Chapter 25
Alina
Dominik’s hand trails up my side. His touch is like fire, but the burn feels good. I place my hand on top of his, but I don’t push it away or stop him. I follow his movements as his hand glides upward, moving over the curve of my breast and around to the back of my neck.
Dominik stiffens a little when his wound grazes my body, and that’s enough to send me hurtling back down to reality.
I pull away from the perfection and rightness of him to say, “Gavriil offered me a deal.” The confession feels like stepping onto thin ice. “He said if I went with him, he’d spare Archer, and he would spare you.”
Dominik’s eyes darken in a way that should scare me but doesn’t.
“You will not agree to anything that allows him to touch you,” he grits out.
Each word is clean enough to cut before his lips claim mine again.
They claim and don’t relent until I let out a gasp when his thigh slips between mine, the pressure making my cheeks flush.
“I told him no,” I say against his lips, because I need him to have that, to put it in a place inside him that keeps the worst parts quiet. “I couldn’t do it. Not like that.”
“Good girl,” he murmurs, then praises me again with a searing kiss.
I should hate those words, his approval. I don’t. My lungs forget to breathe. Then I remember…
Pressing my palms to his chest to put space between us, I look up at his eyes and ask, “Why didn’t you tell me about Archer and that the meetings with the biker had been going on for months?”
“You know why,” Dominik replies quietly.
“My brother has made his decisions. You don’t have to keep protecting me from them. I can handle the truth. Always.”
“I know you can, hellcat,” he says. “From now on, I’ll give you the truth.”
“Okay,” I say in relief because I believe him. I know he was only trying to keep me from having to endure more pain, no other reason.
“Gavriil said tomorrow,” I remind him, because the deadline has to be put between us to keep it from pushing us closer. “What are you going to do?”
“Work,” he says, and the word is ugly and comforting at once. “Move men, guns, and money.” His thumb traces a line under my ear, barely pressure, just enough to teach my pulse to jump. “And keep you close.”
“You can’t keep everything,” I say, softer than anything I’ve said all day. I’m not sure which of us needs to hear it more. “Not with Gavriil holding a knife to your throat.”
He leans in and kisses me gently, just enough that his breath warms my mouth. The restraint is worse than any surrender. “Watch me,” he says.
The room tilts, delicate as a full glass of water in a shaky hand.
My body answers for me, a shiver I can’t swallow.
I have a moment where I see myself from the outside—a brave woman in a worn tee, hair down, eyes too wide, mouth learning a man by heart—and I don’t know which part of that should make me turn away. I don’t turn.
Dominik’s hand drops to the edge of my shirt, thumb brushing the hem like a question he already knows the answer to and respects anyway.
I grab his hand and shove it underneath.
His gray eyes widen in surprise as his calloused palm strokes along my side, higher until he’s cupping my bare breast. Dominik groans and squeezes.
I feel the pull of pleasure between my thighs.
The wrong, traitorous throbbing that started back when Gavriil showed up increases tenfold.
I don’t pretend to understand my body’s reaction to danger masquerading as a man.
If I had to guess, I’d say part of me just wants to be the one who unravels men like that—rips off their emotional armor and makes them feel vulnerable and weak for once—and I hate myself for it.
When Dominik starts to kiss me again, I feel so guilty for thinking about his brother that I stop him with my rambling. “He might come back to try to change my mind,” I say, guilt and dread tangling in my throat. “When you’re gone.”
“He won’t be alone with you again,” Dominik says. “Not while I breathe.”
I know that’s a promise he can’t realistically keep—not with his brother—but I like hearing it anyway.
As if he’s thinking the same thing, he pulls his hand out from under my shirt and steps back an inch. Apparently, he’s decided to be honorable when it would be so easy not to be. The inch hurts.
“Did you eat?” he asks, and even though I know it’s a distraction, the gentleness feels like a more intimate kiss.
“Yes.”
“Then lie down and rest.” He tilts his head, cataloguing me again, but it isn’t like his brother’s look. It feels like being chosen, not priced. “You look like you haven’t slept in a year, hellcat.”
“Feels like it too.” I force a breath in, then out, and find the ground with my feet again. “Will you rest?”
He smiles without showing teeth, the quiet, dangerous version of it that only happens when the world narrows down to the two of us. “No.” His gaze flicks to the door and back. “But I’ll stay close.”
“In the chair?” I ask.
“In the chair, eventually,” he agrees. “I’ll be nearby if even a shadow moves wrong.”
“I know you will be,” I say, and there’s truth in it and something else that sounds like a vow.
“I should speak to the guards.” He moves toward the door and then stops. He returns one step, maybe two, lifts his hand, and fits his palm over my chest. It’s not a grope this time. It’s a claim and a promise, all at once. My heart thunders into that hand.
“You’re not a bargaining chip,” he says, voice roughened by something I don’t know how to handle yet. “Not for him. Not for me. Not even for yourself.”
“What am I then?” I ask, because if I don’t, I’ll never sleep again.
Dominik’s eyes hold mine until the city outside forgets to blink. “Mine,” he says. The word should feel like a cage. It doesn’t. It feels like somebody finally closing a door against the storm and letting me breathe.
Before I can answer, his phone buzzes. He steps away, thumb sliding, mouth flattening as he listens to a voice I can’t hear and understands a risk I can’t see. “Good,” he says finally. “Hold position. No noise.”
“Viktor or Petrov?” I guess when he ends the call.
“Viktor,” he confirms. “And the clock.” The way he says it tells me something just shifted on the invisible countdown between him and his brother. He glances toward the hallway. “Go rest. I’ll be here when you wake.”
“Your room or mine?” I know the answer; I just want to hear him say it.
“Mine,” he replies without leaving any room for argument.
The guards return to the inside of the penthouse, ghosts with earpieces.
They pretend not to watch as I cross to the hall.
I stop in the doorway and look back because I’m weak and because I finally give myself permission to be.
Dominik looks like a man about to get violent against time to make it behave for him.
He looks like a man who would snap his brother’s neck for me and then carry my guilt too, if I asked him to.
He looks like a man I should never want, should never put in that position.
I promise myself that I won’t do that, even if I’m beginning to suspect it’s a lie.
“Dom,” I say because I can.
He tips his head, that quarter-smile ghosting his mouth. “Alina.”
My name in his voice is a sin and a blessing. I tuck it into the place in me I’m not willing to examine yet. I step into his room and close the door, the soft click the first sound all day that doesn’t frighten me. It isn’t prison bars shutting. It’s a line being drawn.
I lie down on top of the covers, close my eyes, and listen for the scrape of the chair that finally comes, for the quiet curse when his wound reminds him he’s human, for the sigh when he decides to give the night a little piece of himself anyway—sleep he pretends he doesn’t need.
When sleep finally finds me, it trips over his name.
I come to slowly, waking with a hand on my shoulder, a thumb stroking carefully.
He treats me like I’m fragile, even when I’m not, and I love it anyway.
The light outside is different. It’s a shade grayer, matching the mood Gavriil left behind.
Dominik is a silhouette, but even as a shadow, he feels safer than anything else in this city.
“I’m heading out, dikaya koshka,” he says softly, because information is our love language. “We’re going to get the rest of the guns.”
A cold pulse snaps through me.
“When?”
“Soon,” he answers. His voice is steady, but the edges of it are worn. He looks behind him, toward the world that exists outside his bedroom. “Gavriil won’t come back today. He made his point. Now he waits for mine.”
Relief shouldn’t feel like guilt, but it does.
“What if your points don’t match up?” I whisper. I don’t say the rest—that this all feels like a war I accidentally started.
He smiles with no humor, all hunger. “Then I’ll have to sharpen mine.”
My stomach drops at the sound of that promise.
I sit up. The blanket slips, and I pull it back around myself like armor. Dominik must have covered me with it after I fell asleep. “If I were to even consider what he asked—” I start, before he leaves, walking headfirst into more gunfire.
He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear like we’ve done this a hundred times.
“Eat. Shower. Rest. If you think of anything your brother might be stupid enough to try, tell me.” His voice goes rough.
“I’m leaving you a phone for emergencies, with my number programmed in it already.
” He sets it on the nightstand within my reach.
“Call me if you need anything and I’ll be here in a heartbeat. ”
“I know,” I say, because I do know. God help me, I do.
He nods once, that private, pleased motion he thinks I don’t see. “Good girl,” he says again, softer, and leaves, shutting the door behind him. The words shouldn’t warm every inch of me, but they do.
The city outside the windows is the same. The clock is just louder, and every tick feels like it’s counting down to the moment I have to decide who I’m willing to lose.