Chapter 20 - Viktor
When the bright lights flash on, disrupting the pitch-black, my vision is blown blinding white. The door screeches open. Idly, I wonder how long it’s been already.
There’s no fucking way the Yuris would feed a prisoner twice in a twenty-four-hour period.
They aren’t fucking soft, are they?
I blink against the assault of light, ducking my head to wipe at least one of my watering eyes with a roll of my shoulder. My vision adjusts—transitioning from blurry blob to a defined shape—until clarity reigns.
Even beneath the lurid fluorescent lighting, her silver hair gleams. It looks like a form of celestial magic, like a halo that’s been melted down and poured over the long tendrils that spill down to her waist. Her milky skin grows luminous the closer she drifts to me.
“Is this a dream?” I breathe, out-loud, I’m mostly sure.
I must. Because her face twists in agony, like she’s been stung.
My moonkissed angel drops to her knees in front of me, one planted on either side of mine, her eyes shining with tears. “Will you laugh at me if I tell you this is my nightmare?” Nadya asks, her voice hoarse.
Instinct beats self-preservation as I surge upright, my lips catching hers. Amongst the many things I’ve proven I don’t need my fucking hands for so far, this takes the cake. Her hands clutch at my face, and I fucking love that she does it like a habit.
I may not be able to help, but I flinch once it begins to smart, but I don’t give a shit. I growl, “Come back,” when she tries to recoil.
She doesn’t question it. She just kisses me, and it doesn’t fucking matter that our tongues tangle to share the salt of our tears, the metallic tang of my blood, and, confoundingly, what I could swear is chocolate.
I don’t give a fuck. Beneath it all, it’s her.
My Nadya, who doesn’t flinch. She takes what I give her and gives it back tenfold, undeterred by the primal hunger our mouths converse with.
That’s why it breaks my fucking heart when we part for frustratingly necessary air, and her eyes are red and raw-looking. “I’m so fucking sorry about this,” she sniffles wetly.
My mangled heart twists like a fucking dish towel.
“Yeah? About getting kidnapped?” gruffly, I quip, nudging her chin with my nose.
Mindlessly, in the most Nadya fashion, she nips at the tip of it, then peppers a kiss at the same spot. “I could’ve done this differently. A thousand ways. I can’t fucking stop thinking about that.”
The permeable melancholy that shrouds her words threatens to undo me.
This kills me more than all the lashings.
I’d take it all—battered ribs and ripped out fingernails and a million mottled bruises rendering me unrecognizable—a thousand fucking times over than this.
Anything, over the heartbreak that paints her face.
“I fucking wouldn’t,” I say fiercely. “I wouldn’t trade what we shared that first night for anything.
I wouldn’t trade paying that girl and using your heart, this heart I’d fucking die for, to take you.
I don’t care about forcing your hand to sign the license, because if I end this way, I end up belonging to you the way you belong to me.
And I wouldn’t trade having you—not your lips, your pussy, or your heart. It’s all fucking—”
Mine. I don’t get to press that word against her sweet, waiting lips, tinged pink with my blood now.
She’s ripped away from me, and now, at last, the Yuri men see me wail. My anguish reverberates in this dank, hollow space. It entangles with Nadya’s own lament.
“Why?” she shrieks, her limbs flailing explosively, kicking madly. “Val, let me fucking go—”
Unbidden, my reeling mind snaps to the way she’d flailed in my arms, before, the night we wound up at Milena’s. She’d been furious, then, and indignant. It wasn’t anything like the tortured wrath this version of Nadya radiates in front of me.
“Let her fucking go!” I roar, tearing at my own restraints, feeling the cuffs cut up my already raw wrists. I’d cut off my fucking hands if I could.
“Val, Trifon said—”
Valentin’s laughter is cold and clipped.
“Trifon bugged you, Nadya. He planted one on you before you came in.” I can’t see where he plucks the bug from through the haze of red superimposed on my vision, but I want to rip his fucking arm off when he waves it in her face.
“And now we have proof. This sham marriage is going to be annulled.”
I’d thought, truly, that I knew what Nadya Yuri looked like when she was angry.
I thought no one knew when she stood, shocked, at the booming impact of betrayal better than I.
I’ve earned all of it from her; I have wounded her pride and corroded her rectitude several times over. And I stand corrected.
This, now, is so much worse.
Yet I know, intrinsically, that this is the case because she loves her brother. She loves them all. She would’ve remained shackled to me, whether she cared for me or not, to spare them any possibility of pain. She’d redo what the two of us share if it could save them from shame.
And they have betrayed her.
She looks like she’s going to be sick, and whatever tide it rises within her, brings with it a force Nadya channels. It’s enough for her to bodily propel Valentin away from her with a devastated snarl. “No,” she howls, her grief apparent. “He wouldn’t do that. I told Yulia—”
“Oh, we know what you fucking told Yulia,” Valentin spits, his mouth twisted in scorn. “You’re not a fucking kid anymore, Nadya. How could you do this to your own family? How could you not tell Iosif the second you recognized this motherfucker on the feed?”
Nadya is shaking. I yank at my chains, desperate to be near her. To stand in front of her and absorb every hit her family tries to land in the name of loyalty, she already ascribes to with every inch of her soul.
She gapes and doesn’t answer. She can’t, I think. Maybe because she truly doesn’t know the answer, and maybe because she just isn’t ready to admit it to herself, let alone out loud.
Furious, Valentin shouts in her face, “He’s fucking playing you. He’s been playing you since he saw you. There’s a reason we kept you and Darya out of this shit.”
I want to fucking kill him.
I have no right. This, I see. He is her brother, and Nadya would not allow me to finish him. But that is what my hands itch to do. They crave spilling his blood and causing him such profound pain that it’ll recontextualize any he’s inflicted.
Yet I am bound and prone to a wall and have to watch her fight this alone. This is the worst punishment yet. I’ve been alone for so long that it should perhaps stun me to feel so inundated with a need to protect another person. But it doesn’t.
It is what I am made to do.
If I have a body, it’s for whoever’s proverbial sword to plunge through me before I ever let it so much as graze her.
This magnificent, ferocious woman, who doesn’t even need me to do it. Who does not seek protection or completion. And who does not suffer being trapped beneath a thumb. She doesn’t swallow down disrespect.
Valentin doesn’t fear her, though. Nope. She’s his little sister.
Is that all he sees when she echoes, her voice unnervingly calm, “Playing me. Ah.”
Maybe not. Valentin frowns, looking pained. “Yeah. And I’m sorry about that. We all are.”
“Are you?” Nadya stares at him.
“Of course. You’re a badass, but you’re also so young, Nadya. You’re a decent fucking person with a good fucking heart, and this villain took advantage of that.”
“I propositioned him,” she cries, incredulous, hysterical laughter peaking at the back of her throat.
There’s a slim chance I could legitimately be hallucinating right now.
But I swear I can see steam come out of his ears.
I know I’m not imagining the obdurate jut of Nadya’s chin.
Mostly since, she snipes, “I said, I propositioned him. You can’t really be surprised, dude.
Come the fuck on. This is the way the world outside of the bratva—you know, where you like to stow Darya and me away—actually works.
A hot guy approaches you and hits on you, and you tell him to take you back to his hotel room.
I had sex with him, and I didn’t bother to learn his name.
Does that make me the fucking idiot everyone is intent on treating me like, or am I just a grown goddamn woman? ”
“A. Fucking. Idiot,” Valentin bites back ruthlessly.
She physically recoils from the words.
I can’t see her face anymore, and it’s intolerable. It’s so fucking intolerable, they need to invent a new word for it.
But I can hear the tears in her voice when she speaks.
“I love you. I love all of you. I know you don’t mean to be cruel, that you aren’t monsters, and this, like everything you do, is because you love me too.
I know you can’t see what I'm thinking. I get that I look fucking nuts to everyone. But, Val,” Nadya implores, her hands reaching for her brother, clutching at his elbows and looking up at him.
“Please. It isn’t what you think. You’ve already beaten the ever-living shit out of him for what he’s pulled.
Let him go. If you respect me at all, please. ”
Every word that falls out of her mouth lashes at me like a whip. She sounds fucking small, and I fucking hate it. The desperation that colors her tone as she appeals to Yuri guts me.
For a moment, I honestly fucking think she’s gotten to him. I can see the tick in his jaw, the way his eyes fall shut and squeeze tight, pensive and pained because of it. Can she honestly get him to relent?
He peels her grip away from his arms and looks over his shoulder. His fist bangs against the sealed door.
“Get her the fuck out of here,” he thunders, and some henchmen waltz in and march her out.