Chapter 20 Vivika
VIVIKA
The rain soaks through my clothes and plasters my hair to my face as I huddle behind the hedge, straining to hear anything over the drumming of water against leaves and earth. Gunshots echoed from inside the house minutes ago, and then silence fell like a blanket, smothering everything beneath it.
I'm shivering so hard my teeth are chattering, my fingers numb where they grip the wet branches in front of me, and every shadow that moves in the storm makes my heart slam against my ribs.
Lev told me to stay hidden and to trust him, but what if he's lying dead on his own floor right now, and I'm sitting out here in the rain waiting for a man who will never come back? He promised he'd come back…
Then I see a dark shape emerging from the back of the house and moving toward me through the downpour.
He's not stalking like a predator. He's hunched and jogging as if he's trying to stay out of sight, and I know it's Lev.
I scramble out from behind the hedge and throw myself into his arms, not caring that we're both soaked and freezing and standing in the middle of what might still be a war zone.
"We have to go," Lev says against my ear, his voice urgent. "There are too many of them, and by now they've called for backup. We gotta get out of here."
He pulls me toward the car and practically shoves me into the passenger seat before sprinting around to the driver's side. The engine roars to life, and we're moving before I can even get my seatbelt fastened, tearing down the street.
I twist in my seat to look through the rear window, and my stomach drops when I see headlights appear behind us, gaining fast.
"Lev—"
"I see them." His jaw is tight but his eyes flick back and forth from the mirror to the road. "There's a gun in the glove compartment. Take it."
"What? No." I did this once and almost shot him. I can't live like this.
"Do it, Viv. Now. You don't have a choice."
My hands are shaking so badly, I can barely get the compartment open, but I manage to pull out the weapon and hold it in my lap, staring at it like it might bite me if I move too quickly.
The last time I held a gun, I almost shot Lev in the face when he came back to the car.
I'm not a killer like he thinks I am. I'm just an interpreter.
"Vivika." His voice cuts through my panic. "I need you to shoot at that car."
"I can't—"
"You can. You've done harder things than this." He swerves around a corner and the pursuing car follows, close enough now that I can see the shapes of men inside. "Roll down your window, aim for the driver, and pull the trigger. Don't think about it, just do it."
I don't know where the courage comes from—maybe it's been building inside me all along, waiting for the right moment to emerge, or maybe desperation has a way of making you braver than you thought possible—but I find myself rolling down the window and twisting in my seat.
Rain immediately pelts my face as I point the gun at the car behind us.
The wind tears at my hair and the water blinds me.
My arms are shaking so hard I can barely keep the weapon steady, but I squeeze the trigger anyway.
The first shot goes wide, sparking off the pavement somewhere to the left.
The second hits the hood of the pursuing car but doesn't slow it down.
The third… the third punches through the windshield, and the car swerves violently, careening across the rain-slicked road before clipping a guardrail and flipping end over end in a spectacular explosion of fire and twisted metal that lights up the night behind us.
I stare at the wreckage for a minute as Lev speeds away. The flames are beaten down right away by the rain, but with a fire that hot, a little rain can't stop it. I sink back into my seat, now trembling from the adrenaline as much as how cold I am, and I let the gun fall to my feet at the floor.
I did that. I killed those men.
"Good girl," Lev says, but his praise feels sickening. "You did good, Vivika."
I can't even respond to him right now because this is crossing lines. I can't even cry. I feel like shock has a death grip on me. All I can do is stare at the weapon on the ground and shiver until the car heats up enough that the shaking stops, but the shock never quite wears off.
We drive for what feels like hours. Lev doesn't speak and neither do I, both of us lost in our own thoughts as the distance between us grows. Being his pawn is one thing. Killing for him is another. I feel like I'm living a nightmare right now and I just want to wake up.
When he pulls up to an old home that looks like it's seen better days, I finally look up. The porch is leaning, and the windows are dark. If anyone is home, they're sleeping, and Lev doesn’t seem to care about any of it.
"Where are we?" I ask, coughing to clear my throat of the knot that's formed there.
"Somewhere safe." Lev parks the car in front of the house and kills the engine. "Come on. Let's get inside before we both freeze to death."
The farmhouse is even more imposing up close.
Its wooden porch is sagging under years of neglect and its front door hangs slightly crooked in its frame.
I follow Lev up the creaking steps and through the entrance.
Every step squishes more water out of my soggy shoes, leaving puddles on the flooring.
Inside, it's so dark I can't see a single thing, but Lev walks right in like he knows the place and I hear him rummaging around before a match flares to life and illuminates his face in a warm orange glow.
He touches the flame to an oil lamp on a nearby table, and the room slowly emerges from the shadows—a large living area with furniture draped in white sheets, a stone fireplace against one wall, and windows that rattle in their frames every time the wind gusts.
"There should be wood by the fireplace," Lev says, already moving toward it. "Help me get a fire started."
We work together in silence, crumpling old newspaper and stacking logs and kindling until Lev lights a wad of paper and tosses it in. The flame catches and begins to grow and it helps light the place up more, and slowly, gradually, warmth begins to seep into the room and into my frozen bones.
"What is this place?" I ask, settling onto the floor in front of the fireplace and holding my hands out toward the heat.
Lev sits down beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch.
"The original Gravitch home. My great-grandfather built it when he first came to Russia, before the family moved to the city and started building the empire Yuri controls today.
" He looks around the room nostalgically.
"Nobody comes here anymore. It's too far from everything. But that's what makes it safe."
"Is there any food here?"
"Probably nothing edible after all this time.
The place has been empty for years." His hands stretch out toward the fire too, like he's wanting to warm them, but instead of fear that mirrors my own, I see calmness in his eyes.
He's so used to these sorts of things happening that he doesn't even register it anymore.
Is that how he survives this? He just locks it out? Or maybe he's too desensitized to the violence to care anymore. His world is in a constant state of upheaval, so this is normalized to the point that he can't even see it as surprising when someone pulls a gun. It makes me sad and frightens me.
I watch the flames dance and crackle and think about everything that's happened since Lev's men grabbed me off that street corner all those weeks ago.
The fear, the training, the moments of tenderness that caught me off guard, the violence that seems to follow him everywhere he goes.
I've killed people now. I've watched him kill people.
I've become someone I never imagined I could be, and I don't know if I can ever go back to who I was before.
Lev pulls out his phone and begins scrolling through messages, his brow furrowing as he reads whatever Yuri's sent him. I lean against his shoulder and let the fire warm my face, too exhausted to do anything except exist in this moment of temporary peace.
"My life's never going back to normal, is it?" I ask, hugging my knees to my chest as I rest my chin on my arms. If he cares about me at all, I know he'll help me. Inessa said Lev cares, but I have to see it with my own eyes to believe it.
Lev sets his phone aside and takes both my hands in his. I manage to look up at him, but he doesn't seem angry about my asking about my future this time. "I don't want you to go back to normal."
"What?"
"I want you to stay with me, Vivika." His grip tightens on my hands. "I know this life is dangerous and violent and nothing like what you imagined for yourself. But I've never felt about anyone the way I feel about you, and I can't let you walk away without at least asking you to stay."
I don’t know if I can do what he's asking. Staying with him would mean constantly running from people, looking over my shoulder, and being afraid. Before all of this started, the scariest part of my life was the spider that lives above my shower head. I'm not cut out for Bratva life.
"Lev…" I pull my hands free and wrap my arms around myself again. "The life you live—men are constantly trying to kill you. They're trying to kill me just because I'm standing next to you. I'd never feel safe. You wouldn’t want me to live that way, would you?"
"It won't always be like this." He reaches out and cups my face in his hands, forcing me to meet his eyes.
"The war with the Veches will end. Yaros will fall, and when he does, things will stabilize.
The constant danger, the running, the fear—that's because we're in the middle of a conflict.
Once it's over, once we've won, life becomes quieter. "
"Do you really believe that?"
"I have to believe it." His thumb strokes across my cheekbone, but I don't lean into his palm. "I want you to be safe and happy and whole, and I want to be the one who gives you those things."
I don't know what to say. Part of me wants to say yes, wants to fall into his arms and let him promise me everything will be okay.
But another part—the part that remembers the sound of gunfire—that part knows better than to trust anything he says.
He may not have lied about the enslaved women, but he wasn't upfront about how dangerous pretending to be Ana Veche would be.
"I need time to think about all of this," I finally manage. "It's too big a decision to make right now when everything's still so raw…"
"I know." He presses a kiss to my forehead and then pulls back, letting his hands fall from my face.
He stands and stretches, his joints popping audibly from the tension of the night we've survived.
"I'm gonna try to light the pilot light for the water heater.
A hot shower would go a long way toward making both of us feel human again. "
"Okay." I watch him disappear down a hallway, making old floor boards creak, and then I turn back to the fire and reach for another log to add to the flames.
The wood is dry and catches quickly, sending sparks spiraling up the chimney like tiny stars escaping into the storm above. I sit there watching them rise and thinking about Lev's request, turning it over in my mind.
Could I really be with a Mafia hitman, a man who kills people for a living?
His life is so different from everything I've known. I don’t know that I could learn to live with the danger and the violence.
What he does is abhorrent and dangerous, and what if he just didn't come home one night? What would I do then?
The flames crackle and pop, filling the silence with their voice, and I pull my knees up to my chest again and rest my chin on them while I stare into the dancing orange light.
I don't have any answers for any of the questions that swarm my mind. Maybe I won't have any for a long time, or maybe I never will. But I know I feel safer when I'm with him.
Call me a fool because without him there's no danger, and that would mean I'm inherently safer, but I don't think so. He brings a grounding to my soul I need—that I've always needed. And I don't know what my normal, boring life would look like without having that newfound hope.
Maybe the real question isn't whether I can be happy with Lev.
Maybe the question is whether I can be happy without him.