21. Yarik
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
YARIK
I was, as they say, three sheets to the fucking wind when someone knocked on my bedroom door later that night.
From my spot on the floor, I glared at whoever thought it was a good time to come round mine for what, a little company? Some titillating conversation? Not bloody likely. I wasn’t in the mood.
You are an embarrassment ? —
As I tipped the liquor bottle up to my mouth for another swig, I was sorely tempted to drain the damn thing dry. Lucky for me, I didn’t have any plans for the rest of the evening other than to get absolutely pissed off my arse. Way I saw it, if I wasn’t hammered by midnight, then it was my personal responsibility to crack open another bottle and take that smarmy cunt, Fate, into my own two hands. Who was around to stop me? Literally nobody.
The doorknob jiggled.
“Open up, Volkov.” Eren .
“Go away,” I mumbled into the bottle, barely staying upright. “I’m not in the mood for your sanci—santo— sanctimonious face right now.”
“I’ll pick the lock.”
“You don’t know how to pick a lock.”
“Then I’ll get Beck to do it for me.”
I groaned. “Please don’t. I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” I had the sudden, blurry visual of Eren pressing a hand to the door. Knowing him, he was probably calculating how much trouble he’d get in for busting the damn thing down. “I’m worried about you, karde? . We both are.”
Letting my head fall back against the mattress, I squeezed my eyes shut.
The overprotective prick was right. I wasn’t fine.
I’d had my arse handed to me today. Humiliated on such a public stage that I could still hear my father’s bodyguards whispering behind my back after I’d stumbled away from Robert Murray’s dead body. Their whispers were a poison with no antidote. I’d barely made it back to my room before dropping to my knees, hands cradling my throbbing head, wishing that I could wipe the last twenty-four hours from memory. Booze probably wasn’t the healthy solution, but oblivion was preferable to knowing that I was officially the laughingstock of the Bratva.
At any time, someone could have given me the heads-up that Murray was just a vessel for Connor O’Brien to get his hands on some of the “ghost guns” he claimed to hate so much. They could have brought me into the fold. Let me work with them instead of being left to stand on my own. My own father hadn’t bothered.
Kirill hadn’t either.
I felt my throat close up, and— fuck me. With a gasp, I dropped the bottle against my thigh and pressed the heels of my palms to my closed eyelids. Tears burned to the surface. Each sharp breath rattled my lungs. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid?—
“Volkov.” The doorknob shook. “Volkov, open the damn door.”
I couldn’t.
There was no way I could let him see me like this.
Clutching the alcohol in one hand, I turned until I was flush against the mattress but curled onto my side, right arm slung around my bent knees. “Tomorrow,” I rasped into the shell of my body. “Come back tomorrow.”
With a curse, Eren slammed what I could only assume was his fist against the door before he growled, “I’m getting Beck.”
The eerie quiet that came with his absence haunted me.
Years ago, Vera had called me soft. I hadn’t understood what she meant, and if I was being honest, at least with myself, I still didn’t understand, not really. But it had to be this—this awful feeling of incompetence that followed every stage of my life. I wasn’t like Kirill or Beck or even my father—men who all seemed to read between the lines to everything that wasn’t said out loud.
There were lines, and I read them.
I didn’t think it was an intelligence thing; I knew that I was smart. Besides the obvious expulsions, I did all right in school. I scored decent marks, could follow any one of my father’s lengthy tangents, and had even helped Volkov Enterprise in the design of a new long-range rifle that the British military had paid good money to get their hands on.
I could kill a man with my eyes closed. Hell, I could do it with my hands tied behind my back or even in the middle of a storm with heavy winds blowing off the cliffs of Dover. Not a metaphor. I’d done it all, and I hadn’t struggled one bit.
So why did everyone dance around me?
Why was I always stuck on the outside when I was destined to inherit the entire Volkov empire? And what other situations had I read wrong?
A knock sounded on the door.
I didn’t have it in me to yell at Eren and Beck to go away, not when they only wanted to help. Our little tripod was still finding its footing, which meant that I was acutely aware of the fact that everything I did, everything I said, impacted the way we functioned as a unit. While I hated the idea of them thinking less of me for not opening the door, if they saw the tear tracks on my cheeks . . . Well, I wasn’t sure how we’d come back from that. This was the Bratva, wasn’t it? And in the Bratva, men didn’t cry.
The lump in my throat told me that I didn’t deserve a kingdom. I didn’t deserve anything at all.
A second later, someone knocked again, harder this time.
Curling into myself even tighter, I let my head drop down onto my bent knees. They’d go away. All I had to do was wait them out and?—
The door cracked open.
My head flew up just as a figure stepped into my room. I’d expected Beck or Eren, or even the two of them together in an obvious attempt to ambush me, and my heart stopped beating altogether when the haze of alcohol lifted to reveal the face that haunted my dreams.
Honestly, the goddamn audacity.
I was off the floor a moment later, flying at him with raised fists. “Get out,” I snarled, half out of my mind with fury and hurt and betrayal. “Get the fuck out of here before I?—”
In one swift, unexpected move, Kirill had me laid out on my back. Dazed, I blinked up at the ceiling and gasped for air, fumbling a hand toward my throat where I could still feel the warm clutch of his fingers.
“You smell like vodka,” he grunted. “I thought you quit.”
Judgmental wanker.
Sneering, I shot back, “And I thought you were dead.”
“Well, here I am.”
“Yeah, here you are.”
We stayed that way, me on the floor with him standing above me like some great harbinger of Death, until he thrust out a hand like he was doing me a service, offering help that I neither wanted nor trusted. I smacked his hand away before rolling onto my knees with a pitiful moan.
All the while, he watched me with inscrutable eyes. “You look like Hell.”
“Fuck you, too,” I gritted out. He had some nerve walking in here after the shit he’d pulled today. That he’d clearly read my texts but hadn’t found me worth the time it took to reply only added fuel to the fire. “Unless you’re here to apologize, you can piss right off.”
Instead of replying, he walked away. To . . . leave? My alcohol-addled brain tried to compute the fact that he’d moved to the desk that sat beneath the window and was now sifting through the stack of books I’d left out. After months of being stonewalled by him, his curiosity felt like a gross invasion of privacy.
I struggled to my feet. “Did you hear me? I said that unless you’re here to apologize, you can piss right?—”
“Is that what you want? ”
“What?” I queried back, sounding thoroughly hammered. There were currently two Kirills shimmering side by side, but they merged back into one as he turned to rest his arse against the desk. The sight of him there, wearing a worn pair of jeans and a white T-shirt, with the book I’d annotated clutched in one hand—it was too much to take in all at once. I suddenly felt overheated, my skin burning hot with what had to be the onslaught of a fever.
His gaze held mine, unwavering. “Is that what you want? An apology?”
“You don’t think I’m owed one?”
Something unmistakably hard flitted through his expression, there and gone again before I could even begin to put my finger on it. When he spoke, it was through clenched teeth. “Owed one as the Volkov heir?”
“Owed one as your best friend, you bloody prick!” I hadn’t meant to yell, but now that I’d started, I couldn’t seem to shut up. All the worry and hurt from the last nine months poured out of me in a flood of emotion. “Do you know how it felt to wake up and find that you were gone? And not just gone . Oh, no. To realize that nobody would tell me where you’d been shipped off to? It took me weeks, Kirill— weeks —to learn that you were in Russia. And even then, when I at least could point at a map and say, He’s gone to Moscow , it was like you became a ghost!”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Yarik . . .”
“I nearly went mad wondering if you were dead or alive.” I wasn’t sure when I’d crossed the room, but here I was, caging him in against the desk, hands planted on either side of his hips. Not touching him but still so very, very close to blundering past the one boundary he had, the one I’d always vowed to protect as if it were my own. I was too drunk to be careful. Too drunk to be anything but brutally honest. “I spent nine fucking months waiting for a text, an email, a goddamned carrier pigeon, and you gave me nothing. After all that shit you spouted about refusing to let me go, you went and treated me no better than my father ever has.”
Unfathomably dark eyes glittered up at me. “Take that back.”
“Why should I?” I leaned down so that I could spit venom right in his face when I said, “I’m an embarrassment to you, aren’t I? A worthless piece of?—”
The book clattered to the floor as Kirill grabbed me by the shirt?—
And then he shoved me backward.
He didn’t let me go, not when I stumbled over my feet, not when I crashed down onto the bed. Not even when he got close enough to hiss, “You’re drunk, Yaroslav. And since I doubt you’ll remember any of this tomorrow, I’m going to give you the chance to stop talking before you say something that you’ll regret.”
Breathing heavily, I propped my weight onto one elbow and slanted my chin upward. “You think I’ll regret this?” My jaw went tight, lips firming with all the anger that swept recklessly through my blood. “Tell me, Kiryusha, do you regret making me look like a fool?”
It was a direct hit.
I saw the moment he was wounded, how it wept profusely no matter what he did to try and stem the flow. Those beautifully glittering eyes turned anguished, and he released his hold on me, one painstaking finger at a time, to stagger back like I’d actually taken a knife and stabbed him.
I followed, because of course I did, keeping us within short range of each other. “C’mon, tell me. Do you regret it? ”
In all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him like this—gaze haunted, voice gone. The thick rug muffled his retreating footfalls, but the rug couldn’t disguise his shallow breathing, and I found myself utterly hypnotized by the sight of his rabbiting pulse point just below the jut of his jawline. Of the two of us, I was always the one to follow, but it was me on the hunt this time, me stalking him like prey.
“Do you think you’ll sleep tonight?” I purred in a low, furious rasp. “Or do you think that you’ll lie awake, the hours ticking by ever-so-slowly, while you remember the look on my face when I tell you that what you did today is unforgivable ?”
His lips parted.
“But that shouldn’t be a problem for you, right?” There was a chill in my bones. Already I felt icy fingers circling my heart. “Because if you’ve shown me anything in the last nine months, it’s that you care more about kissing my father’s arse than you ever cared about holding onto me.”
With a soft grunt, his back hit the wall beside the door.
And I followed—again. I pressed my hands to the wall above his head and caged him in—again. I lowered my head, cutting the distance between us in half, and spat venom in his face—again.
“I forgive you, you know. For what happened in his study.” Tomorrow, I would regret baring my soul. Tomorrow, but not today. “I would withstand a thousand lashes from you. If that’s what you needed to survive this world, to save face with my father, I’d hand you the belt, Kiryusha, and I’d let you bleed me dry. But I won’t let you be the one to make me feel like I’m worthless. Anyone else,” I uttered in a low, trembling voice, “but not you.”
I won’t survive it.
It would kill me .
An errant tear slipped down my cheek.
I saw the moment he noticed it. The light in his eyes flickered, then went out like the sight of me crying destroyed something vital within him. Then he lifted his hand, fingers already unfurled as if he actually thought to brush away the physical manifestation of my heartache.
Yesterday, if you’d asked me if I would refuse Kirill Volkov the chance to touch me, I would have laughed in your face. Today, all I knew was that I’d shatter into a million little pieces if I let him.
Despite all the vodka, I managed to cleanly evade him.
Grief-stricken, he uttered my name.
“You need to go,” I whispered.
There was a time, back when we were kids, when I was utterly obsessed with the idea of seeing my best friend lose control. I remembered lobbing sock-balls at his head and saying every outrageous thing that came to mind, just to push him over the edge. I thought it was what I wanted—what I craved .
I was wrong.
Because as it registered that I really was kicking him out, Kirill’s entire body hardened like the edge of a steel blade. He stepped forward; this time, I didn’t run. With hands that trembled down by my sides, and a gasp that I would deny until my last breath, I let him stand close enough that I swore I could hear his heartbeat.
“You’re right, you know,” he murmured.
Pulse fluttering, I licked my lips. “About what?”
“I don’t sleep.”
My gut squirmed uneasily with guilt. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said?—”
“I don’t sleep,” he went on gravely, “because your face haunts every one of my nightmares. You may have forgiven me, but I haven’t forgiven myself. I see you the way you were that night—the tears on your cheeks, how utterly lifeless you looked when I touched your face.”
And then, to my surprise, he did just that.
He fitted his warm, calloused palm to the shape of my cheek with such aching tenderness that renewed tears sprang to my eyes. It was too much. His gentleness. His touch. The fierce understanding that flared in his gaze and pierced me through like an arrowhead. All of it was too much .
“Kirill, please,” I rasped as hot, cloying want washed through me. In a bid for self-preservation, I tried to pull away. “Please, just?—”
His palm slid to my nape, holding me captive. “Hate me, Yarik. Tell me I’m a selfish fucking bastard who doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as you.” His fingers slid through the strands of my hair. It wasn’t on purpose, I didn’t think, but it affected me all the same. My heart raced as he used his grip to pull me down so that he could look me dead in the eye when he growled, “But just know that I welcome it, that hatred, because it means that you’re alive .”
My mouth went bone-dry.
It had to be the vodka that made me do it, but I darted my hand up to lay flat over his, clutching his fingers with mine. The combined weight of our entwined hands at the base of my skull nudged my head down until less than a hairsbreadth separated his lips from mine.
I wanted to taste him.
I wanted to show him that while he’d been sent to Moscow, I’d been right here awaiting his return. Nine months later and the memory of us down by the river still plagued my every waking thought. When we’d been so caught up in a maelstrom of emotions, I thought that he might . . . thought that we might?—
Kirill’s gaze fell to my lips, and then he flinched.
I felt it like an earthquake beneath my feet, a tremor that shouldn’t have even registered, but we stood so close, nose to nose, lips millimeters apart, our fingers wound together like braided twine, that it shook me to my core.
Oh, fuck.
Oh, fuck ?—
“I have to go,” he said, jerking away, but not before I saw a flash of panic dart across his expression. “I forgot that I have—that there’s—” He peered back at me over his shoulder with wide, troubled eyes before shaking his head as if to clear it. “I have to go.”
“Wait.” I lurched forward, arm stretched out. “Kirill, wait ?—”
But he was already gone.
I was . . . deeply ashamed of what happened next. Of the way panic, rage, and heartbreak tore through me like the wildest of storms until the state of my bedroom too closely resembled the shambled mess that was my soul. There was a fist-shaped hole in the wall and shards of broken glass glittering in the now-damp rug; a wooden chair snapped in two while books littered the floor. And notebook paper strewn—wait.
Those weren’t mine.
Still panting from my literal self-destruction, I crawled on my hands and knees over splintered glass to snatch up the closest sheet of paper. The handwriting wasn’t mine, but it was . . . familiar.
Too tipsy to make sense of the messy scrawl, I held the paper up to my face. The world around me faded away as I saw the name scribbled at the top .
“No,” I whimpered as I scanned the rest. “No, no, no.”
Nausea clawed at my throat as I let the letter flutter to the floor, only to grab another and another. Soon, there were so many—with more tucked away inside the pages of the book on constellations I’d annotated—that they fanned out around me in a semi-circle.
I was going to be sick.
Through wet lashes, I stared down at the letter clutched in my fist. It was the first. Dated to just two days after my eighteenth birthday when I’d been frantically trying to gather information on where he’d been sent or if he was even still breathing.
Nine months.
He’d been gone nine months , and I had lamented each and every one of those two-hundred-and-seventy-three days. I had thought him dead, and I had thought him an arsehole, but most of all, I’d begged him to write me back.
And he had. Pages and pages worth of letters, so many that it would take me hours just to read them all.
I’d accused Kirill of forgetting me.
He hadn’t.
The boy I loved hadn’t forgotten me at all.