Chapter 38 Lidiya
Lidiya
Part of me thought he would join me. A bigger part hoped he would.
But of course, he is giving me the space I asked for because, for some reason, the Bratva monster is a gentleman.
Time ticks on, and it grows dark outside. I’ve been fed, kept warm, safe from harm, and yet none of that matters because I’m still alone and cold inside.
The sheets smell like him, and I pull the duvet tighter around myself and stare at the ceiling, tracing the faint shadows cast by the security lights outside.
Anna.
The name floats up again, and I let it sit this time instead of shoving it away. Anna Gorbacheva. Is that who I am? Is that who I was before Viktor and Nadia Kareva wrapped me in a forged birth certificate and a new life and carried me across borders like contraband?
I think about my mother. The woman who braided my hair before school, burnt toast every Sunday morning, and cried silently in the kitchen when she thought I couldn’t hear.
Was any of it real? Did she love me? Did she lie awake at night, knowing what she’d done, or did she convince herself it was justified because the alternative was worse?
The alternative being what? Death from whoever they owed money to?
My throat tightens. I roll onto my side and press my face into the pillow, breathing through the wave of nausea that accompanies every new thought about my parents. My abductors. The people who raised me, however imperfectly, however broke, however distant they sometimes felt.
There were good days. I cling to that. There were days when Dad would sit me on his knee and read to me in Russian.
There were afternoons when Mum would let me help her make pelmeni, my small fingers pressing the dough closed while she hummed something I now realise was probably a lullaby from a country I was stolen from.
Were those moments real? Can love coexist with theft? Can someone who took you from your family also genuinely care about you, or is that just Stockholm syndrome dressed up as childhood memories?
I don’t have answers. I’m not sure I ever will.
The clock on the bedside table reads half past ten.
I’ve been lying here for hours, cycling through the same thoughts like a dog chasing its tail.
My head throbs dully where it met the car window, and the painkillers Damien gave me are wearing off, leaving a low, persistent ache that pulses in time with my heartbeat.
He’s still awake, still planning, still being the barracuda circling the problem while I lie here pretending I can sleep.
I throw the duvet off and sit on the edge of the bed, my feet sinking into the plush carpet.
I slip off the pj bottoms and stand, crossing the bedroom quietly and opening the door.
Taking the stairs quietly, I move through the open plan areas to the hallway at the back that leads to his office. The door is open.
The lamp is on, casting a warm glow in the otherwise dark. I peek around the doorframe and see him sitting there, flipping through a folder, making notes with a pen, but also muttering voice notes in Russian into his phone.
I don’t move. I barely breathe. He is beautiful. A beautiful monster who uses violence to make space for himself and to protect me. I am under no illusions that tomorrow is going to be a bloodbath. I hope I survive it, but I think Damien wouldn’t allow me to be damaged in any way.
“Solnyshko,” he murmurs, not looking up from the file. “What are you doing up?”
“My head hurts,” I say, not sugar coating it.
His gaze shoots up, and he is out of his chair in under two seconds, moving towards me, his face full of concern.
“How bad?” he asks, his hand already cupping the side of my face, tilting it towards the lamplight so he can examine the wound at my temple.
His thumb ghosts over the bruised skin without touching it, and the care in the gesture contradicts every sharp edge of him.
“Bad enough that I can’t sleep. The painkillers from earlier wore off.”
“You shouldn’t be sleeping anyway. Concussion.” He drops his hand and moves to a cabinet in the corner, pulling out a first aid kit that looks more advanced than anything I’ve seen outside a hospital. He shakes out two pills and grabs a bottle of water from the side table. He hands them to me.
I take them without argument. The water is cold, and it helps.
“Sit,” he says, nodding to the leather chair opposite his desk.
I sit. The chair swallows me, and I pull my legs up beneath me. His gaze tracks the movement, lingers for half a second on the bare skin of my legs, then snaps back to my face with a discipline that must cost him something.
“What are you working on?” I ask because I need words between us, or I’ll do something reckless, like climb into his lap and bury my face in his neck and pretend I’m not still angry with him.
“Voronov business,” he says shortly.
“Got it,” I say and chew the inside of my lip.
He sits in his chair and studies me over the enormous desk. “If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,” he smirks.
“Well, we wouldn’t want that now, would we?”
“No,” he agrees, the smirk lingering. “We wouldn’t, because then I would have to kill myself for hurting you.”
“A vicious circle.”
“Exactly.”
The silence stretches, but it’s not uncomfortable.
It’s the kind of silence that happens when two people have already said the worst things they can say and do to each other and survived it.
I watch him return to his notes, his pen moving in sharp, decisive strokes across the paper, and I wonder what it’s like to live inside his head.
To carry the weight of a family like his and still find room to care about a woman who showed up in his life as a line item on a debt ledger.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
His gaze stays on the page. “You’re going to regardless.”
“Your dad. Does he approve of... this?” I gesture vaguely between us, encompassing the entire catastrophe of whatever we are.
His pen stills. “Baron doesn’t approve or disapprove. He calculates.”
“Baron. You know you never introduced me to him, and that’s not an answer.”
“Baron doesn’t do introductions. He assumes everyone already knows who he is.
It’s the only answer I have.” He sets the pen down and leans back, his shirt pulling across his chest in a way that makes my stomach do something unhelpful.
“My father measures everything by its utility to the family. If you’re useful, you’re tolerated. If you’re a liability, you’re removed.”
“And which am I?”
“Right now? Neither. You’re an unknown variable, and unknowns make him uncomfortable.”
“He didn’t seem uncomfortable. He seemed like a man who eats discomfort for breakfast and washes it down with the tears of his enemies.”
“That’s because he is.” Damien’s mouth twitches. “But even he has blind spots. You’re one of them.”
“Me? A blind spot?”
“He doesn’t know what to do with you. You’re not Bratva.
You’re not leverage he can use against another family.
You’re not a strategic alliance wrapped in a wedding dress.
You’re a woman his youngest son gave away his mother’s yacht for and is willing to burn everything for, and that doesn’t fit into any column on his spreadsheet. ”
The admission lands somewhere deep in my chest and stays there, warm and terrifying.
“Will he interfere tomorrow?”
“He told me to handle it. That’s as close to permission as Baron gets.”
“And if it goes wrong?”
“It won’t.”
“But if it does.”
His jaw tightens. “Then I deal with the consequences. That’s always been the arrangement. Baron gives me rope. A lot of it. If I hang myself with it, that’s my problem.”
“That’s a horrible arrangement.”
“It’s the only one I’ve ever known.” He says it without self-pity, which makes it worse. As if the dysfunction is so deeply embedded, he doesn’t even register it as dysfunction anymore. It’s just weather. The sky is blue. Water is wet. My father will let me drown if I miscalculate.
I pull my knees tighter to my chest and rest my chin on them. The painkillers are starting to take the edge off, softening the throb in my head. “Your brother is the heir. Is that why you get leeway?”
His gaze hardens briefly, and I think he won’t comment. So I’m surprised when he blows out a breath and says, “Yes. Roman hates me for it.”
“Roman.”
“He is five years older than me and the perfect son. I was the one who came along when they thought they couldn’t have any more kids.
The problem was, Baron had already taken on his nephew, his sister’s son, as mostly his own, and I was flung into a situation where I was wanted but had already been replaced. If that makes sense.”
“Weirdly, it does. Do you feel like they don’t want you?” The question is harsh, but I want to get to know him, and the only way to do that with him is to hit him where it hurts.
He laughs. It’s not bitter, it’s not mocking. It’s amusement. Plain and simple. “No. That is not what I’m saying. My mother dotes on me, maybe too much. Baron enjoys my whimsy.”
I nearly choke on my saliva. “Whimsy? I wouldn’t call you whimsical.”
“I am to Baron. I don’t fit into the mould. Roman is the heir, Laszlo is the second son he thought he wasn’t going to get. I am the…”
“The what?”
“The wild card,” he says, and the way he says it tells me he’s made peace with it long ago.
“Baron doesn’t need me to run the empire.
Roman does that. He doesn’t need me to be the diplomat.
Laszlo handles that. What he needs is someone who doesn’t follow the rules.
Someone who can walk into a room and make everyone in it recalculate their odds. ”
“An enforcer.”