23. Yarik
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
YARIK
I t took me three long weeks to get Kirill alone. Even then, we were surrounded by mourners.
And okay, maybe I should have waited until we weren’t attending a funeral to corner him, but I was running out of options. Simply put, I was beyond the point of desperation. If this was my one chance to speak with him, then carpe fucking diem. Just let him try and shake me off.
Here goes nothing .
Slanting a nervous glance over my shoulder, I searched the assembly of unfamiliar faces for any sign of my father. When I came up blessedly empty, I drew in a slow, calming breath, then slid silently into the empty spot beside Kirill. Immediately, he stiffened and moved to leave.
“Wait,” I uttered pathetically. “Fuck, just wait . Please.”
Dressed in a black, tailored suit that hugged the firm lines of his body, Kirill remained half in profile, his back to the wall. The width of his shoulders rose with a heavy breath. Then he speared me with his gaze. “We aren’t doing this at a funeral. ”
“Then where? When? You might as well still be in Moscow for all I’ve seen of you.”
“We live in the same house.”
“And yet, you’re never there.”
Shoulders drooping, his shoes tapped soundlessly against the floor as he stepped back into place, though he kept his distance like he wasn’t in any hurry to let his guard down. I was so focused on the muscle fluttering in his jaw that I almost missed the way his cheeks had flooded with color.
Wait.
Had he just been avoiding me like I’d suspected? Or had he . . . had he actually been staying somewhere else with someone else?
The thought almost knocked me back onto my arse. Had the chairs not been reserved for the frail and elderly, I would have sat down, just to withstand the unwanted visual of Kirill with—with someone —assaulting me. Grappling for control over my expression, I forced my closed fists behind my back like a toddler being told to sit on their hands to stop them from playing with fire.
Only problem was, I wanted nothing more than to dance amidst the flames.
Did you forget? He ran from you. And by the looks of it, he wants nothing more than to keep on running .
Maybe I’d had the right of it, striking up conversation with him in the middle of a funeral. It meant that I couldn’t make a scene, no matter how badly I wanted to pepper him with questions. Jealousy writhed inside me like a living, breathing beast. Gritting my teeth, I flicked my aimless gaze over the ornate, gold-plated icons that decorated the muraled walls of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral. It was the oldest of its kind in London. I’d been baptized here. Buried my mother here, too, on church grounds. And while I wasn’t particularly religious, I still pitched my voice respectfully low as I’d been taught to do from birth. “We both know you’ve been avoiding me.”
Kirill stared straight ahead. The muscle in his jaw ticked faster. “I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Yarik, I’m not playing these games?—”
“It’s fine if you have been; I don’t blame you. But here’s the thing”—I spared him a single, vulnerable glance—“you mean something to me. No,” I corrected with a quick, emphatic shake of my head, “you mean everything to me. And I said bloody awful things to you.”
If I thought his body couldn’t grow any stiffer, I was immediately proven wrong. His knuckles turned bone-white just before he slipped them into the front pockets of his trousers. “Let’s not do this here. Please.”
If it were up to him, we’d never do this at all.
Meanwhile, I was slowly unraveling.
I’d once heard that apologies aren’t for the injured party so much as they’re given to wipe clean a guilty conscience. If that logic held true, then the only reason I’d showed up here today—for the death of some foot soldier I didn’t even know—was for purely selfish reasons. It made me uncomfortable to think I was using the loss of someone’s life for my own benefit, but the idea of going yet another day without getting any of this off my chest was unbearable.
I had to believe that Kirill needed to hear the words just as badly as I needed to say them.
“We have to do this, don’t you see?” Giving up all pretenses, I hunched my shoulders to draw less attention to myself. Inadvertently, my elbow pressed into his sternum. While he didn’t pull away, his cautious gaze flinched up to meet mine. That brief, shared glance elicited a tremor down my spine. I plowed on. It was now or never. “In your letters, you wrote that you haven’t forgiven yourself for what happened last year—but, Kirill, I can’t forgive myself for what I said just three weeks ago.”
The somber silence around us was crudely interrupted as the archpriest began the service.
Lowering my voice even more, I let raw heartache rasp across my tongue. “I was angry and upset. You were gone and I . . . I was a mess.” I raked my fingers through my hair, my eyes darting hastily over the people around us. I shifted closer. “I’d just spent nine months terrified you were never coming back, and then you did, in my father’s shadow, no less, looking perfect and untouchable, like you didn’t have a single care in the world, and I lost it, Kiryusha. I wanted to hurt you as badly as you hurt me.”
Except that he’d already been hurt, almost fatally so. The thought that I could have just as easily been attending his funeral today nearly dropped me to my knees.
“I’m sorry. With everything I am, I’m so, so sorry.”
Unable to resist any longer, I twisted away from the congregation so that the only person filling my vision was Kirill. Reading his letters had consumed my entire being. I kept them in the annotated book he’d slipped them into, and the thin pages were already becoming worn from my constant handling.
He’d never given me such unfettered access to his thoughts before.
His mind was . . . addicting, gut-wrenching . Insomnia had become my second-closest friend, after Kirill himself, because no matter what I did, I couldn’t erase the terrifying prospect that he could have died, and I never would have known. He wrote that he worried about me, and yet I was surrounded by bodyguards every second of the day to the point of suffocation—I’d practically had to browbeat Anton into waiting for me outside the cathedral just so I could have this conversation without him eavesdropping.
But what about Kirill?
Where were his guards? Who ensured his security?
Like every other foot soldier in the Bratva, he only had himself. The difference was, of course, that Kirill spent his life teetered across two worlds. Within the social hierarchy of Father’s army, he was at the bottom. And yet, he lived with us, ate with us, slept with us, under my father’s own roof.
When he’d said that he didn’t have a choice, he’d meant it.
He was surviving the only way he knew how, and I had twisted the last nine months of deafening silence to make it all about me—the privileged, spoiled mafia prince who never had to worry about whether he’d live or die. Unless, of course, it was at the hands of my own father.
Be grateful I don’t put you down like a dog .
It wasn’t the same. And I felt such terrible shame, knowing that I had stuck Kirill between a rock and a hard place, expecting unconditional loyalty from him when I offered nothing in return. What did I even have to give him? My friendship? Love ? Fucking worthless, just like I was.
Loyalty to my father guaranteed him safety.
He deserved that. It was the bare minimum, really.
The sensation of a shoulder gently nudging my arm snapped me back to reality, drawing my attention down to Kirill’s upturned face. His brows were furrowed, his head tipped back so that he could hold my gaze. I expected him to pull away so we were no longer touching, but then the middle-aged man on the other side of him jostled toward us, leaving Kirill no wriggle room to escape.
I wanted him.
Fuck, I wanted him so badly that my teeth ached.
I stepped back, anyway, giving him breathing room. I wanted him, yes, but I loved him more. I loved him enough that I would bury these unwanted feelings of mine to the depths of my core. Forever, if I had to.
“I’m sorry, too,” he finally said. When I lifted a brow, he seemed to shore himself up to get the words out before he lost his nerve. “I was the one who told Volkov what you were up to with Robert Murray.”
Oh. Weakly, I tried for a smile. “It’s okay.”
“I was the one who had them all monitored. The one who did the monitoring.”
Those weren’t the normal duties of a foot soldier, and I felt my stomach churn uneasily. “It’s okay, Kiryusha. Really.”
“And I’ve watched you, too.”
It was, I thought, as if the floor had opened up beneath me. I would have been in freefall, but Kirill’s midnight eyes kept me tethered to this church, to the archpriest’s monotone sermon and the sweet scent of incense permeating the air. At the base of my spine, my fingers knotted together so tightly that circulation loss had to be imminent.
“Everything you do,” Kirill confessed roughly, “I see. Everything you say, I hear.”
I struggled to find my voice. “What do you do with that information?”
But I knew.
Fuck, I knew, and the way he watched me now, with remorse and self-loathing warring in his distraught gaze . . . Well, it was all the confirmation I needed. He hadn’ t been avoiding me for the last three weeks because he’d been angry with me. He’d avoided me out of guilt .
“Right.” I jerked my gaze away, vision blurring. “Okay.”
It wasn’t okay. Maybe I hadn’t had much freedom to begin with, but it was still something, at least, to know that if I tried hard enough, I could escape for a few hours of solitary bliss. Now there was no part of my life that my father wouldn’t have full access to.
I was a prisoner.
Chained to the future Volkov throne the way Princess Andromeda had been chained to a rock as a sacrifice to the sea monster, Cetus. But instead of being rescued by Perseus and his trusty steed, Pegasus, as Andromeda had been in the Greek myth Kirill had once told me about, my own savior had opted to save himself. Survival in the only way he knows, I reminded myself. If only I loved him a little less, maybe I would hate him for it.
Gruffly, I asked, “Do you remember when Pavel died?”
Kirill’s nod was almost imperceptible.
“I wondered if it was better to know the person you killed, and you said it was worse knowing the way that you knew Pavel.” The flesh of my palms screamed from the biting pressure of my nails. “I don’t agree.”
“Yarik, I?—”
“It’s better to know the truth,” I interjected sharply, “no matter how much it hurts.” Tension crackled like a livewire between us. At some point, we’d shifted to stand shoulder to shoulder, both of us looking out into the assembly of mourners. Inside my soul, it felt like I was dying, too. “How many cameras?”
There was a slight pause as if he was struggling for an answer, before he finally admitted in a flat, emotionless voice, “Throughout the house. ”
“My bedroom?”
“Yes.”
Trying not to think about all the times I’d potentially jerked off in my room, I forced myself to adopt the same impassive inflection he had. “Anton?”
“He wears a body camera.”
“And you?” I ground my teeth, wanting desperately to look at him, to gauge the truth in his eyes, but I held myself unnaturally still, unwilling to let my self-control shatter. “Are you wearing a camera right now?”
Another pause.
Then, hoarsely, “Yes.”
“This tape. Will you give it to him?”
“No.”
For the first time in my life, I didn’t believe him.
My right palm split open, the flesh finally surrendering as it broke. There’d be blood. Maybe a small scar to match the ones he’d left on my back. I often thought that I loved Kirill Volkov so much that it hurt. And yet, with the damning truth laid out before us, I realized with a dawning sense of horror that I felt nothing at all.
I was numb, hollowed out. Like an ancient tree on the cusp of death.
In a voice like gravel, Kirill rasped, “I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t,” I vowed.
It was a lie.
We were already lost.