25. Yarik
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
YARIK
“ W e’re all good for tomorrow,” Eren said as he lowered into the chair adjacent to mine a few days later, his brown eyes still fixed on the phone in his hand. Even from here, I could see that he had his favorite calendar app pulled up on the screen. The man lived for a perfectly plotted schedule. I figured it was a leftover habit from his army days. “Flight is booked, and?—”
“Tell me again why we aren’t flying private?”
I stared at Beck, who was lazily toying with a trench knife by tossing it up into the air like a juggler with a death wish. “Because my father hates you, that’s why.”
“Hates me?” Somehow, the crazy bastard managed to catch the blade by the tip without severing a finger, only to flip it around, so that he could playfully thrust the pointed edge in my direction. “How about hates you , my liege?”
“I think I’m the only one here that he doesn’t hate.” Beck and I both glanced at Eren, who still hadn’t bothered to lift his head from his phone to fully join the conversation. His dark brown hair hung in coiled ringlets in front of his face. When three seconds passed without either me or Beck speaking, he finally blew one thick curl out of his eyes. “What?” He set his phone down on the kitchen table. “He can’t hate me when he doesn’t even know me.”
“He definitely hates you,” I said bluntly.
“Thanks to forced proximity,” Beck tacked on. He pointed the knife at Eren. “Forced proximity with us, I mean, not with the Sperm Donor.”
Eren’s nose wrinkled. “Should you really be calling the pakhan that?”
“Well, I’m not calling him Daddy , if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”
“I wasn’t. I really, really wasn’t.”
“That’s right. Because there’s only one daddy here, mates, and it’s yours truly.” When Beck waved a hand—the one clutching the knife—in front of his body, Eren turned to me with a half-crazed look that said he was about five seconds away from putting a bullet in Beck’s skull.
Struggling to hold back a laugh, I cleared my throat. “So, flight’s booked. And Marchetti, where are we meeting him?”
Relief chased away the lingering irritation in his gaze as Eren went back to his beloved calendar. “We’ll get into Naples around noon. I’ve booked us a reservation at Marchetti’s favorite trattoria. Hopefully, that will soften him up before we break the news.”
Beck snorted. “Have you met Dante Marchetti? Cold bastard wouldn’t melt an ice lolly even if you shoved it up his arse.”
With a defeated sigh, Eren’s eyes slid closed. “Do you ever listen to yourself? Like, really, truly listen to yourself?”
“Every day of my life, mate.” Beck offered him a wolfish grin. “And aren’t you one lucky cunt, getting to hear the sound of my voice for the rest of your life. ”
“Just kill me. Please,” Eren muttered, although to whom, I wasn’t even sure.
The three of us had been together for the better part of four years, and while there’d been plenty of times when I felt like an exhausted parent herding a pair of constantly squabbling children, I’d never . . . Well, aside from Kirill, I’d never had any friends at all. Beck and Eren were it for me, though in many ways, there was still so much that I kept hidden from them.
Like the fact that I was gay.
It wasn’t something that I planned on telling them. Much as I’d like to think that they wouldn’t care, there wasn’t any point in testing the waters. For as long as I existed in the Bratva, I’d be tracked like prey, my every move watched and recorded. Anton, my father’s brigadiers, Kirill —they all had me locked in their sights with no hope of ever breaking free.
I swallowed, tightly, then subtly lowered my gaze to my phone, which I had balanced on my thigh. With a flick of my fingers, I pulled up my most recent texts—still nothing.
It was starting to feel like I’d gotten away with murder.
Kirill’s absence since the club was either a blessing or a curse; I just wasn’t sure which one yet. Either way, it seemed that I’d have another few days to sweat out the rest of my shame while we were roasting in the warm Italian sun.
Good luck trying to forget the memory of him leaving with her .
I put my phone facedown on the table, my stomach twisting with bitter jealousy.
“Marchetti isn’t going to like hearing that his older brother’s cut him off,” I said, drawing Beck and Eren’s attention back to me and away from each other. “That’s not our problem. We’re not there to get involved in family drama. Either he agrees to open his own contract with us or he’s done. Obviously, the hope is the former.”
“Or the Sperm Donor will get very, very angry.”
Eren rolled his eyes at Beck. To me, he said, “Can we leave him behind? I’m begging you.”
Him being Daniel Beck.
I cracked a smile. “You have my blessing to smother him in his sleep on the flight home.”
“You are a true hero,” Eren utterly dryly, just as Beck exclaimed, “Oi! I’m right here, ain’t I? Don’t be talkin’ like I can’t hear the two of you.”
Whatever he said next was drowned out by the buzz of white noise in my ears as a familiar body entered my periphery. I turned my head slightly, already knowing whom I’d find.
Kirill.
He was standing just inside the front door of Beck’s flat with one hand tucked casually into the pocket of his trousers while he spoke quietly with Anton. Just the sight of him there—completely unexpected since I hadn’t realized he even knew where Beck lived—was enough to short-circuit my brain.
I wanted to throw myself at him while simultaneously wanting to hurl my guilt-ridden body from the closest window.
Fuck.
Beck’s good humor faded as he noticed Kirill. “What’s he doing here?”
Wondering the same, I went for nonchalance—and failed. My heart thrashed wildly against my rib cage as I wet my lips. “Don’t know. I didn’t invite him.”
Even Eren peered over his shoulder, watching with wary eyes as Anton nodded at whatever Kirill told him before slipping out into the hallway beyond Beck’s flat. My best friend left the front door open as he turned toward where we sat in the kitchen. Beside me, Beck shifted his weight, rising to his feet as though he could personally withstand whatever Kirill was about to throw at us.
I pushed to my feet, too.
Truthfully, I didn’t blame Beck or Eren for their hesitation when it came to Kirill. He regularly spent time with us, like the other night at the club, but no one was blind to the fact that in the last three years, Kirill had slowly, mercilessly, climbed the ladder until he had a permanent seat at my father’s table as his bookkeeper, or kassir . Sometimes, the only time Kirill came around was to collect money that would go directly into my father’s coffers or be strategically placed into the hands of people who would otherwise see the Volkov empire fall.
Beck and Eren liked Kirill, I knew they did, but they didn’t trust him.
It killed me that some days I felt the same way.
“Hey,” I said, cutting around the table until I stood directly before him. Despite the unease swimming in my gut over his unexpected arrival, the pathetic eagerness with which I met his gaze was all too genuine. I was weak for him, and it didn’t seem to matter what wrongs he committed against me—there was still nothing I loved more than existing in his orbit. “I didn’t realize you were stopping by.” Carefully, I glanced over his shoulder to the open doorway. “Did Anton get bad news?”
Did you bring bad news ? I bit the question back before it escaped.
“Your father wanted me to pass a message along. It couldn’t wait. ”
A private message that wasn’t for Anton’s spying ears? The unease swimming in my gut multiplied tenfold. I wasn’t na?ve enough to think that Kirill had rushed all this way to tell me some clandestine secret of my father’s, but I still heard myself ask Beck and Eren if they’d mind giving us a few minutes alone. It was a testament to his loyalty that Beck didn’t complain about being kicked out of his own flat—just squeezed my shoulder as he headed for the door.
The snick of the lock turning over echoed like a foghorn in my ears. Habit, I thought, as Beck closed up, too busy bickering with Eren to realize locking us in here wasn’t exactly necessary. And not that we couldn’t just walk out whenever we wanted to. Soon, their voices faded into silence.
Kirill stepped away.
I watched him go, never taking my eyes off him. The stiff way he held his shoulders . . . “Something’s wrong. What is it?”
Instead of answering, he shrugged out of his jacket to reveal a gray, long-sleeved dress shirt that he paused to cuff at the elbows. The jacket he draped over the closest chair.
Sometimes, it was a shock to see my best friend all grown up. Somewhere in his mid-twenties, the Kirill Volkov I’d fallen for was nowhere to be found. In his place was a man with battle-weary eyes that missed absolutely nothing. The angular jaw was perfectly clean-shaven, the shoulders strong enough to carry the weight of the world. Even the clothes he preferred to wear seemed more like armor than an expression of creativity. The trousers cupped his arse. The shirt emphasized his narrow waist. Utilitarian at its finest. Meanwhile, I’d spent all of five minutes this morning tossing on a worn pair of jeans and a black T-shirt that was a few years too old. The fabric stretched tight across my wide shoulders and flirted with my waistline. It should have gone in the bin ages ago, but I’d kept it out of spite, secretly enjoying the way the snug fit made me feel good.
Any enjoyment I might have felt wearing it in Kirill’s presence was entirely short-lived. The moment he was sure that Beck and Eren were out of earshot, his gaze turned stony with an emotion I could only classify as fury.
I dropped my arms back down to my sides just as he bit out, “Take a seat.”
“Kiryusha—”
“Take. A. Seat.” Each word left his mouth like a round from a chamber. Hard. Deadly. When I didn’t immediately move to obey, he clamped a hand down on the chair that held his jacket and jerked it away from the table. The wooden feet clattered against the tile floor. “Sit,” he growled.
“You could at least say please.”
Wrong move .
His dark eyes blazed with an inferno that I was embarrassed to say lit me aflame. I loved tender Kirill. I loved the Kirill who’d written me pages upon pages of letters from the other side of the world. But if the last few years had taught me anything, it was that I also loved this version of him, too—the coldhearted soldier whose claws I knew would carve me open while he dragged me kicking and screaming down to the darkest depths of Hell.
Which had to be the only reason I was mad enough to poke the angry beast by adding, “I don’t answer to you.”
“Oh, but I think you do.”
To my surprise, he sidestepped the table. His gait was still agitated—I’d known him for way too long to miss the clipped, angry strides that were usually so smooth and loose-limbed—but the rage in his voice had opted for a different tactic, softening to a dangerous purr that coated my veins like the sweetest poison.
“The first time your father made me watch you, I nearly threw up from the guilt.”
I jerked my head to the side just in time to see him disappear behind me. Like a predator stalking its prey, he proved elusive. When I twisted the other way, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, he evaded me once again to stand just out of arm’s reach. He had me turned upside down, twisted inside out, my reflexes shoddy from the uncertainty of what he’d do or say next. The rich scent of him, though, filled my nose. Cedarwood with a hint of the sea. I wanted nothing more than to bury my face in his neck and rub his scent all over me.
“It started out innocently enough,” Kirill continued in a falsely good-humored murmur, “with you on your back, hands resting on your belly. I thought to myself, I miss him . Because I did, Yaroslav. I missed you so fucking much, I thought I would die from the loss of you.”
“I missed you, too?—”
“I would have done anything to get back to you—so, I did. I became your father’s little spy.” A cruel smile dripping with self-loathing twisted his lips. “It felt wrong to spy on you when you were so incredibly clueless. Rightfully so, I might add. Why would you think that you were being watched? Your father is a lot of things, but he’d never crossed that line before—not with you or your sister.” Gaze shuttering, Kirill passed a hand over his mouth. When he pulled it away, the dark smile curving his lips was gone. “I told myself that invading your privacy was worth whatever pain I might cause you, so long as I actually got to come home in the end. But that was before you started playing with the button on your jeans . . .”
My breath caught in my throat.
“You were insatiable, weren’t you?” The tenor of his voice dropped to a husky rumble. “Fucking shameless.”
“I thought that I was alone,” I uttered hoarsely.
“You weren’t.”
“Did you watch me?” The question leapt from my tongue before I could wrangle it into submission. There were butterflies swarming in my stomach. Any second now, I was going to pass the fuck out. “When I was . . . When I touched myself, I mean. Did you watch?”
“No.”
Disappointment nearly dropped me to my knees.
“I refused to watch you.” His midnight-black eyes bored into me with such fierce intensity that I felt lightheaded. “When you touched yourself, I turned the audio off, made sure to focus my attention elsewhere. And when you finished, I made sure to delete every trace of you jacking off from the server, or looking up porn on the internet, or whatever the fuck else you were doing at three in the morning when you thought everyone was asleep.”
Porn. On the internet.
The white noise buzzing in my ears was now a thunderous roar. Fuck provoking the beast, I wanted to run away and never, ever look back. He knew. He knew that I’d been watching gay porn—everything from docking to frottage to coming hands-free—and I could see it in the dark glimmer of his eyes, in the way he held himself apart from me, that he had kept this secret for years now.
Had he realized, too, that I was hopelessly in love with him?
I opened my mouth to defend myself, to spew some rubbish lie that neither one of us would believe. Only, to my burning shame, nothing came out.
I stumbled backward, fear and panic pummeling me from all angles, but Kirill—he followed, tracking my harried escape across Beck’s kitchen, never letting me out of his sight.
“You could have used those midnight hours to murder someone, and I would have gotten rid of the evidence. For you, Yarik. Anything for you. Because I made a vow to protect you, no matter what.” His features distorted with an emotion that I wasn’t even sure I could properly name—betrayal, anger, resentment. Some horrid blend of all three. “Imagine my surprise,” he growled, “when I realized that you couldn’t do the same for me.”
He pulled something small from his pocket and threw it on the floor. It rolled once, twice, thrice, before skidding to a stop halfway between us. It was compact and made of plastic, its hard shell a deep, dark gray that appeared almost black.
A body camera.
The kind that all of my father’s men wore around me.
The kind that Kirill wore around me.
It cracked in two beneath the heavy weight of his shoe. “Did it ever occur to you that I’d find out? That I might pull up the feed from the club, the very next day, to delete a private moment that I wouldn’t want hand-delivered to your father on a silver platter?”
Oh, fuck .
Eyes wide, my heart rabbited so fiercely that I was actually panting.
Kirill wasn’t done with me.
In a voice like ice, he ground out, “And there you were, weren’t you? ”
Something hard and immovable collided with my spine, impeding my getaway. A quick jerk of my chin revealed that I was pressed up against a wall in Beck’s lounge. I was bigger than Kirill, stronger, too, if not necessarily faster. There was nothing to stop me from shoving him out of the way and getting out of here.
Only, I’d been anticipating this confrontation, hadn’t I? The guilt, the endless shame. I’d felt the first stirrings of each that night when I’d watched him, but in the three days that followed, I’d done nothing but drown in them both.
He was right, of course. In that bathroom, with nothing but a wall and a mirror to keep us apart, I’d thought of only my own desires. I deserved his wrath. For many different reasons, honestly, but mostly because maybe, if he hated me enough, it’d finally get through my stupid, fucking brain that he didn’t want me .
I couldn’t keep living like this—I wouldn’t survive it.
We wouldn’t survive it.
“Did you watch me?”
At the gravel in his voice, I squeezed my eyes shut. “You already know the answer.”
“I want you to own it,” my best friend growled hotly. “Did you watch me, Yarik?”
Mortification bled into every cell in my body.
“Yes,” I whispered, my skin hot with shame.
“Did you touch yourself, thinking of her?”
The laugh that crawled up my throat sounded tragically bitter. “Does it make you feel better to think that? If so, then yeah. Sure did. Fucking made myself come all over my hand thinking of the hot little blonde sucking you off, the one you could barely bring yourself to look at.”
He hissed through his teeth. “Careful, now.”
“I touched myself thinking of you !” I exploded, my hands shaped into tight, trembling fists down at my sides. It was too late to snatch the confession back. Too late to do much of anything but double down and lie in the grave I’d dug myself. “Because that’s what I do, Kirill. I dream of you—in bed, with my hand around my aching dick, or at the club, watching your reflection in the mirror, wishing you’d only look at me.”
Surprise flashed in his unfathomably dark eyes. “I-I look at you.”
“Not the way that I look at you.”
“Yarik—”
“Do I disgust you? Is that it?” Somehow, the tables had turned, putting me on the offensive even though I didn’t dare move a single muscle. I dragged in shattered breath after shattered breath, staring helplessly at the boy I’d loved for over ten years, with my back still pressed against the wall, entirely at his mercy. “Is it one thing to know your best mate gets off to gay porn but something else entirely to know that he wants all of that with you ? Because I want that,” I said, for the first time in my life not shying away from the truth. “I want you to fuck me, Kiryusha. I want you to make me scream your name, to carve my nails down your spine so that you remember me always, but most of all, I want you to beg for me.”
“Shut up,” he said, but his voice shook with the effort it took to get the words out. His cheeks were stained red with a furious flush. “Stop talking, okay? Just stop talking .”
“No. If this is the only chance I’ll get to tell you how I really feel, then you’re just going to have to take it.”
His hand found the front of my T-shirt, twining the material around his fist. Maybe so he could hold me in place when he knocked my lights out. Maybe so he could yell at me some more. All I knew was that he watched me the way a tiger might watch an approaching predator from its perch in the jungle, almost bewildered to find another of its ilk encroaching on territory that it had always called home.
Kirill was my home.
Wherever he went, I’d fit myself there beside him even if it meant that I fed on days-old scraps.
“I want you more than I want my next breath.” The admission was raw, completely unfiltered. It left me swaying from an overwhelming sense of relief, a burden that I no longer carried alone. “I’ve wanted you for years . And I can tell you that I’m sorry for watching you the other night, but that would be a lie—I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry at all.”
Quick, uneven breaths slipped past his lips.
And then glassy, midnight-eyes dropped down to my mouth.
“Every page of my life has you written between the lines. You could walk away right now, and that still wouldn’t change how I feel about you.” Because I was weak for him, utterly hopeless . I always would be. “So, go.” I shoved his chest. “Get out of here. If you don’t want me, there’s the fucking door.”
He didn’t budge.
If anything, his hand coiled the fabric of my shirt even tighter. Whether he realized it or not, he’d pulled me forward so that I hovered over him. I wanted to place my hands on his hips. I wanted to dig my nails into his skin and mark him forever. But both of those options involved touching him, and I didn’t know what to do with the mixed signals he was sending. Swallowing hard, I searched his face, seeking any confirmation that he wanted this—that he wanted me .
His color was still high, his pulse pounding almost feverishly in the hollow of his throat. Then his lips parted like he was about to receive a kiss, and he nervously touched his tongue to his bottom lip.
I was fucking done .
“Let me taste you, Kiryusha.”
As if he was a skittish colt, I lifted my trembling hand slowly, allowing my palm to drift over his cheek without actually touching him. So, so close, but I refused to close that final gap—not until he surrendered or at least gave me permission to take what I wanted. What I’d always wanted—him.
“Just once,” I begged roughly, “please.”
His gaze snapped up to meet mine.
He didn’t say no.
He didn’t tell me to fuck off.
He didn’t do anything besides lift his chin, and that was really all I needed. With every bit of my heart and soul, I cradled his cheek like he was precious to me, then lowered my head in tiny increments, giving him every chance to pull away, to put a stop to this, once and for all.
Our noses brushed. My thumb grazed his cheekbone in a gentle, careful caress that I’d ached to give him for over a decade, since that night I’d found him by the river, his skin caked in mud. I breathed him in, that scent of cedarwood and the sea that smelled of home, and felt his warm, shaky breath tease my lips with the promise of more.
I’d waited eleven years to make Kirill Volkov mine.
I couldn’t wait a second longer.
Letting my eyes flutter shut, I slanted my mouth down over his and?—