Chapter Twenty-five
Dmitri Konstantinov
A cold touch on my forehead dragged me out of sleep, and my hand moved on instinct. I looked up to find Inna standing over me, and the coldness was a cloth pressed to my skin. I exhaled, releasing her hand. She apparently appointed herself to a position nobody advertised.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
She let the cloth rest on my forehead and sat back in the chair she had brought closer to the bed. “You were burning.”
Her eyes held too much sleep, her brows drawn together as though she were responsible for keeping me alive. It was almost charming and worth correcting.
Gunshot wounds were familiar territory. They were the cost of plans that didn’t go well, and my body understood the terms. A few solid hours of sleep would settle it.
Inna, however, was committed to ruining those hours by performing emergency nursing with a basin of water and a cloth.
She was also furious at me for not doing whatever she suggested earlier.
She called me a robot because I declined her repeated requests to go to a hospital.
I let her press the cloth and stared at her lips instead.
Those soft lips were obedient. The way her tongue moved with mine with a particular earnestness, like she was learning a language she already half knew. I could still feel them on mine.
She continued to surprise me. At first, I underestimated her hair, thinking it couldn’t fill my fist, but our moment in the closet proved me wrong.
I assumed the mouth would be a disaster, and it wasn’t.
The inexperience was visible for only a few seconds before she caught up.
What I hadn’t yet resolved was how she would feel when I fucked her, how she would sound, and how she would look at me while I thrust my cock in her pussy.
In my experience, women were not complicated. Sex was direct. I took their bodies and moved forward. But Inna turned me into a man I didn’t recognize, a man exploring smaller things, staying in the earlier chapters because the last one would end the story.
“Normal people go to the hospital.” She caught my attention. She must have noticed I was staring and started that silly argument again.
If she knew the number of men I had murdered, she wouldn’t mention hospitals, let alone police. She believed I was attacked. It was a reasonable conclusion and a wrong one.
I attacked.
The operation to retrieve her father came close to failing.
Iker moved him before we arrived. The location we had earlier was empty, meaning Iker knew it could happen.
What followed was a hunt through territory I had no interest in crossing.
I built a messier plan that left marks and started conversations between men who communicate exclusively through violence.
Going out as Luigi carried its own logic.
That name had a reputation I shaped over the years, a signature that announced itself without apology.
Luigi doesn’t slip in and out; he arrives, takes what he came for, and leaves evidence.
Evidence was the message. I left marks scattered behind me to redirect Iker’s attention toward a ghost while I moved in the opposite direction.
It always worked.
But as I walked out with one bullet, Inna’s father absorbed more bullets than a man his age could survive. He was unconscious, and here was Inna taking care of a small wound. If she knew the shape her father was in, she wouldn’t be treating me like I was at the edge.
She didn’t have to know about her father yet. Not until I knew whether or not he would survive.
I noticed her head drop as she finally surrendered to sleep. Her chin dipped toward her chest and came to rest against the edge of the mattress. Her fingers curled around my injured hand. She always argues about everything, including sleep.
I watched her for a moment. The furrow between her brows was gone, and the hair she was always pushing back fell across her cheek.
Shifting to sit up, Inna jumped awake.
“What happened?” Her hands moved toward my face.
I leaned back against the headboard and watched her. She reached for the cloth and rinsed it. Her hand moved toward my forehead, but I caught her wrist.
“That’s enough.”
She looked at me. “What?”
I nodded toward the empty side of the bed. “Get in bed.”
Her brows drew together. “What if you need something?” I pulled her wrist toward the mattress. “Fine,” she muttered. “Only because you insist.”
She climbed beside me and settled against the headboard in a sitting position. She stared forward as if she expected a signal before she could lie down.
After a moment, she turned her head toward me, eyelids heavy, losing the fight completely. “Are you feeling better?”
I lifted the edge of the blanket and gestured toward the pillow. “You look like the one dying. Lie down.”
She groaned but obeyed, sliding down until her head met the pillow. Even then, she kept her eyes on me with a stubborn vigilance.
“I still think you should see a doctor,” she murmured. “And whoever attacked you, shouldn’t you report it?”
“Sleep.”
I reached for my phone, and the movement dragged a dull, specific ache through my shoulder and down into my arm.
“Don’t you care about your body? This is serious, you should—”
“Inna.”
She looked at me. “Hm.”
A sharp response sat on my tongue, a final one that would end the conversation without ceremony. I had the words, but when I looked down at her face, I didn’t use them. There was nothing in her eyes except pure concern. She was simply worried.
I set the phone down and reached over to pull the blanket higher around her shoulders.
“Enough talking,” I said. “Sleep.”
Her eyelids dragged lower.
“We’re still talking when I wake up,” she murmured, the words softening and blurring at the edges as sleep moved through her.
Talk? There wasn’t going to be any talking. What was going to happen was attending Iker’s event. I would show up at that event as though nothing had happened. He invited Dmitri Konstantinov, and that was who would show up.
Before any of that, I needed painkillers. The wound was beginning to argue with me, trying to convince me Inna was right.
I looked down at her.
She was already gone, the furrow between her brows finally released again. I reached over and brushed a loose strand of hair from her cheek, letting my fingers move across her temple.
My gaze settled on her mouth. I was staring at her lips more than necessary. My thumb moved to her lower lip and brushed it over her. The softness sent a slow current of heat through me.
She pulled something in me I had no vocabulary for and no particular interest in developing one for. Naming it would mean examining it, and examining it would mean giving it weight. I didn’t extend that courtesy to things I intended to end.
The resolution was obvious. I wanted to fuck her so badly, and once I did, the wanting would fade on its own the way it always did. Whatever this was would become a memory. I would leave with that much.