Chapter 013 Isabella
His bedroom smells of cedar and something sharper threading beneath—gun oil, perhaps, or the ghost of smoke that never quite leaves a man like him. I sit on the edge of the California king, spine straight, cataloguing every detail for the eighth night of my captivity.
Three hours have passed since the guards deposited me here. Three hours alone with the scent of him, with the bonsai on the dresser trimmed to ruthless perfection, with the photograph I should not have studied so closely: Viktor, Dimitri, their mother, all caught in a moment of sunlight that feels obscene now. My small canvas bag rests in the corner—cotton dresses, toiletries, nothing that matters. What matters is the knife I slid beneath the mattress, the creaking floorboard by the en-suite door, the blind spot beneath the camera in the far corner. Old habits. Necessary habits.
The door opens without ceremony.
Viktor steps in, jacket discarded somewhere else, white shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow. The dying light from the bulletproof windows cuts across the sharp architecture of his face. He does not look at me immediately. Instead he crosses to the window, plants his feet wide, folds his arms, and only then lets those pale eyes settle on mine.
The silence stretches, thick enough to taste.
“So,” I say, voice low, “your bedroom. Should I feel flattered or alarmed?”
He turns fully. “You tell me, kotyonok.”
There is a new tension tonight—shoulders drawn tight, a faint bruise of exhaustion beneath his eyes. Someone disappointed him today. Someone, somewhere, is probably missing fingers.
“You could have installed more cameras,” I observe. “More guards on the door. Instead you bring me here.” I let my hand drift across the dark silk duvet. “This feels deliberate.”
“It is.” He moves to the locked cabinet I noted earlier—pickable, if I had time. He produces a bottle. Beluga Gold Label. The Cyrillic script glints. “We need to talk.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Everything between us is ominous.” He pours two heavy crystal tumblers, the vodka catching the last of the light like liquid mercury. Sets one on the dresser within my reach. Takes his own to the leather chair angled toward the window and the approach no one will ever use. “Drink.”
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“I’m trying to get myself drunk.” A faint curve at the corner of his mouth. “You’re invited.”
The vodka is cold fire—clean, expensive, unforgiving. It spreads through my chest and loosens the knots I keep so carefully tied.
“So,” I say, swirling the glass, “we coexist now? Share a bedroom like civilized enemies?”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“On whether you can manage honesty for five consecutive minutes.”
I arch a brow. “I’ve been honest.”
“You’ve been surgical.” He refills his glass without asking, gestures for mine. “I have a proposition.”
Every instinct sharpens. “I’m not sleeping with you.”
His eyes flick to my mouth and away. “Not that kind.” He leans forward, elbows on knees. “A game. Question for question. Truth or you drink. Three passes each. After that, the game changes.”
“Changes how?”
His smile is slow, lethal. “It gets interesting.”
“Rules?”
“No limits. But nothing spoken here leaves this room. Sworn on Dimitri’s memory.”
The name lands between us like a blade. He watches me, waiting for refusal. I feel the weight of the vow—he will keep it. For Dimitri he will keep it.
I rise, cross the small distance, take my refilled glass from his hand. Our fingers brush. Electricity snaps up my arm. I return to the bed, sit on the edge, let the mattress take my weight.
“Fine,” I say. “I start. How many people have you killed? Personally.”
He does not blink. “Thirty-seven.”
The number settles cold in my stomach. Thirty-seven lives ended by those elegant, brutal hands. I picture them—gun, knife, bare—moving with the same precision he uses to trim his bonsai.
“Your turn.”
I could lie. I could drink. Instead I meet his gaze. “Twenty-one.”
Something flickers across his face—confirmation, not shock. “The assassin rumors are true, then.”
“I didn’t say assassin.”
“Twenty-one isn’t self-defense, kotyonok. That’s craft.” He tilts his head. “How old were you for the first?”
“That’s two questions.”
He drinks instead, throat working. “Curious. Was fifteen really a senator?”
Ice floods my veins. “You’ve been listening to my nightmares.”
“You speak in your sleep.” Quiet, almost gentle. “Not often. But that name stuck.”
“He trafficked children.” The words taste like rust. “Gianni and I made it last three hours.”
“Good,” he says, and the approval should disgust me. It doesn’t. Heat coils low in my belly.
He shifts; the leather sighs beneath him. “My turn. What did you overhear in the parking garage?”
“Nothing. You were across the street with a rifle scope on my brother’s forehead.”
My hand twitches toward the knife I no longer wear. He notices, of course.
“Relax. If I wanted Rocco dead, he would be.”
“Then why isn’t he?”
“That’s your second question.” He lifts the bottle. “Drink.”
I knock the vodka back, hold out the glass for more. “Answer.”
He pours. “I wanted to watch you play. See what intelligence you passed. Whether you’d mention the Barone shipment.”
I snort—unladylike, reckless. The vodka is doing its work. “Barone Schmarone. Amateur bait.”
His eyes narrow, reassessing. “Indeed.”
He refills us both. “Why did you let me take you?”
The question I have dodged for eight days. My fingers tighten on the crystal.
“I needed answers,” I admit. “About eleven years ago. About why your brother haunts my dreams.” I swallow more fire. “And I wanted to see you.”
“See me.”
“Know thy enemy.” The lie tastes thin even to me.
We trade truths like blades, parry and thrust. Each answer strips another careful layer. The bottle empties steadily. We exhaust our passes. The room tilts pleasantly.
I pour again. “Enough graves. Tell me something ridiculous. Something no one knows.”
“That isn’t the game.”
“I’m rewriting the rules.” I lean forward. “I want something human, Viktor.”
He studies me for a long moment, thumb tracing the rim of his glass. Then he drinks, winces, and the mask slips.
“I’m afraid of butterflies.”
I blink. “Come again?”
“Butterflies. Moths too.” His voice is flat, as though confessing a war crime. “Papery wings. Erratic flight. When I was seven, one crawled across my face in my sleep. Legs like wire. Body like a worm. I woke screaming.” He shudders—an actual, visible shudder from the man who severs fingers without blinking.
I try to hold it in. I fail.
Laughter bursts out of me, bright and helpless. I double over on his bed, tears streaming, stomach aching. “You—knives in the basement—thirty-seven kills—and butterflies—”
“I will eject you from this room.”
“You moved me in!” I gasp. “You’re stuck with me and my uncontrollable laughter at your entirely reasonable childhood trauma.”
He watches me wipe my eyes, something raw flickering behind the ice. Not anger. Hunger.
“Your turn,” he says, voice rough. “Something equally humiliating.”
I catch my breath. “I can’t whistle.”
He scoffs. “Everyone can whistle.”
I purse my lips, blow. Nothing but air and a faint wet rasp. I try again; spittle flecks the duvet.
He shakes his head. “Tragic.”
“It’s mortifying. Field ops—I have to imitate birds. Rocco says I sound like a pigeon with a grudge.”
A laugh escapes him—real, unguarded, transforming his face into something dangerously young. My chest tightens.
The laughter fades. The bottle is nearly spent. We are both drunk enough that the walls feel softer.
He sets his glass aside. “One more. Not the game. Just… why do you say ‘Misha’ in your sleep?”
The air leaves my lungs. “I don’t know.” Truth. “I dream of a boy in a garden teaching me Russian. Laughing. He says the same thing every time.”
“What does he say?”
I close my eyes. Copper floods my tongue—phantom blood. “‘Promise me, Isabella. Promise me.’ Then I wake up crying. I never hear the rest.”
Silence swells.
When I open my eyes he is closer, perched on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips. Heat radiates from him.
“You really don’t remember.”
“No.”
He reaches out, fingertips ghosting my cheekbone. The touch is feather-light, devastating. My pulse leaps against my throat.
“What do you want, Isabella?” Quiet. Dangerous. “Not your family. You.”
The vodka dissolves the last of my restraint.
“I want to remember who I was before I became this.” My voice cracks. “Before I became a weapon. And sometimes—” I let him see it, the heat, the reckless lean of my body toward his—“sometimes I want things I have no right to want.”
His pupils blow wide. Breath catches. His thumb settles against my lower lip, pressing gently, testing.
“I should hate you,” he murmurs. “I have hated you for eleven years.”
“Do you still?”
He cradles my face in both hands, thumbs stroking my cheekbones. His palms are warm, callused, trembling with restraint.
“I don’t know what I feel anymore.” His voice is gravel. “You’ve ruined me.”
I part my lips against his thumb. Taste him—salt, vodka, danger.
“If I kiss you now—”
“Then kiss me.”
His grip tightens. I watch the war: vengeance against want, control against surrender. His jaw locks. Body vibrates.
Then he releases me. Stands. Puts the width of the room between us.
“Take the bed.”
“Where will you—”
“The chair.”
“Viktor—”
“If I join you tonight I won’t stop.” He looks back, eyes blazing. “And I refuse to take something you’ll regret when the vodka fades.”
“What if I won’t regret it?”
“You will.” He turns to the window, silhouette stark against the night. “When you remember what I am. What I still intend to do.”
The threat slides hot between my thighs.
I lie back on his pillows. The sheets smell of cedar and smoke and him. My body aches with denial.
“Viktor?”
“Sleep, kotyonok.”
“You’ll be stiff tomorrow.”
“I’ve slept in worse.”
Of course he has.
“Number twenty-one,” I murmur into the dark, “sold my family to the feds. I made him watch me burn everything he loved first. Then I took my time.”
A pause. Then, soft: “Good girl.”
The praise strokes down my spine.
Later, half-asleep: “When you finally do it… will you make it quick?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“Liar.”
Silence. His breathing steady across the room, watchful.
Sleep pulls me under. For the first time in eleven years there is no garden, no boyish laughter, no blood-soaked promise I cannot recall.
Instead I dream of butterflies with razor wings slicing the air, of a man folded into a leather chair, fists clenched against desire, guarding me from himself.
And I sleep deeply, strangely safe, wrapped in the scent of my enemy.