Chapter 10 - Viktor
I would never have left if I hadn’t had to. A glance at my watch tells me it’s been about four hours. But when I re-enter the warehouse, I’ve walked into some alternate universe. Right off the top of my head, it’s the only fucking explanation for the laughter that pummels me the second I walk in.
Laughter that can only be described as cackling.
I’ve never heard such a sound of delight from Nadya Yuri. Amongst plenty else, I’ve yet to earn it from her. But I’ve spent a lifetime growing up with Maxim Zakharov. I know what it sounds like when he’s up to no fucking good.
There’s no forethought. My feet pick up the pace and race toward the cacophony. I run until I stutter to a halt, my eyes bugging out of my head.
Yep. Alternate fucking universe.
It has to be.
Or else, my cousin has my woman trapped beneath him on the ground in this world.
With an arm twisted behind her back and his weight bearing down on her from behind, Maxim has her thoroughly immobilized.
Her cheek is flesh against the carpet. Even through the disarray of Nadya’s endlessly long locks, I can see her laughing.
Her whole body is shaking with it. Her body that is trapped beneath him, the one who convinced me to go deal with bratva shit in the first place.
“Say it,” Maxim crows, shamelessly grinning.
Nadya chokes out, “Never!” wheezing, before she dissolves into another fit of glee.
I can’t stomach it. Any of it. A heartbeat later, I’ve crossed the room before I can think about it.
I snatch a fistful of Maxim’s shirt and wrench him off of her with every ounce of force in my body.
A body that tremors with unrepressed rage.
Were it anyone else, they would’ve done more than stumble. Maxim, however, catches himself.
He knows me, which is why he turns to me with his hands already up in front of him. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he yells, eyes wide like I’ve caught his ass off-guard.
“Are you fucking kidding me, man?” I sneer.
It takes everything in me to keep my fists by my sides. To not clock him in the fucking mouth and not stop. The urge burns within me like a fever. And it isn’t remotely tempered by Maxim not backing away.
Instead, he argues, “She started it!”
Nadya, meanwhile, flips onto her back. With a dramatic roll of her eyes, she says, “Okay, snitch-bitch.”
But there’s no missing the stunning rosiness to her complexion, or the way her chest erratically rises and falls while she strains to catch her breath. Her smile sprawls wider on her face, all teeth and ferality, except for the stupid fucking cute dimple in her right cheek.
I definitely don’t miss it when she swivels toward me, and it goes out like a fucking light. There’s plenty of light in her eyes, still. It just has nothing to do with delight. I imagine it’s the vision of hellfire she’s envisioning shoving me toward.
Faced with it, I resist the urge to put my own hands up like Maxim had. In defense, like I’ve got one. Like I’ve ever bothered to fucking need one. Irritated by this, I angle away from her. It isn’t an improvement to see Maxim looking back at me with a knowing glint in his eye.
The desire to punch him returns promptly.
“I’m just gonna…” he trails off, gesturing vaguely around himself.
“Stay.” It isn’t a suggestion.
I can tell he’s holding back a laugh at my expense. What can I say? You grow up with someone, and you learn their fucking tells. I know what the twitch of his lips means. I know why he keeps looking away from me. He may as well be plucked from a comic book, a thought-bubble floating overhead.
There’s undiluted amusement in his tone when he insists, “Oh, I really don’t think I should, actually. You two lovebirds have shit to work out.”
Behind me, there is a swift barrage of angry muttering.
“Max.”
He slants a look behind me, and it’s the only reason I let Nadya out of peripheral view. I’m not certain she won’t lunge for my throat at this point. Whatever he sees, though, seems to be enough for him to leave us with a useless pat on my fucking shoulder.
“I’ll be back later. Good luck.”
When the fuck have I ever needed luck?
I’ve always made my own.
Not that I can afford to turn down more of it. Even before I turn back around, I know there isn’t a happy face waiting for me.
As is often the case, I’m fucking right.
But it doesn’t feel like nothing that she looks like she’s waiting for me.
Her softly muscular arms are crossed over her chest, and her foot is tapping expectantly.
There’s no give to her features anymore.
Gone is all the tenderness that humor brought to her face. I get hard angles and serrated edges.
What she doesn’t understand is that I’m glad to cut myself on them.
“Let’s have it,” I invite, shucking my jacket from my shoulders and tossing it to the sectional. “Do you want to fight? Wrestle? Talk? I can take it.”
I don’t know which part exactly has her lips pursing into a thin, hard line. But I don’t take them back. I owe her this. So, I wait.
“You and Maxim are cousins,” she starts, and it makes me frown.
Really? I open the fucking gate, and she wants to know about Maxim?
“He’s about to be my late fucking cousin,” I warn.
Nadya is unfazed. She doesn’t even blink.
Fuck, she’s glorious.
“Paternal?” she asks.
“My father and his father are brothers. Boris is three years younger than my father and just as much of a cunt.”
I decided before I even took her from the street that the only way this had a fucking prayer of working was if I told her the truth. Now, I watch her, doing my damnedest to discern if I’ve done a good enough job with this answer.
It makes my stomach clench, watching her nod slowly, her expression indecipherable. I want no part of her to be unknown to me. It grates at me that most of her remains that way—and behind a bulky concrete wall, not a gossamer veil I can lift away.
“Then why are you so close to him?” Nadya challenges.
I don’t really have to question how she knows we are.
She surmised it because she’s as sharp as a tack.
I must still wear my intrigue, though, because she answers the unasked question all the same.
“You would’ve hit him if you weren’t. I know what you bratva men are like.
Though, let’s be clear—I’m not your fucking property, Viktor. ”
A complicated storm of emotion swirls within me. I can’t decide whether to be thrilled to have my first name in her mouth instead of the last or be enraged about being reduced to one of many.
“You were mine the first time I touched you,” I snap, letting the heat flare in my gaze. I make no fucking apologies for it.
“That’s so—”
“Shut the fuck up, baby,” I sigh. “I’m answering your question. Max and I are close because we looked out for each other. It’s just loyalty. As simple and difficult as that.”
This time, I suspect it’s the use of that word I know Yuris holds so dear—“loyalty”—that has her forehead creasing in distress.
“I spent a lot of time with him today.”
“I know. I fucking hate it.”
Again, she rolls her eyes at me. I want to kiss her breathless.
“Boo-fucking-hoo,” she says, and moves on, which is its own kind of thing. “I asked him a lot of questions, and he didn’t give you up. So, I’ve had to do a lot of thinking here.”
“Thinking,” I repeat.
“Shut the fuck up, I’m talking,” she snaps, flipping me off for good measure.
Jesus, I don’t even think about it. I snatch her wrist from the air and put that finger in my mouth, nipping at it. She freezes, her eyes wide but undaunted. She drives me fucking crazy.
I don’t miss that it takes her a second before she steals her hand back. I hope she notices how easily I let her go.
“Be nice to me,” I taunt, just to piss her off.
“Blow me,” Nadya counters post-haste. “You can talk shit about my brothers and their bizarre-o life choices all you want, chump. This Stockholm Syndrome shit isn’t going to work on me. You should know that.”
“I do know that,” I agree. “Did you know that term isn’t even in the DSM? It’s actually pretty debated in the field.”
“Aw, did you discover that while you were looking up what disorder you have?
I shrug. It’s not an unfair assessment. “Crime is interesting. The syndrome comes from hostages of a bank robbery defending the robbers after a week-long faceoff.”
“It’s really concerning that you know that. That doesn’t make this less creepy. It achieves the opposite result, actually.”
“I’m making a point.”
“Okay. Really fucking slowly.”
“The point is, what the syndrome boils down to is those feelings of empathy stirring inside the captor to preserve a bunch of shit. Namely, their sanity, general faith in humanity, and sometimes just a general sense of self-preservation.” I pause, waiting for her to look at least a little impressed.
She doesn’t. “I think anyone who’s spent more than ten seconds with you understands you have no sense of self-preservation. ”
Nadya steps forward until her chest brushes against mine.
“I think you honestly believe that if you treat me nicely like a well-loved pet, I’ll come around.
Maybe I’ll decide you’re not so bad. And I’ll start rooting for the wrong team.
Maybe I’ll even spill family secrets and help you win whatever war you’ve started with my brothers.
” She glowers at me like she’s trying to make my soul wither inside my body. “Not gonna happen.”
My fingertips itch to smooth the loose tendril of blonde away from her face. I decide not to push this, while I’m already pushing it.
“I have no doubts that you’ve secreted a weapon on your person somewhere already, Nadya.” It’s gratifying, I’ll admit, to see her eyes widen with alarm at that. “I’m sorry it has to be this way. But it had to be this way.”
“The fuck it didn’t,” she squawks, and shoves me away from her. I let her. Just as I let her walk away from me, stomping toward the kitchen.
What’s her obsession with apples?
I make a mental note to get more.
“You kidnapped me,” she reminds me, as if I need reminding. “You took me off the fucking street and proceeded to forge my name on a legal document—”
“I didn’t forge it.”
“—before you pissed me off, locked me in a room, and now you want me to what? Give you the benefit of the doubt? Do you fucking hear yourself?”
“I do. As I hear every word you say. I remember everything, Nadya.”
“Good,” she spits, biting viciously into the apple.
I hold up a finger, a signal that I’m anything but done. “Including how you told me at the race that you could live with my blood on your hands, but you didn’t want it there.”
Her eyes narrow in a fascinatingly feline manner. “That’s not the order I said that in,” she argues, and gives away that she remembers too. She’s thought of this. She’s been thinking about this—as I have.
“Doesn’t make it any less true. But those things can’t be true at the same time.”
“And yet they are. Or were. Now, I do want you dead. I’ll bathe in your blood and run cheering through the fucking streets, if you want.”
I quirk a single brow at that. “So long as you do it naked.”
She chokes on her apple. Thankfully, she’s quick to recover, though not quick enough to keep me from continuing.
“You didn’t call your brothers that night.
You could have. You should have, and we both know it.
Like we both knew, I was watching you. You hid behind them for two weeks, and you knew I was there.
I know you could sense me. Yet, you said nothing.
You kept it a secret. Our secret.” It’s me who prowls toward her now. “Why?”
“That was a fucking mistake,” she cries.
I don’t enjoy the look of anguish that eclipses her delicate, doll-like features. The sight twists inside me like a knife. She won’t believe it if I tell her that.
“Mistakes are just choices cowards regret.”
Her anguish has no choice but to dissipate to make room for the immensity of her anger. It floods her face, painting it red. “Did you just call me a fucking coward?”
“I call it like I see it.”
I see it coming when she pulls the knife out from her waistband. Is she batshit insane for wielding it like a feral, cornered animal, or am I, for stepping toward it and letting her—no, making her—draw blood from the hand I wrap around the blade to lower it.
I swear, the way her breath hitches gets me fucking hard.