hurts. I clench my fists to hold back my rage. “Don’t you dare—”
“He’s a good kid so he accepts the way things are, you know? And why not? It’s all he’s known. But one of these days, he’s going to start asking more questions about his mother and why he’s stuck in this house, and you’re going to have to deal with that.”
“How I deal with it has nothing to do with you.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe you should figure out what story you’re going to tell him now, because the questions are already coming.” She crosses her arms defiantly. “You can’t just leave him hanging—”
“And that’s why you broke in here? So you could tell him that his mother was killed because protecting her would mean that I sided with the Feds in the eyes of my brothers? Is that it?”
She stares at me with those fucking eyes. Big, blue, and as innocent as a child’s. “That’s not the only reason,” she says. “I wanted to know. Titus… oh, Titus.” She sighs and lowers her hands. “I guess, after last night, I wanted to know you better.”
“You could have asked.”
“Would you have told me?”
She’s got me there. I turn away from her, wanting to just walk away from this conversation. She’s not going to let me, though. I walk over to the edge of my bed and sit, patting the space next to me. She hesitates, then comes over and sits down next to me.
“It’s important to you to know about this?”
She nods.
I must be going crazy to even entertain telling her these things. But maybe if I tell her, then she’ll understand why I have to protect Luka.
“I met Angela in a bar,” I tell her. “The night after I did a stretch in prison, I walked into this place and there she was. Sitting on one of those bar stools, half turned toward the door as she talked to the guy she was with. The minute she lifted her head up and our eyes locked, I knew she was coming home with me that night.”
Sofia stays silent, listening to me talk with her hands clasped in her lap. I go on.
“We were together every night for about a week before I happened across a news report about the election of the new D.A. You can’t imagine how pissed I was to discover it was her. The night I found out, I almost broke it off with her… but I didn’t. To this day, I still don’t know why.”
I take a deep breath. The memory of her face comes back to me. Her no-nonsense way of speaking to me. The completely fearless manner in which she stood up to me when we fought. That fight the night that I found out was started hot and ended much hotter.
“What I do know,” I go on, “is that she had my heart. Somewhere along the way, she captured me completely and the very next thing I knew, we were starting to consider what it would mean for us to be together.”
“You had to know that no one would ever accept it,” Sofia said softly. “She… even if she quit being a D.A., no one in your Bratva would ever trust you.”
“Yeah,” I say in response. “Yeah, that was the size of it. One night, Ignat found out about her. Showed up to the house while she was here and put two and two together. I’m lucky it was him and not any of my brigadiers. Ignat’s loyalty is unmatched. He’d follow me into Hell without question.”
I have to pause. The night he came over was a comedy of errors in a way.
I was trying to keep him in the foyer. Angela and I had just finished making love in the living room and she was in the kitchen.
As I went to usher him out, she came walking into view wearing nothing but my dress shirt.
Ignat was as equally shocked as he was furious.
“Ignat was the one who convinced me to break it off with her,” I tell her. “He made it clear that if I didn’t do that, then someone in this brotherhood would decide for me.”
I stop there, giving her a side glance. I don’t want to tell her the details of what happened next. If she believed me, I don’t think she could handle it. Not now.
“He was right,” she says. “Wasn’t he?”
I look down at my hands for a second, then, “A couple of years in, she got pregnant. The night she told me, I told her that she had to choose to end our relationship or the pregnancy.” I pause, the last letter she wrote me still stinging in my mind. “She chose the relationship.”
I glance over and see her pursing her lips, the slightest bit of judgment on her face.
“I didn’t know I’d had a son until after she was dead,” I tell her. “It had been a few years. I didn’t want to intrude on her. Once I did know, however…”
She takes my hand. I pull it away from her.
“Don’t pity me,” I say. “This is the life. I took a chance and I lost.”
“I’m not pitying you,” she says. “I’m sad for you. It’s a sad story.”
I scoff. “This life is full of sad stories, Princess.”
She reaches over and takes my hand again. It’s soft and so fucking welcome. I squeeze it as she scoots closer to me.
“You loved her.”
“More than anything,” I whisper. “But she’s gone and I have to live with that.”
She rests her head on my shoulder and something inside blooms. A warm feeling rushes comfortably through me.
“Did you make her killer pay?” she asks me.
“I did,” I say honestly.
“Good.”
The irony isn’t lost on me. The way Sofia came into my life with her own need to collect on the same debt makes me wonder where she is now with it. I look down at the top of her head, focusing on her shiny hair. I’d like to think she’s let it go. At least for now.
But the way she attacked Cyril…
“You should know something,” I say. “I should have told you already, but with all the excitement yesterday, it slipped my mind.”
“What is it?”
“You attacked Cyril because you thought he killed your brother. You were mistaken. He’s not dead.”
She lifts her head and looks at me, trying to find the lie. “What?”
“I haven’t ordered his death, Sofia.”
She just stares, stock still like a deer in headlights. “You… Why not?”
“I think it’s better that you don’t know the answer to that.”
She sits up and slips her hand out of mine as she looks away. I can see the wheels turning in her mind as she tries to reckon with what I’ve just told her. Finally, she says, “Where is he?”
“The warehouse. The same one you were in.”
“Can you take me to him?” I don’t answer her and her head whips around to me. “Titus, please.”
“Sofia, your brother’s committed a cardinal sin against my Bratva and against the global brotherhood. We have a code of silence and he’s disregarded that. He’s being punished—”
“I don’t care. I need to see my brother.”
My heart aches for her, but I just shake my head. “Trust me. You don’t want to see him.”
She seems to understand me. As she looks away, I see tears appear at the waterline of her eyes. “Dammit,” she whispers. She remains silent for a few seconds and I give her that. Finding out your brother is a snitch can’t be easy. Finally, she says, “Let me at least say goodbye to him, then.”
“Sofia—”
“You’re going to kill him, right? Whatever you’ve done to him already, it’s going to end up with him dead.
I want the chance to say goodbye to him.
Titus, you killed my father without giving me that chance.
I want it with my brother.” She looks at me and her eyes have gone bloodshot as tears fall from them. “Please, Titus.”
I wipe the tears from her cheeks and brush her hair out of her face. “All right,” I say to her. “I’ll give you that.”
I decided we should wait until it was late and Luka was well asleep before we went to the warehouse.
As soon as I was sure he was safe and secure in his room, we set out.
The whole ride, Sofia remained silent, caught in her own elusive thoughts.
There’s part of me that suspects that she’s planning something.
Some way to get her brother free and get away from me and this entire thing.
I think that’s the part of my mind that has learned to suspect everyone, no matter who they are or how close they are to you.
The funny thing is how that suspicion crops up even as I look over at her and see that there’s no deception in any part of her. Not this time. I think she truly just wants to see her brother one last time.
We get to the warehouse and the moment I turn off the engine and she reaches for the door, I stop her with a touch to her shoulder.
“I expect several of my men to be standing guard,” I tell her. “One of them will probably be Cyril.”
“Cyril?”
“You’ve met him a few times,” I tell her, and her eyebrows rise. “You broke his nose yesterday.”
“Oh.” A sly smile appears on her face. “I do keep meeting that one.”
“It’s not funny. He’s itching for a chance to try and get back at you. I’ll be the only thing between you and him when we go in there. You understand?”
She nods as her smile fades. “I understand. You lead, I’ll follow.”
“Very good. Let’s go.”
She opens the door and we walk across the lot to the warehouse entrance.
The first two of my men are boeviks who serve under Cyrus.
They acknowledge me with the appropriate amount of respect, but they all gave Sofia a suspicious glance.
No one questions me on it, but suddenly, Ignat’s warning comes to mind.
I’m going to have to address that sooner or later.
I’m told that his room is on the first floor, so we make our way through the dimly lit hallway at the back of the larger room once used for processing canned vegetables. As soon as we enter the hallway, I see Cyril coming out of the room, wiping blood from his hands.
Sofia’s behind me and I can’t see her face, but I feel her reaction. A wave of distress hits me in the back and nearly makes me stop.
Cyril closes the door and looks up at me with surprise. “Sir,” he says. “What are you doing here?”
I suppose I could try being diplomatic here, but I decide not to. Cyril’s job is to follow my orders, so that’s what he’s going to do. “Cyril, why don’t you go outside? Check on the boeviks at the door.”
He regards me, then his eyes dip down and behind me at Sofia. “Are you sure, sir?”
“You know better than to question me,” I say. “You also know I don’t repeat orders.”
He nods, straightening up slightly, and responds with, “Yes, sir.”
He walks past us, and I catch him eyeing Sofia cautiously as his jaw clenches. Once he’s gone, Sofia looks up at me for reassurance.
“I’m giving you twenty minutes,” I say to her. “That’s all. Don’t make me come in after you.”
She nods. Then, “Thank you, Titus.”
I almost smile. “Go on.”
She turns away from me and approaches the door.