Chapter 37 Damien
Damien
Lidiya excuses herself under the pretence that she is going to freshen up.
But really, I know she is going to cry until she feels strong enough to rejoin me.
Hopefully, by then, Anton will be back with food.
Time is ticking on, and I want Lidiya fed and happy so she can rest easier tonight.
Tomorrow is going to be a day that she has never had to face before, and while I’m looking forward to it with every cell in my body, Lidiya isn’t built for this life.
She doesn’t have to be. That’s what I’m here for.
Tomorrow, it is just the two of us and whatever comes our way. She is brave, wanting to walk in there with her head held high, and I will do everything in my power to make sure she walks back out again.
“Please, Dear God, tell me he is back?” she says, moving through the room like a goddess.
“Not long. Anton isn’t known for driving slowly.”
“As long as he doesn’t have a crash and loses my kebab all over the windscreen.”
“You are obsessed with this kebab.”
“Hungry,” she mutters, but her cheeks flush and she looks away. I’ve hit a nerve.
“Talk to me,” I say softly, keeping the countertop between us as her shield.
“About what?”
“The kebab.”
“It’s stupid,” she says.
“I doubt it. Your feelings are valid.”
She gives me a scathing glare. “You can be so enlightened for a brute.”
“I have layers.”
“Hm, well. There is no story except that of a poor little English-Russian girl whose mouth watered every time she walked past a takeaway and couldn’t afford to get anything. Okay? Happy?”
No. Not happy. The opposite of happy. The image of her walking past lit windows, stomach empty, the smell of grilled meat and warm bread hitting her like a taunt—it sits in my chest like a coal I can’t spit out.
“There was this Turkish place,” she continues, picking at the edge of the counter like she’s trying to peel the granite.
“Near my flat. The owner, Hasan, would see me walk past, and sometimes he would call me over. ‘Lidiya, come, come, I made too much, it will go to waste.’ He knew. He absolutely knew I couldn’t afford it, and he never once made me feel small about it. ”
Her voice cracks on the word small, and I grip the edge of the counter because if I move towards her right now, she’ll stop talking, and I need her to keep talking. I need to hear every single word of this, so it brands itself into my memory and never lets me forget what I failed to see.
“He’d wrap it up in extra foil, so it stayed warm on the walk home.
Always put extra sauce on. Sometimes fries.
He never asked for anything. Never wanted anything.
Just... kindness. So yes, I’m obsessed with the kebab because it reminds me that not everyone in this world operates on transactions, leverage, and power plays.
Some people are just nice enough to give you a kebab when you can’t afford one. ”
“I will buy you all the kebabs,” I say, meaning it.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’ll buy you a kebab shop, and you can just go in and eat them all.” My eyes flash with amusement as her mouth curves up slightly.
“Are you teasing me, Voronov?”
“Nope. Never. Whatever you want, you get.”
“You’re an arse.”
“That’s a downgrade from arsehole cunt. I’ll take it.”
Her smile brightens, and then she groans as the buzzer goes, and moments later, Anton strolls through with a pile of pizza boxes and kebab wraps.
Lidiya snatches them from him and places them on the counter, sliding onto the chair and tucking in with all the grace of a woman who has waited the best part of an hour for her food.
“Thanks for the rush job,” she mumbles around a bite of kebab. “Hope you didn’t get a ticket.”
Anton stares at her as if he has never seen a woman devour a kebab in record time before. “Pleasure,” he grits out as I glare at him for staring. He moves out, and I open the pizza box with a grimace.
“Here goes nothing,” I say and pick up a slice as Lidiya snorts at me.
“Are you serious? Have you never had takeaway pizza before?”
“I’ve had pizza,” I say, but the defensive edge in my voice gives me away. “Just not... this kind.”
“This kind being the kind that normal people eat?”
“I’ve eaten pizza in Rome. Naples. That place in Knightsbridge that has a three-month waiting list.”
“Oh my God.” She puts the kebab down long enough to stare at me with genuine pity. “That’s so sad.”
No one has ever called me sad before. Sadistic maybe. But not sad. I wield the slice like a weapon and take a bite.
It’s good. It’s offensively good. The grease soaks through the base and coats my fingers, and the pepperoni has that particular salty bite that no Michelin-starred kitchen has ever managed to replicate because they’re too busy deconstructing things that don’t need deconstructing.
Lidiya is watching me with the kind of intensity she usually reserves for moments when she’s deciding whether to slap me or kiss me.
“Well?” she demands.
“It’s adequate.”
“Adequate.” She shakes her head, licks chilli sauce from her thumb and returns to her kebab with the fervour of a woman who is relishing every bite in case it’s her last. We eat in companionable silence for a while, and I watch her demolish a kebab, half a pizza, and a mountain of fries with a dedication that borders on religious.
The cake—a chocolate thing with too much icing—she sets aside with a reverence that tells me it’s being saved, not ignored.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking up.
“I’m observing.”
“Same thing. Stop it.”
I don’t stop. I can’t. There’s something about watching her eat without fear, without rationing, without the quiet calculation I now know was running behind her eyes every time she looked at food. She eats like someone who’s been given permission to be hungry, and the simplicity of that guts me.
She wipes her hands on a napkin and leans back, one hand on her stomach. “I might actually explode.”
“Please don’t. I’ve just had the carpets cleaned.”
She laughs. A real one. Full and unguarded and slightly too loud for the quiet house, and the sound of it rearranges something in my chest that I thought was permanently fixed in place.
“Thank you,” she says, and the sincerity catches me off guard because she’s looking at me like the kebab was the kindest thing anyone’s done for her in months. Which, given what I now know about her life, it might be.
“Don’t thank me. Thank Anton. He’s the one who went for it.”
“But he’s not the one I can kiss with gratitude.” She is taunting me.
I rise to it and growl, because the thought makes me blind with rage. “Try it, and you will be burying him behind the kebab shop.”
She laughs again, softer this time, and props her chin on her hand. “See, that’s the Damien I need tomorrow. The one who threatens to bury people behind kebab shops without blinking.”
“That Damien never left. He’s just been sitting very still, so you’d stop throwing things at him.”
“I didn’t throw anything.”
“Metaphorically, you threw a kitchen sink, a grenade, and my own conscience at me. In that order.”
She tilts her head, considering. “Fair.”
I clear the boxes and stack them by the bin because there’s something grounding about the mundane act of tidying up after a meal.
Like if I keep my hands busy with pizza boxes, they won’t reach for her.
She’s watching me again, but the edge is gone.
What’s left is something quieter. Warmer.
The kind of look that makes me want to do hot and filthy things to her.
I wipe down the counter and hang the cloth over the tap like a man who has his shit together.
“Bed,” I say.
Her eyebrow arches.
“To sleep. Rest. Whatever your body needs. You’re concussed, you’ve been in a car crash, and you’ve eaten enough to feed a small army. Your body needs to recover.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be down here. Planning.”
“Planning what?”
“How to walk into a private members’ club tomorrow and dismantle a seventy-nine-year-old woman’s empire without getting us both killed.”
She slides off the stool and stands there for a moment, barefoot on the kitchen tiles in the black satin pyjamas I bought for her. She looks like a woman on the verge of a breakthrough, but she shuts it down and nods briskly. “I’ll see you later,” she says and turns on her heel.
Before she can make it one step, I move in front of her and grasp her throat lightly. “What? No kiss?”
She holds my gaze for three full seconds, each one a small war I can see playing out behind her eyes. Then she rises on her toes, grips the front of my shirt, and presses her mouth to mine.
It’s brief. Barely a brush. The kind of kiss you give someone at the end of a first date when you’re not sure you want a second one. But her fingers tighten in my shirt for a fraction of a heartbeat longer than necessary, and the warmth of her lingers on my lips after she pulls back.
“Until I get over what you did, that’s all you get,” she says quietly before she slips out of my grip and heads upstairs, looking stronger than she has since I met her.