24. Anya #3
I watch him move through the room, still damp from the shower, trousers low on his hips, hair wet and pushed back from his face.
His scar looks darker when his skin is warm.
The silver in his hair catches the low light.
He looks less like a monster now and more like a man who has spent too long letting people believe he is one.
He opens one of the drawers.
Then he stops. His shoulders go still. His hand remains inside the drawer. His head lowers slightly, as if whatever he has found is not something he expected to see, but something he has been waiting for anyway.
My stomach tightens. “What is it?”
He doesn’t answer.
I stand, clutching the towel around myself, and walk closer. “Yaromir?”
His hand comes out of the drawer.
The ring is in his palm. Dmitri’s engagement ring.
No.
I forgot I had put it there. Not forgot exactly. Buried. I couldn’t keep it on my hand, couldn’t throw it away, couldn’t give it to anyone. So I slipped it into the drawer beneath a silk scarf and pretended the decision could wait.
Now it lies in Yaromir’s hand, glittering under the bedroom light.
He looks at it like it’s a wound.
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly. “I didn’t know where else to put it.”
His fingers close around the ring.
Not hard enough to crush it. Hard enough that I imagine the diamonds cutting into his palm.
“This was hers,” he says.
His voice is so quiet that I almost don’t hear it.
“What?”
“This ring belonged to my mother.”
This’s the last thing I expected him to say.
“What was her name?” I ask.
His eyes stay on the ring. “Mila.”
Mila. The name feels too soft for this room, for him, for the Volkovs.
“She wore it always,” he says. “Not because of Kirill. Not after she understood what he was. She wore it because it belonged to her mother before her. It was one of the few things she had that did not come from him.”
I say nothing. I’m afraid if I speak too soon, he’ll stop.
Yaromir turns the ring slowly in his fingers. “When she got sick, she became thinner every month. Her hands changed first. The ring became too loose. I remember finding thread wrapped around the band so it wouldn’t slip off.” His jaw tightens.
“She still wore it?”
“Until the end.”
The words hit me in the chest. I look at the ring again, and for the first time it doesn’t look like an engagement ring. Not like Dmitri’s gift. Not like the pretty thing my friends admired by the pier.
It looks like something stolen from a dead woman’s hand.
My throat tightens. “How did Dmitri get it?”
Yaromir’s mouth twists. “Kirill took everything after she died. Papers. jewelry. photographs. Anything that connected her to him. I was nineteen. Dmitri must have stolen it, or my father gave it to him. Either way.”
“That’s cruel.”
“No,” he says. “Cruel would require him to think of my mother when he did it. He did not. To Kirill, this was only a ring from a box he had no use for.”
His voice stays controlled, but I can feel the anger beneath it.
I think of Dmitri sliding it onto my finger. His easy smile. The lunch by the pier. The women admiring it, Katya staring too long, me glowing under all that attention because I thought the ring meant I had been chosen.
I feel sick. “I wore it,” I whisper.
“You didn’t know.”
“I still wore it.”
His expression shifts, not softening exactly, but changing into something quieter.
“The first time I saw you,” he says, “I saw the ring before I saw your face.”
My breath catches. “At the pier?”
“Yes.”
“You noticed me then?”
His eyes move over me slowly. There’s no point pretending the answer is harmless.
“I noticed everything.”
Heat rises in my face, though this doesn’t feel like flirtation. It feels like confession.
“You looked angry,” I say.
“I was.”
“Because of the ring?”
“At first.”
“And then?”
He looks back at the ring in his palm. “Then you looked up.”
The room goes very still. I don’t know why those four words affect me so much, but they do. They move through me like a hand along bare skin.
“But then you looked at me,” he says. “And the smile disappeared.”
I remember that moment. The scar. The height of him. The way every man around him seemed to adjust to his presence. I had thought of Beauty and the Beast, then hated myself for the childishness of it.
“I was afraid of you,” I admit.
“No. Not only afraid.”
My face warms. He sees it, of course.
“You wanted me,” he says.
I look away.
His hand comes to my chin, turning my face back. “I wanted you too.”
The words are blunt enough to steal my breath.
“You barely knew me.”
“I didn’t need to know you to want you.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“It was.” His thumb brushes my lower lip once. “I wanted to take the ring off your finger. Then I wanted to take you with it.”
My pulse jumps. He sees that too.
“Yaromir.”
“I told myself it was anger,” he says. “That Dmitri had put my mother’s ring on some pretty, empty girl who would make a suitable Volkov bride and nothing more.”
“That’s terrible,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“You say that like it doesn’t bother you.”
“It did.”
The honesty of that sends a shiver through me.
I look at the ring in his hand because looking at his face feels dangerous. “What did you want?” I ask, though I’m not sure I should.
His eyes hold mine. “To see you again.”
The simple answer is somehow worse than something filthy would have been.
“And did you?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
His expression doesn’t change, but something in me goes still.
“Yaromir.”
“I made inquiries.”
“What does that mean?”
The room feels suddenly smaller.
I stare at him. “You were watching me?”
“Not at first.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“No.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because you asked.”
I step back once, but not because I’m afraid. Not exactly.
Because something about this is too much.
“You should have run farther,” he says.
“I did run.”
“Not far enough.”
My breath shakes. The night at the club rises suddenly in my mind. The smoky hallway. Leonid’s hand on me. The panic. The kick. The gunshot from the dark. A flash of a scar. Dark eyes.
My body goes cold. “Yaromir.”
He knows before I ask. I see it in his face.
“The club,” I whisper. “Venera.”
He says nothing.
My heart starts pounding harder. “That was you.”
Silence.
I take one step toward him. “The man in the hallway. Leonid. Someone shot him. I saw a scar, but I thought… I didn’t know. I thought maybe I imagined it.”
“You did not.”
The room tilts slightly. I grip the edge of the dresser.
“You followed me there?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted you,” he says simply.
“You killed him.”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
A shiver runs through me.
“He touched you,” Yaromir says. “He had to die.”
“I should be afraid of you,” I say.
“You are.”
“No.” I look at him. “I mean more afraid.”
His gaze moves over me, slow and searching. “And are you?”
I think about lying.
I don’t.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s honest.”
“I’m angry.”
“Yes.”
“You followed me. You watched me. You killed a man because he put his hands on me before I even agreed to marry you.”
“Yes.”
“You say yes too easily.”
“Because I’m not sorry.”
My breath catches. He moves closer, stopping just short of touching me.
“If that frightens you, be frightened,” he says. “If it angers you, be angry. But don’t ask me to pretend I would have let him live. I would kill him again.”
I look up at him.
The terrible thing is that I believe him.
The more terrible thing is what belief does to me.
I remember the fear in that hallway. The blood on my dress. The sense, even then, that something darker than danger had stepped out of the shadows on my side.
“You were mine before you even knew it.” His voice roughens on the last word, and suddenly I see it beneath the violence. The fear he will not name. The obsession that was not only possession, not only desire, but some fierce, irrational refusal to let the world have me.
“I think I should be furious with you.”
“You are.”
“Not enough.”
His hand comes up slowly, giving me time to move away. I don’t. His fingers settle at my waist, over the towel. “Then be furious tomorrow.”
My breath catches. “Tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
His mouth lowers toward mine, but stops a breath away. “Tonight, let me show you what I wanted the first time you looked at me.”
The words move through me like flame.
I should tell him no. I should make him wait. I should hold on to the anger because it’s reasonable, because it belongs to me.
Instead, I rise on my toes and kiss him.
The towel loosens under his hands. He catches it before it falls, then looks at me with a question that is not soft but is there. I answer by taking his wrist and placing his hand against my bare skin.
His control frays in his eyes.
Only there. Only for me.
He kisses me then, and it’s not like the shower. Not rushed, not desperate, not all heat and wet tile. This is slower. Darker. He lifts me carefully, carries me to the bed, and lays me down like he has already imagined it too many times to hurry now.