Chapter 30
Lidiya
The separation is immediate and savage. One second, I’m wrapped around him, full of him, his heartbeat against my chest like a second pulse I didn’t ask for.
The next, I’m on the leather seat beside him, smoothing my dress down with hands that won’t stop trembling, and the space between us feels like a wound that hasn’t decided whether it’s going to heal or fester.
The ache of him between my thighs, the slick evidence of what we just did, cools against my skin, and I should be horrified.
I should be drowning in regret and self-loathing and every sensible emotion a woman should feel after fucking a Bratva heir-slash-monster-slash-whatever else he is in a church car park while her entire identity lies in smoking ruins around her.
Instead, I feel calm.
Not the numb kind. Not the dissociative, floating-above-my-body calm that came with the auction or the bathtub or the knowledge of three dead men in the hallway.
This is different. This is the calm that comes after a storm has ripped through, and there’s nothing left to destroy.
The wreckage is already here. The worst has already happened.
In the middle of it, I chose something. For myself.
With my voice, my pussy sliding over his enormous cock, and my hands fisted in his shirt like I couldn’t bear the thought of him disappearing.
That matters. Even if it shouldn’t.
I pull my underwear back into place and wipe my palms on my thighs, a functional gesture that pretends I’m putting myself back together when really, I’m just redistributing the chaos into manageable piles.
Damien has already sorted himself out, but I refuse to look at him because if I look, I’ll want to touch, and if I touch, we’ll be here until Kirill wears a groove into the tarmac.
I stare at the fogged window instead, thanking God, ironically, for the tint that darkens it.
Through the condensation, the church spire is a grey accusation pointing skyward, and I wonder briefly if there’s a special circle of hell reserved for women who have earth-shattering orgasms in consecrated car parks while their entire identity collapses like a house of cards.
Probably. And it’s probably next to the circle reserved for men who propose marriage before lunch and make you come before dinner.
I press my forehead against the cool glass and let the condensation kiss my skin. My breath adds another layer of fog, and I trace a line through it with my fingertip without thinking—a single, meaningless stroke that disappears as fast as I draw it.
“Anna,” I say to the window. Testing the name. Rolling it around my mouth like a foreign sweet I don’t recognise the flavour of.
It doesn’t fit. It sits on my tongue like someone else’s coat draped over my frame—wrong size, wrong weight, wrong everything.
I’ve been Lidiya for twenty-eight years.
Lidiya, who counts coins. Lidiya, who skips meals.
Lidiya, who walked onto a stage in a taped-up dress because five hundred quid felt like a fortune.
If Orlov is telling the truth, and I’m not ready to accept that she is, not fully, not yet, then Lidiya was a costume stitched by people who stole me from a life I’ll never remember living.
My father. The man who borrowed money he couldn’t repay. The man who died owing the Voronovs a debt that landed on my back like an inheritance I never signed for.
The cruelty of that alone is enough to make me want to cry myself into an early grave.
He wasn’t my father. He was a courier who traded a baby for the erasure of what he owed.
The thought makes my stomach lurch so violently that I press my fist against my mouth.
“Breathe,” Damien says beside me, and his hand hovers near my back without touching. Respecting the rules I already shattered twenty minutes ago when I begged him to fuck me.
I breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The same mechanical rhythm I’ve used in every crisis since I was old enough to understand that crises were a permanent feature of my existence, not a temporary glitch.
The nausea recedes. Not fully. It retreats to a manageable distance, crouching in the pit of my stomach like something waiting for permission to return.
“I need air,” I say, and reach for the door handle.
His hand wraps around my wrist. “Can’t let you do that.”
“Please,” I whisper.
He breathes in slowly but shakes his head. “You step out of this car, even for a second without me there shielding you, you are a target.”
“Then shield me, but I need to move, to feel the cold, to do something other than sit here and wallow.”
He debates with himself for a few seconds before he opens his door and climbs out. Seconds later, my door opens, and he holds a hand out for me while scanning the church grounds like a hawk. He frowns.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, taking his hand and getting out.
“Kirill,” he murmurs and slams the car door shut, pulling me into his side and moving towards the grassy area behind the church.
“What about him?” I ask, hurrying to keep up.
“Where is he?” he asks and then stops dead with a sharp inhale.
I look up at Damien and then follow his line of sight. “Fuck!” I exclaim before Damien’s hand closes over my mouth.
Kirill is slumped on a bench, blood staining his shirt from a knife wound to the gut. I whimper and move closer to Damien. He has gone stone cold in every sense.
He turns in a circle, bringing me with him, making me feel dizzy as he scans the area with that laser-like gaze that I feel could slice through a man with the intensity of it.
Damien shoves me behind him and moves fast. I match him, my boots slipping on wet grass as we reach the bench.
Kirill’s eyes are open. Glassy. The knife is gone. Blood soaks his shirt, dark and spreading. His breath comes in short, jagged pulls. He’s alive.
“Thank God,” I breathe and then wince at the blasphemy on holy ground.
“Lidiya,” Damien says, his tone soft but icy. “Can you drive?”
“Yes.” I say, “but not officially.” Now isn’t the time to tell that my fake dad taught me in the Tesco car park with his beat-up old Volvo. We laughed, and joked, and it was memories I hold onto on my darkest days.
And it was all a lie.
Damien nods and scoops Kirill up, holding him up as he tightens his hold around the other man’s waist. “Move,” he says to me.
I nod and scramble forward as Damien stays at my back with Kirill gushing blood out of his gut that hits the ground as we aim for the car. I yank the door open and climb into the driver’s seat. “Where is the key?” I ask, looking all around for the ignition.
“Brake. Push the start button,” Damien growls as he practically throws Kirill onto the back seat before ripping his coat off and joining him.
He presses the coat to the wound. “Lidiya,” he says calmly as I search for a fucking Start button, even though I have no idea what that is.
I find the button and press it triumphantly.
The engine growls alive, and my foot fumbles on the brake instead of the accelerator because my brain has turned into static.
This is nothing like Dad’s old Volvo.
“Drive,” Damien says, voice low and surgical. “Straight out. Left. Keep going left unless I tell you otherwise.”
“In a circle?” I ask because I need instructions like I’m five years old right now.
“That’s what I said,” he grits out.
I slap the car into D and lurch forward, tyres bumping over the lip of the car park. My heart is in my throat, and my hands are slippery on the wheel. I wipe one palm on my dress and take the turn too wide, clipping a bit of kerb. The jolt stings up my arms.
“Breathe,” he says behind me. Calm. Like we didn’t just have sex in this car while his man was stabbed and left for dead in a graveyard.
I breathe. I aim the car at the gap in traffic and slide in faster than I mean to. A horn blares. I flinch and correct. The church disappears in the rear mirror.
“How bad?” I ask, eyes flicking between the road and the ghost of Kirill’s reflection.
“Bad enough.”
“Hospital?”
“No hospitals.” He presses harder on the wound and pulls out his phone. “Marek. Meet me at home. Priority.” He ends the call without pleasantries and taps something else into his phone. He throws it onto the passenger seat. “Follow Maps.”
I nod and listen to the instructions.
I’m so focused, I don’t see the van until it’s already hurtling through the red light.
Metal screams against metal as it slams into us, the impact punching the air from my lungs.
My skull cracks against the window. The Mercedes spins wildly, tyres shrieking across asphalt, the world outside blurring into streaks of colour and light.
My hands clutch the wheel uselessly as we careen off the road, gravity shifting violently around us as Damien swears and yells at me to duck.