Chapter 34 #2
I watch him hesitate for a fraction of a second before he drops to his knees again and begins gathering the scattered notes.
His movements are methodical, precise, the same way he does everything else.
Each note gets smoothed, straightened, placed back into the lockbox with a care that feels almost reverent.
I don’t help. I stand there wrapped in my towel, watching a Bratva heir crawl around his bedroom floor collecting money he stole from me whilst I starved, and something about the visual satisfaction of it helps ease the knot in my chest. Just a little.
When the last note is back in the box, he stands and holds it out to me.
“Now what?” he asks.
“This money is not mine. I owed the debt my father accrued to your family. I took on the obligation. I paid what you asked of me, even though it cost me in ways you can never truly fathom. You doing what you did… it hurts. It hurts like fuck, but the fact remains that money wasn’t ever mine.
If you hadn’t come along and kept the fucking payments I gave you, to pay it yourself, your Pakhan would’ve sent someone else who would’ve probably taken interest on top for himself and maybe more than that. ”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying this money is yours. I don’t want it.”
“Lidiya,” he breathes with a sound of anguish that nearly makes me snatch it off him and run.
“This is the right thing to do. I don’t want to owe anyone. I don’t want the cash, I don’t want the building. I will keep paying my debt until the day I die. Take it back.”
His face cycles through emotions of shock, pain, something that looks almost like grief, and the raw visibility of it makes me want to take the words back.
But I don’t. Because accepting that money, accepting the building, accepting anything from him right now feels like swallowing poison wrapped in velvet.
“No.” The word is flat. Final.
“No?” I repeat, because surely I’ve misheard him.
“No,” he says again, and sets the lockbox on the bed beside me. “The building stays in your name. The money is yours. You can burn it, donate it, shove it down the toilet for all I care, but I’m not taking it back.”
“You don’t get to make that decision for me,” I snap, and the irony of the statement isn’t lost on either of us. “You said you would stop doing that.”
His jaw tightens. “You’re right. I did say that. But I’m also not taking back something I gave you, even if you’re throwing it at me in anger. The building generates income you didn’t have yesterday. The money is restitution for what I took. Neither of those things are debts you owe me.”
“Everything with you is a debt,” I say bitterly. “Everything is leverage. This is just another way to keep me tied to you.”
“If that’s what you think, then sell the building tomorrow.” His voice is hard now, the softness from moments ago evaporating. “Transfer it. Walk away from every penny. But you’re not giving it to me out of some misguided sense of martyrdom.”
“It’s not martyrdom,” I say, but my voice wavers. “It’s self-preservation. I don’t want to owe you.”
“You don’t.” He steps closer, and I can feel the heat radiating off his still-damp skin. “The debt your father accrued? Gone. The building? Yours, free and clear, no strings. The money in that box? Restitution for what I took from you whilst you suffered. None of it comes with conditions.”
“Everything comes with conditions,” I counter, because I’ve learned that lesson the hard way, over and over, until it’s carved into my bones. “Especially with men like you.”
“Men like me.” He repeats the phrase I threw at him, and something dark flashes across his face.
“You’re right. I was wrong to say that you didn’t know men like me.
We are all the same. Men like me always have an angle.
Always have a price. But this?” He gestures to the lockbox.
“This isn’t about leverage. This is about me trying to be less of a bastard than I was raised to be. ”
I want to believe him. I want to believe him so badly it makes my chest ache. But belief requires trust, and trust requires evidence, and all the evidence I have points to a man who manipulates situations to his advantage.
“I need time,” I say finally, because standing here arguing whilst wrapped in a towel is doing nothing except making me more confused. “I need time to think without you hovering over me, dressed only in a towel with your sexy as fuck tats on show, while my whole life as I knew it has fallen apart.”
“About that,” he says, eyes narrowed.
I sigh. “I know. I know we have to go and see Orlov. Tomorrow. It’s just more than I can take right now.”
“Okay,” he says and moves to the wardrobe. He pulls out some clothes, and without another word, he leaves me alone as I asked him to do.
The trouble is, I don’t really want to be alone. I’ve been alone my whole life, even when I had my parents. My abductors.
Always alone.
I move the box onto the bedside cabinet and crawl into his bed, knowing how this looks, but too tired to care.