Chapter 22
Kasimir~
After we’d gotten the names of the two men from Marcelle, there’d been no need to keep Zoya there any longer, so I’d taken her home, leaving Viktor and Aurora to finish the job.
The entire ride home, she hadn’t said a word, but I could only imagine how conflicted she must be feeling, and that’s why I wasn’t a fan of emotions.
Emotions complicated the simplest of things, and remorse was probably the worst of them.
People did a lot of things in the heat of anger, or made idiotic decisions in the name of love, but once they were thinking clearly again, remorse was always there to greet them, and that was the shit that kept you up at night.
Depending on the transgression, that shit could also last for the rest of your life.
So, right now, that was my greatest concern.
I was worried that Zoya’s insistence was going to come back to haunt her, and I didn’t want that for her.
It also didn’t matter that we hadn’t needed to torture Marcelle in order to get her to talk.
When Aurora had stabbed that knife into her thigh, Zoya had visibly paled, and it’d taken everything in me not to drag her back home.
That experience was going to stay with her forever, whether she wanted it to or not.
Walking into the house, I followed Zoya to the kitchen, and I didn’t say anything as she grabbed a bottled water from the refrigerator, and it still warmed my heart to watch her make herself at home here.
Little by little, she was getting used to the idea of us, and what more could a man like me ask for?
“How are you holding up?” I finally asked, having waited for her to take a healthy drink from the bottle.
Looking at me from across the kitchen island, she said, “I’m not sure. It all still feels...it still feels like it’s not real.”
“Which part?”
“All of it,” she answered. “I mean...it’s everything, Kasimir.
How in the world did two regular customers turn out to be men willing to steal and kill for money?
I...I just feel so na?ve right now. I feel like a...
a side character in my own movie. I feel like...
I don’t know. I feel like...like I’ve moved to another country and have no clue of what’s happening around me because I’m not familiar with the language or culture.
” She shook her head as she let out a heavy sigh.
“I just...I never imagined that...they seemed like just normal people.”
“You’d be surprised at what a man will do for the woman he loves,” I remarked with a shrug.
“You think Daryll did this for love?” she asked, trying so hard to make sense of it all.
“Honestly, probably not,” I replied candidly. “Marcelle mentioned their relationship too casually for it to be anything more than a mutual hookup. My guess is that he did it for the money, though life in prison is a huge risk for fifty-thousand dollars.”
“Yeah, but money is relative,” she stated. “While fifty-thousand dollars isn’t a big deal to you, it might be life-changing for Daryll and Jim.”
“And what of Marcelle?” I asked. “How are you feeling about that?”
After a few seconds, she said, “You were right about how it’s possible to become conflicted when it’s actually happening.
I thought my anger would keep me focused, but when she started begging for the life of her parents, all I could think about was how I’d met them and had spoken to them many times.
” She let out another sigh, and I hated seeing her so troubled.
“I also don’t understand it. I should have wanted it to be an eye-for-an-eye.
I shouldn’t care if her parents were killed, not after everything that she caused. ”
“There is nothing wrong with having compassion, Zoya,” I told her, though that philosophy didn’t necessarily work for a man in my position.
“I also hadn’t expected Aurora to...I mean, I know it sounds stupid, but I’d been expecting a...a warning or something,” she said, making me chuckle a bit. “I just...I hadn’t seen that coming.”
“Like I’ve said, Aurora is something else,” I grinned. “And I can’t imagine that pregnancy is doing anything to soften her disposition.”
“I guess I just...I don’t know,” she sighed. “I think I just need to...to process.”
“I imagine so,” I replied, trying my best to sound understanding and not condescending.
Nothing more was said as Zoya finished off her water, but when she was done, she said, “I want to be there when you guys...uhm, question Daryll and Jim.”
I was already shaking my head before she even finished her sentence. “Absolutely not,” I told her. “Abso-fucking-lutely not.”
“Kasimir-”
“Zoya, you could barely stand to see Aurora do something as simple as stab Marcelle in her thigh,” I pointed out. “Plus, you’ve just admitted to feeling sorry for her parents.”
“That’s different,” she argued.
“How do you figure?” I almost snapped, doing my best to have a reasonable conversation with her. “You think that not knowing them as well as you knew Marcelle makes a difference?”
“It’s not that,” she replied. “Unlike Marcelle, these men actually hurt me, Kasimir. They shot and killed my mother. They shot me and left me for dead. That’s a different kind of anger.”
“While I can appreciate that, they’re still human beings, Zoya,” I reminded her. “They’re still going to plead for their lives, and you’re not...that’s not anything that you need to experience.”
“They killed my mother, Kasimir,” she repeated. “I want to see them face-to-face for the same reason that I wanted to face Marcelle.”
“Except that we’re not going to question them,” I reminded her. “We’re not snatching them up to ask them their version of events, Zoya. They will be in our custody for the sole purpose of revenge, and that’s not going to be a pretty thing.”
“I know that,” she bristled.
“Do you?” I challenged. “Because your reaction to Aurora stabbing Marcelle was very telling, lepestok. You were affected when you shouldn’t have been.
Whether by her own hand or not, this was the woman who had orchestrated events that had led up to your mother’s death, but you were still affected by a simple stab wound. ”
“Quit saying it like that,” she snapped.
That had my brow furrowing. “Saying what?”
“Making it sound like stabbing someone is just a simple daily occurrence,” she bit out.
“Quit making it sound like I’m not the normal one because I had a genuine reaction to someone being stabbed.
You guys are the ones who aren’t normal.
You guys are the ones walking around with this idea that it’s not a big deal to just stab people at random. ”
Okay.
She wasn’t wrong.
“I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” I told her, my irritation relenting. “They’ll be images and sounds that you won’t ever be able to erase from your mind, Zoya.”
“I want to be there,” she repeated. “I deserve to be there.”
While I was still against her participating in any way, she had a point.
I wasn’t the one who’d been shot and left for dead.
I wasn’t the one who’d had to endure a beating at the hands of those assholes.
I was involved because it was my duty to avenge Zoya, but the events of that night hadn’t happened to me; they had happened to her.
“I want to watch their eyes widen in shock and fear when they see me,” she went on. “I want to experience the moment they realize that they’re sitting in those chairs because of me.”
“Zoya, Aurora won’t be handling this one,” I clarified. “It’ll be me, and I am incapable of showing mercy to those who have wronged me or my family.”
“I’m not asking you to take it lightly on them,” she assured me. “I just want to be there, Kasimir. I want to remind them of how they didn’t care about my begging and pleading. I want to remind them of how helpless we’d been and how they hadn’t cared.”
She was killing me.
Fucking killing me.
“Baby, I get that,” I said, meaning it. “I understand the thirst for revenge better than most people. Still, that being said, the shit I do and see doesn’t haunt me afterwards. Will you be able to say the same once you see what I’m capable of?”
Instead of answering, she said, “I need this, Kasimir. Just like I needed it with Marcelle, I need this to be able to heal. I need to see the two men who killed my mother pay for what they did, and...and if it leaves me with some additional scars, I’m okay with that.”
“I’m not,” I shot back. “It is my job to make sure that you have no scars.”
“Too late,” she stated bluntly. “No matter where I go from here, that night has scarred me for life, and all I’m asking is for you to help me find a way to live with that.”
Well, fuck.
I let out a heavy sigh before saying, “Well, don’t say that I didn’t warn you.”
“Consider me properly warned,” she retorted, taking her win.