Vadim
Tai is asleep against me, having dropped in the seconds before we pull up to my gates, one hand curled in the front of my shirt. She didn’t choose that. Her body did. I like it more than I should.
Bogdan pulls through the gates without a word. The drive is clear, the road behind us quiet, the guards in position. Cleaners have already done their work. No blood on the tarmac. No bodies. No evidence that Tarasov tried to force my hand outside my own gates.
The insult remains.
I look down at Tai. She cooked lasagne for Baron before dawn after finding out a man with enough money to move Bratva pieces wants her delivered to him. Most men would be useless after that. She insulted my uncle’s herbs.
Fuck, I want her.
Not now. Not with her dead on her feet, guilt eating through her, fear sitting in her bones. I can wait. I don’t like waiting, but I can do it when I must.
Bogdan parks near the entrance.
“I want you on Tarasov,” I say.
He turns in his seat with a nod.
“Now. Find the Mercedes. Find where he went after he left here. Pull traffic cameras, CCTV, ANPR, every private feed we can access. I want to know if he went home, went to ground, or met whoever sent that message.”
He doesn’t react, but I know he heard me.
“No one gets near the gates unless I know about it first.” I open the door carefully and slide out with Tai still against me. She stirs but doesn’t wake. Her hand tightens in my shirt for a second, then loosens again. I lift her out of the car and carry her toward the house.
Ivan opens the front door before I reach it. His eyes go to Tai first, then to me.
“No interruptions unless the house is on fire or Tarasov is in the hallway.”
“Understood.”
I carry Tai up the stairs. She makes a small sound against my chest, then settles again. The trust lands like a stone dropped into still water. It’s unpleasant because I don’t have a place to put it. I understand obedience, fear, loyalty when it is earned through blood, money, or leverage.
This is different.
She walked into my room because silence scared her more than I did. She slept beside me because my body made the dark tolerable. Now she curls into me because whatever part of her is still awake knows I won’t drop her.
I take her into my bedroom, place her on the bed, and pull the boots from her feet. She frowns in her sleep, mutters something I don’t catch, and turns her face into the pillow.
My pillow.
I remove her coat gently and set it on the chair. I leave the rest of her clothes. She needs sleep, and if I start undressing her, I’ll want things I’m not taking from her while she’s asleep.
I pull the duvet over her. She catches my wrist before I move away.
“Don’t go,” she murmurs.
Her eyes stay shut.
I go still.
This woman is dangerous in ways no enemy has ever managed. Men come at me with knives, guns, threats, debts, ambitions. I understand that language. Tai asks for something small in a broken voice, and something inside me obeys before pride can interfere.
“I’m here,” I say.
Her fingers loosen, but she doesn’t let go completely. I lower myself to the bed next to her, and she snuggles into me, against my side like she belongs there.
I stay dressed and on top of the duvet, because if I get under it, my self-control will become a negotiation. Her breathing evens out. The tension in her fingers fades until her hand rests open on my stomach.
I stare at the ceiling and listen to her breathe.
For once, the silence doesn’t scrape at me.
That pisses me off.
I don’t need a woman changing the way a room feels. I have survived things that would unmake most men, but it is a half-asleep woman’s fingers around my wrist that I can’t seem to shake. I don’t need to be thinking about marriage as something beyond strategy.
But I am.
I close my eyes, but not to sleep. It’s just so I can stop looking at her, stop wanting her. This small woman has crashed into my perfect life and made me realise it was decidedly unperfect without her. My phone vibrates in my pocket.
I consider ignoring it. That lasts one second.
Tai stirs when I shift. I freeze until she settles again, then ease the phone free and check the screen.
Bogdan is calling me instead of texting. That means one thing. Bad fucking news.
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
“Found the Mercedes,” he says. “Abandoned in an underground car park near Vauxhall. Tarasov wasn’t on any exit footage.”
“He changed cars.”
He grunts.
“Find the second car.”
He grunts again. “There’s more.”
I look at Tai. She sleeps with one hand still resting against me, hair loose across the pillow, mouth parted slightly. She looks too soft for men like me.
“What?” I ask.
“The number that sent the message was burned. The handset pinged near Kaverin territory before it went dead.”
I sit up slowly.
Tai makes a protesting sound, and I place my hand over hers until she calms.
“Kaverin,” I repeat.
Another grunt. Bogdan has done his speech quota for the day, it seems.
“Everything could be planted. Find out what the Kaverin family is up to. See if anything links them to the Melnikovs.”
Bogdan hangs up without another word, so I chuck the phone on the bed next to me.
“Kaverin,” Tai murmurs. “I know that name.”
My head snaps towards her. “How?”
Her eyes open a fraction. Sleep still has hold of her, but fear cuts through it fast enough.
“Tai,” I say. “How do you know that name?”
“My deadbeat dad was a Kaverin, according to my mother. I don’t know.
I never met him. I asked her once, and only once, because she turned frightening.
She shouted at me that I didn’t need to know ‘that Kaverin scum’ and stormed out of the house and left me for an hour. I was seven. I didn’t dare ask again.”
The silence in the room becomes absolute. My gaze doesn’t waver from her face, but my eyes tighten. Every instinct I’ve honed over twenty years of survival sharpens to a single point. This woman, this name, this connection that cannot be coincidence. “Where is your mother now?”
She shrugs. “We don’t speak.”
“But she’s alive.”
“Maybe. After that day, things were never the same. I hated it and hated myself for changing things.”
“I doubt it was you asking or that day. It was probably always that way and you just never noticed it until you poked at it.”
“Maybe,” she mutters again, looking away. “Last I know, she moved up north, away from London. I don’t know where. I ran into her neighbour who said she packed up one day and left without a forwarding address. Just said she was going north. That was about three years ago.”
“It doesn’t matter. She is irrelevant. Your dad, however, if this is all connecting into something outside of a coincidence? He matters.”
“I don’t know anything, I swear,” she says, sitting up and shoving her hands into her hair.
“I didn’t accuse you of lying,” I say lightly.
Her gaze meets mine. “I know you didn’t, but I just wanted that out there.”
“I believe you.”
She stares at me for a second, searching for the trap in the sentence. “You’re being calm.”
“I’m not calm.”
“You look calm.”
“That’s different.”
She catches her bottom lip between her teeth. “Is Kaverin bad?”
I exhale through my nose. “They’re old London Bratva. Smaller than the Voronov family, but they hold serious power in the East End. It’s a rumour they were involved with the Krays back in the day. Arseny Kaverin is the current head. He’s cautious, bitter, and rich enough to be annoying.”
“Wonderful. I might be descended from annoying.”
“You are definitely descended from annoying.”
She gives me a vicious look, which just proves my point, and my smug smile confirms it.
“What does this mean?” she asks.
“It means I need to find out which Kaverin was fucking your mother thirty years ago.”
Her eyes close. “Please never phrase it like that again.”
“I don’t do euphemisms.”
“Not even for me?”
“Especially not for you. You deserve the blunt, honest truth.”
She rubs both hands over her face, then drops them into her lap. “My mother’s name is Yelena Korotayeva. She used to work in a pub in the East End.”
“Well, that tracks,” I mutter and pick up my phone. I type the name and send it to Bogdan with instructions to find out more about this woman’s life here in London.
Tai’s gaze is on the phone. “Are you asking Bogdan to investigate her?”
“Yes, but only her life here. If you don’t care or want to know where she is, she stays hidden.”
Tai nods and accepts that. “Thank you,” she whispers. “I know I should want to know, but—”
“Hey. Don’t ever think this is on you to sort out. You did nothing wrong.”
“Except be born to a woman who hated my father enough to blame me for it my whole life, it seems. What a bitch thing to wake up to.”
“Sorry,” I say with a soft smile. “Are you okay?”
She looks at me for longer than necessary, and the honesty drains out of her face until all that remains is exhaustion.
“Yeah,” she says with a sigh. “I loathe self-pity. I’m more focused on I killed a man, and no one has come knocking to lock me up and throw away the key.”
“And quite possibly with good reason.”
“Meaning?” she asks sharply.
“Meaning it might not just be the Voronovs whose protection you’re under.”
“Don’t,” she says, holding up her hand and climbing off the bed. “Do not go there. If my dad is alive, and a Kaverin, and capable of protecting me, why did he let Gregor stalk me, fleece me and nearly rape me?”
“Can’t answer that, bunny.” But they are all damn good questions. Ones I intend to find the answers to.
“I’m hungry,” she says suddenly. “I want to eat, then I want to have a proper shower and wash my hair and then crawl into bed with TV until I fall asleep.”
“All of that can be arranged.”
She shoots me a look. “Do you even own a TV?”
“Several.”
“Of course you do. They’re probably hidden behind oil paintings and activated by blood oath.”
“You’ve been awake for five minutes, and you’re already insulting my interior design.”
“I haven’t seen a TV. That’s not an insult. That’s an observation.”
“There’s one in the cinema room.”
She stops at the bedroom door. “You have a cinema room.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a normal room? With a normal TV? Where normal people watch trash programmes while pretending they aren’t emotionally collapsing?”
I think about it. “Yes.”
“Could you have it brought up to my room?”
“Of course. Or would you rather have it in here?”
The question is loaded. We both know it. We both accept it.
“I’ll think about it over breakfast,” she says and strides out of the room, causing me to rush after her like a fucking fool.