Chapter 28 #3
I look at Dominik because I have to know if he’ll flinch from that too.
He doesn’t. He stands like he lives—weight on both feet, shoulders like a wall, eyes steady on me.
If I say no to him, I think he’ll crack without showing me where.
He’ll reach for a gun and a lie, and he’ll keep moving.
If I say yes, he’ll be exactly what he promised, for better or worse.
I want to be the kind of person who chooses the thing that makes me brave instead of the thing that makes me nostalgic.
“Say it,” Archer urges, desperate and cruel. “Say my name and we’ll leave, and you can pretend you didn’t fuck this monster.”
Now he’s being unnecessarily vulgar because my brother knows he’s not going to win.
Dominik’s mouth tics, the smallest movement. “If she leaves with you,” he says, “you don’t use that word about me in front of her again.”
“Or what?” Archer sneers.
“Or I’ll teach you other words,” Dominik says.
All he asks if I choose to leave is that I try to remember him as the good man he longs to be. The man I saw in him. See in him.
The choice isn’t loud inside me. I expected a crash, a drum. It’s just a soft click, like a key turning in a lock that was always meant for it.
One step forward and the floor doesn’t tilt; it steadies.
I stop in front of Dominik, and I tip my face up. His pupils go dark. His chest swells with a breath he controls into quiet. My hands shake a little until I tell them not to. “I am choosing you,” I say. “I’m choosing to keep you both alive. Please don’t forget that when everything else gets ugly.”
Dominik’s jaw flexes once, something like pain punching through the flat line of his control. For the first time since he stepped into the room, his hand moves toward me and doesn’t stop. He touches the side of my neck with his knuckles as if I’m a match he means to strike.
Behind me, Archer makes a sound I don’t have a word for. It’s too raw to be anger, too sharp to be grief. The chain scrapes the table as he jerks.
“You’re killing me and choosing him,” he says. The accusation scrapes my spine and leaves a mark. He doesn’t get it; the gigantic sacrifice I’m making for him. He never has, not really.
Dominik hasn’t realized it, either. And I can’t bear to tell him. Not yet.
His fingers curve around the nape of my neck, just enough pressure to make my breath catch.
The heat ripples out through me and everything else gets very quiet.
I rise onto my toes before I can second-guess the part of me that’s been wanting to do this again like it’s more necessary to my body than oxygen. I press my mouth to his.
Dominik doesn’t make a noise. He doesn’t have to.
The way his hand tightens, the way his other arm comes around my waist and pulls me against him like the world is about to tilt and he’s securing the most important parts, the way he opens his mouth on mine—slow, controlled, then not—that’s his sound.
I taste heat and iron and something stubborn I could learn to live on.
The kiss isn’t sweet. It’s not meant to be.
It’s claiming and defiant and a little desperate, like signing my name in blood on a week-long contract that was already binding before I met him.
Archer shouts something behind us. The guards shift and then pretend they didn’t. My heart is doing stupid gymnastic things I would mock if I could think straight.
Dominik breaks the kiss first. His forehead rests against mine as he breathes in like he’s memorizing the taste of me. When he lifts his head, the softness that flickered before is gone again, locked behind whatever door he uses when he walks into rooms with men who think love is a weakness.
“Renat,” he says without raising his voice, and I realize the man has been in the hallway this whole time like a shadow. “No one in or out of the building without my eyes on them. Petrov stays on the side door until I say otherwise.”
“Yes, sir,” Petrov says.
Dominik kisses me again, briefly, like an apology.
“What the fuck?” Archer shouts. “You just going to leave me chained here so you can make out like teenagers? This is a fucking joke.”
Dominik turns to him. “You get to live because she decided,” he says. “I suggest you learn how to be quiet with gratitude. It’s a new skill for you, I know.”
“I’m dead anyway,” Archer hurls back. “That’s what her choice means. Maybe you’ll let me run. Maybe you’ll give me a car and money to make her think I have a chance. Your brother will still demand my blood. And yours if you let me go.”
Dominik says, “Don’t flatter yourself that you can make him forget either. Like she can make him forget it.” He looks at me again. The angle of his head shifts, and he’s suddenly all calculation, a map unfolding, reassessing.
Before he can figure out my plan, I tell him, “I want a minute alone with him. With the door open and men in the hall who can see. I want to say goodbye.”
Dominik’s eyes hold mine, and the decision he makes runs like a quiet click through the room. “You get two,” he says. “Petrov, the door stays open. If he breathes wrong, I come back with my gun in my hand.”
Petrov nods and steps to the side to leave a line of sight. Archer is vibrating with fury and fear, which always registered as the same thing in him. I walk back to him, and the chain trembles because his hands are shaking.
“You’re really going to do this,” he says, trying for calm but sounding shattered. “You’re going to send me out with a bullet in my head and go hold that man’s hand like it means something other than his signature on a death warrant.”
“I’m doing this for the person who won’t ever use me as a shield, not just for you,” I say.
Deep down, I know that’s the only reason Archer wanted me to run with him.
He thought that if I was by his side, he may not meet his end, that the Bratva wouldn’t be as quick to shoot to kill.
“I’m going to stop being a hostage to your mistakes. ”
“He’ll use you,” he says. “Men like that don’t know how to love. They selfishly manipulate people like they’re nothing.”
I reach for Archer through the cuffs and when I put my hands on his shoulders, he shudders. “I’ll survive because that’s how you’ve always treated me.”
He closes his eyes tight as if the light hurts them. “You’ll never forgive me.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” I say, honest and mean and kind in the same breath. “But that was always true. This just made it real.”
Archer looks at me, and for a second, he’s my brother again, pearly scar on his nose from when a bike handle caught him, the dimple that appears only when he says something terrible and thinks it’s funny.
“I didn’t just choose Dom. I chose you too.”
He studies me closer with a frown before understanding dawns on him, and he almost smiles. “You…you were always braver than me,” he whispers. “I just didn’t want you to know it.”
“You made me that way,” I say.
He huffs something that wants to be a laugh and isn’t. I squeeze his shoulders once, a benediction or a warning, I don’t know which, and then I step back because two minutes is a short time, and I’ve already spent most of my life giving my time to him. I want the rest of my time to be my own.
I tear my eyes away from him, knowing that things will never be the same between us now. That’s for the best, though. My fate no longer rests in his hands.
“Tell your boss…I accept his offer,” I say to Petrov. His eyes widen in surprise, and his mouth opens as if to argue, but I slap my palm over it. “For Dom and for Archer,” I add in a whisper. “No one else hears it from you. Understood?”
A long moment passes before he finally gives me a small, respectful nod.
I find Dominik in the living room. He looks at me like he’s inventorying a war vault before walking into battle. “Ready?” he asks.
“No,” I say, and his mouth curves the smallest amount because he appreciates a good honest answer. “But yes.”
He nods. “We move in fifteen,” he tells Petrov. “Get whatever POS is sitting around ready for him. Three cars, middle for us.”
For us. I feel like I’m going to be sick.
“For us,” I agree, and I take Dominik’s hand because my body already decided for me when my mind was still collecting arguments.
His strong fingers curl around mine, and the relief that surges through me is so intense I want to be embarrassed by it.
I’m not. My palm fits his like it remembers a shape it wasn’t ever taught.
Dominik squeezes once, then lets go because he has things to order and men to sharpen and a brother to defy. He turns to go and stops, glancing back at me with that small tilt of his head that has already become a private question. Are you all right?
“Yes,” I say honestly. Because I am. Or I will be, once this is all over.
“Then that’s all that matters,” he says, and for another small, dangerous second the cage doesn’t look like bars. It looks like a ring you draw around what you claim.
He steps into the hallway and barks orders mostly in Russian, but I get the gist of them. From the other room, Archer mutters curses that sound like prayers if you strain your ears. I stand between them and feel the strange, terrifying relief of owning the ground underneath my feet.
When the guards eventually bring in Archer, uncuffed, I look at my brother one last time. His eyes cut to mine and away, then back again like he can’t help it. “I’ll hate you for this,” he says with a grin.
“I’ve hated you for less,” I answer. And the sad thing is he knows it’s true.
“Thank you,” he adds after a moment, and his gratitude is so small and human it cracks me open.
“Don’t make me regret it.”
He nods his agreement. I hope it’s not a lie.
I walk away before Archer can say anything that will undo me. In the foyer, the guards part without looking like they’re moving. Dominik is at the end of the corridor, phone to his ear, voice a quiet knife in Russian I can’t follow and don’t need to. He ends the call and pockets the device.
“You handled that remarkably well,” he says to me.
“No, I didn’t,” I say. “But I did it the only way I could.”
“Get ready. When we leave, we sit in the middle seat, middle car. Petrov will ride behind us. Renat will ride ahead. Viktor will be our navigator. If you need anything, tell me.”
“And you’ll make it appear,” I say, because he’s taught me how this works. “Like magic.”
“If it’s possible, I will,” he says, and something wicked and warm walks across his mouth. “I do love the way you look at me like I could move mountains for you if I tried.”
Dominik steps closer and my pulse climbs for a different reason than fear.
He lifts his hand like he might touch my cheek and changes his mind because he’s a man who knows how to save something for later and I’m going to have to learn that skill if it kills me.
His fingers ghost the air two inches from my jaw, and my skin rises to meet nothing like it might qualify if it tries hard enough.
“Stay next to me at all times,” he says, and it should sound bossy, but it doesn’t. It sounds like a wish.
“I will,” I lie.
He nods once and the almost-smile is back. I want to put my mouth on it. Later. After all this is over. I’ll always be grateful to Dominik even when I hate myself.
He turns away from me to make plans, and I watch him go with the kind of trust a person puts in the tide to keep coming back, to never relent, because it doesn’t know how to do anything else.
That’s exactly what I’m counting on.