Chapter 14 Lev
Lev
She takes the last of the bread without asking, and I let her, because I’d let her take most things at this point, and I’m not going to examine that too closely.
We’ve been at the dacha since yesterday morning. I drove us out before sunrise, two hours through fields and pine that got thicker the farther we got from the city. She slept most of the way with her cheek against the window and her shoes off on the seat.
Polina didn’t ask where we were going. She trusted me with the route, which is more than I’ve earned, and I spent the better part of that drive more aware of her breathing than the road.
The place belongs to a contact who owes me a favor and knows better than to ask why I need it.
It’s quaint and simple, with wood floors and a stone fireplace, and she made herself at home before I finished bringing in the bags.
She found the kitchen first, and by the time we sat down to eat, the dacha felt less like a hideout and more like somewhere we’d chosen to be.
I’ve spent two years watching her from a distance, and I still wasn’t prepared for what she’s like when she isn’t performing anything for anyone.
“You’re staring,” she comments without looking up from her plate.
“I’m aware.”
“It’s impolite.”
“I’ll work on it,” I reply with a smirk, though I have no intention of doing so.
She looks up, and the corner of her mouth does what it does when she’s trying not to be amused.
She tears the piece of bread she took earlier and holds half across the table toward me.
I already have bread, but I take it anyway, and she watches my hand before looking back down at her plate, and my cock stirs like I’m seventeen years old.
I don’t know what to do with her, which is a new problem for me. I’ve been around women I wanted, and people I respected, but this is the first time those two things have shown up together.
I catch myself doing things I can’t justify, like refilling her glass before she asks, putting myself between her and the door, and listening for the sound of her moving through rooms I can’t see her in. When she laughs genuinely at something I say, I lose track of whatever I was saying.
I’ve spent years building loyalty through competence and fear, and here I am, completely undone by a woman who steals the last of the bread.
Ruslan would have a lot to say about all of this, but Ruslan is in Moscow. Not here.
She’s wearing my sweater because she packed light and gets cold at night.
I’ve been trying not to stare at her in it for the last hour.
The sleeves hang past her wrists, and she keeps pushing them up.
Every time she does, I want to put my mouth on the inside of her wrist and work my way up from there.
Polina has her knees pulled up on the chair and her wine glass balanced on her knee, and she looks nothing like the woman who runs a trauma bay at Moscow General. She looks like herself, which turns out to be considerably more dangerous.
She looks at me over the rim of her glass, and for a second, her face is unguarded in a way she doesn’t usually allow, and then she looks away first, which rarely happens. She sets her wine on the arm of the chair and seems to be deciding something. I’ve learned not to push her.
“My parents died when I was sixteen,” she says. “Car accident. Black ice, according to the official report.” She takes a slow sip. “I never believed it.”
I keep my face neutral. “Why not?”
“Because it wasn’t cold enough for black ice to form that day.
” She shrugs, and her eyes stay on the fire.
“My mother wasn’t Bratva. She came from outside, married my father, and spent the rest of her life being treated like an outsider.
She had knowledge of both families just from living in our house.
She knew too much about both organizations simply from living in our house.
For years before she died, powerful men considered her a liability. ”
I say nothing, because there’s nothing safe to say. I know all this from my findings, but I can’t tell her that her suspicions are spot-on without betraying my family.
“I spent two years after it happened pulling every police document I could get my hands on. I tracked down three witnesses and spoke to all of them. But I was eighteen.” She pauses to clear her throat.
“Then I stopped. Not because I changed my mind about what happened. I stopped because I was old enough to understand that whoever ordered it was still operating, and asking too loudly would put me in the ground next to them.”
I reach forward and set my glass on the table, mostly so my hands have somewhere to go.
Polina sets her wine down as well and bites her bottom lip, looking at me expectantly with her stunning brown eyes. “You’re not saying anything.”
“I’m listening.” My mouth is dry from the oversimplification. I am listening, but I’m also drowning in guilt.
“Does it bother you? Talking about things like this that are so personal?”
“No. Of course, not. They were… I mean, they are important to you. Tell me what they were like.”
She checks my face once, the way she does when she’s deciding whether someone means what they say. Then she does.
Her father was the quietest Kozlov, more interested in books than territory.
Her mother cooked with the radio on and sang off-key to songs that were already twenty years old when Polina was born.
She describes a house that was always warm because her father insisted on a fire in the hearth, no matter the time of year.
Her voice stays even all the way through, the way it does when someone has told a story so many times that the telling has become its own armor.
It dips near the end just once. She clears her throat and picks her wine back up, covering the misstep so expertly that it cracks my heart.
She shouldn’t have to cover up her vulnerable side with me, but given the topic, I’m almost grateful she has.
“I became a surgeon because I needed to be the one who decides,” she explains. “Whether someone lives. I needed to be on the right side of that equation for once.”
I look across the fire at this woman who rebuilt herself from something that should have finished her, and I make a choice I know I’ll spend years answering for.
I say nothing.
It’s not that I don’t have the words. I have dates, names, and a complete account of what my father ordered and why, sitting in a file I’ve looked at only once since I found it.
I remain silent because the truth isn’t a single, clean thing.
It comes with three others attached: The Kozlov side might have been complicit, that I’m the son of the man who killed her parents, and that I spent two years watching her while carrying that knowledge.
There’s no version of that confession that doesn’t blow everything apart.
I tell myself I’m protecting her. That part is true.
The full truth would do real damage to her relationship with Dmitri, to the stability she’s spent years building, and to whatever this is between us that I’m not willing to lose.
But underneath all that is something smaller and harder to defend: I don’t want to watch her face change when she looks at me.
She’s never looked at me like a weapon or a liability or a thing to manage.
I’ve been looked at that way my entire life by everyone who was supposed to matter, and I’m not ready to add her to that list.
The lie settles low in my gut and lodges there.
I refill both our glasses, and she accepts hers without looking up. I suspect she’s still somewhere inside the memory, and I let her stay there. She’ll come back when she’s ready.
And she does, albeit slowly. She sets her glass on the arm of the chair and looks at me, harder this time. I hold eye contact and give her nothing that looks like pity, because she’d hate that more than silence, and I know her well enough now to understand the difference.
“You’re not going to say anything?” she asks.
“What would you like me to say?”
She draws in a deep, shaky breath. “Nothing, probably. That’s why I told you. I knew you wouldn’t offer platitudes.”
“Then nothing is what you get.”
She cocks her head and studies me, then nods once, like that answer passed some secret test.
The tension she’s carried since she started talking about her parents drains from her.
Her shoulders drop, and she exhales. In a matter of seconds, she stops looking like a woman bracing for impact.
She reaches over and sets her hand on my knee, not looking at me, and I cover it with mine, and we stay like that until the fire starts to go down.
She uncurls from her chair and crosses to me, and I reach up, catch her hand, and pull her onto my lap.
She settles against me, and I feel the long breath that comes out of her, like she’s been carrying something since before dinner and is only now setting it down.
I rake one hand through her hair, and she tips her chin up to look at me, and from this close, I can see how she’s looking at me.
She needs a distraction from the past, and I’m already hard just thinking about giving it to her.
Fuck. I’m a piece of shit.
I kiss her anyway, and she moans against my mouth as she turns toward me and slips her fingers into my collar.
I pull her closer until she’s straddling me, and she rolls her hips against me.
I jut my hips up, grinding my cock against her core so she can feel what she’s doing to me, and her cheeks go bright pink.
“You have terrible timing,” she complains against my mouth.
“How so?”
“I was being emotional. You’re not supposed to be attractive right now.”
I settle both hands on her hips and hold her still before she finishes me before we’ve even started. “I can wait.”
“Don’t.” She pulls my mouth back to hers.
She reaches between us and untucks my shirt, and I slide my hands up under the back of the sweater she borrowed from me. Her skin is scorching hot, and I have wanted to put my hands on her all evening. She arches into it, and I take that as permission to keep going.
Polina presses her mouth to my throat, grazing my pulse point with her teeth, and I groan against her skin as I glide my hands up her back and pull her flush against me.
Piece by piece, we pull each other apart with the fire still burning low in front of us and the countryside holding its dark outside the windows, and I think about what she said about needing to be on the right side of something, so I hold onto her tighter than necessary.
She lets me. That might be the best part.
Later, when she’s asleep against my chest and the fire’s gone to coals, I stare at the ceiling and run the same account I’ve been running for two years.
The truth would free her. It would also destroy her. And it would end this the moment it left my mouth.
I’ve never wanted to keep anything the way I want to keep this. Not territory. Not standing. Not the approval of a man who’s never offered it freely. None of it comes close to the weight of her against my chest and the way she says my name.
I close my eyes, and the boulder of guilt stays where it is.