Chapter 12 Alina
Alina
When the lock disengages, I jump a mile off the bed and scramble towards the bedside cabinet where the Glock and knife reside, waiting for me to use them on an intruder.
Luckily, it’s just Dima, and I was told not to shoot him. “Breakfast,” he says, and stands in the doorway, unblinking.
I straighten up, smoothing down my tee like I wasn’t about to reach for a gun to fire at him. “Where is it?”
“Downstairs.”
“You’re letting me out?”
“Pakhan’s orders.”
“The police have left?”
“Yes.”
I exhale and follow him out of the bedroom. Dima walks ahead of me, his massive frame blocking out most of the light from the staircase windows. I notice he doesn’t look back. Either he trusts me not to bolt, or he knows there’s nowhere to go. Both, probably.
The dining room is laid out with breakfast goods in a buffet style. My gaze goes straight to the stain on the wall, but I’m not sure if it’s blood or wine, so I don’t comment.
Arkady is nowhere in sight.
“Where is he?” I ask, picking up a plate.
“Busy.”
“Helpful as always, Dima. You should write a memoir. Really riveting stuff.”
He positions himself by the door, arms folded, and says nothing.
I load my plate with scrambled eggs, bacon and toast, because apparently my appetite hasn’t received the memo that I’m a hostage in a madman’s mansion.
The coffee is already poured, sitting at the same spot I occupied last night.
I slide into the chair and eat in silence, hyper-aware of Dima’s presence and the absence of Arkady’s.
The house feels different this morning. Tighter.
Like the walls have drawn in overnight and the air has thickened with something I can’t name.
There’s a hum beneath the silence—phones buzzing in distant rooms, muffled voices, the occasional heavy tread of boots on marble. More men. Arkady is fortifying.
“Something going down?” I ask solemnly, nodding my head as if I know what the fuck I’m talking about.
Dima glances at me, and I see him try not to smile. “Nothing is going down,” he says.
“Liar.” I bite into my toast. “You can tell me. I’m not exactly in a position to tell anyone else, am I?”
“There is a Saranov family meeting tomorrow night,” Arkady states, coming into the dining room and sitting down. “Anything else you want to know?”
“Is it dangerous?”
“No.”
“For me?”
“Yes.” He gives me that smile I want to lick off his face.
“Thought any more about my theory?”
“All night,” he says, trying to disguise the weariness in his tone, but I caught it.
“Do you think I’m onto something?” I place the toast on the plate and brush my hands off, waiting for an answer.
He doesn’t give one.
“Look,” I say, trying not to snap. “I want to be useful if I’m stuck here. Let me help.”
“How can you help?” he asks after taking a sip of coffee.
“I don’t know yet. But I’ve got a brain, I came up with this connection, and you clearly need someone who isn’t running on zero sleep and coffee.
” I hold his stare. “You’re about to sit in a room with every brigadier in your organisation, one of whom might have killed your father.
You need someone who isn’t emotionally compromised looking at the data. ”
His jaw does that thing. The muscle jumps, and I know I’ve hit a nerve. Good. Nerves are how you find the truth.
“You think I’m emotionally compromised,” he says, flat and dangerous.
“I think you’re running on three seconds of grief and a gallon of caffeine-induced fury. That’s not the same as thinking clearly.”
Dima shifts by the door. I know he has stepped out without looking. Nobody talks to the pakhan like this, except me, it seems.
Arkady sets his cup down with a precision that tells me he’s considering several responses, most of which involve telling me to fuck off back upstairs and to stay in my lane.
But he doesn’t. He leans back and rests his inked hands on his lap.
“You’re not wrong,” he says, and the admission costs him.
I can see it in the way his mouth tightens, the way his fingers curl against his thighs. “But you’re not Bratva.”
“I’m Bratva enough to spot what your entire inner circle missed.”
That lands. His nostrils flare, and for a second, I think he’s going to explode. But he doesn’t. He breathes. One. Two. Three. There it is again. His reset. Three seconds that I’m starting to think were drilled into him. Probably by the very dead man we are discussing.
“Fine,” he says. “You want to help? Earn it. Tell me something I don’t already know.”
I pick up my coffee and take a slow sip, buying myself a moment. My heart is hammering, but I keep my hands steady because he’s giving me an opening, and I’m not about to waste it by looking like a nervous wreck.
“Your dad was shot by someone he knows.”
“So you already said.”
“Maybe it was deliberate.”
His eyes narrow to two slits, rage on his features. “What the fuck makes you say that?”
My insides wither at the tone, but I’ve said it now.
I have to keep going and not backtrack. He will respect me more.
I hope. “I’m not really sure. It is the only thing that makes sense.
Your dad, from what I’ve heard, was not a stupid man.
Nor a slow one. If someone was getting ready to kill him, he’d know about it.
Also, why the phone call? Why did he call just in time for you to hear the shot that killed him? He wanted you to know.”
“You are talking shit,” he says, standing up. “There is no way my father planned his own murder.”
“To make you pakhan? To protect you from whoever was targeting you in the only way he knew how?” I say, also standing because I’m onto something. I might’ve watched too many TV shows and movies, but this is starting to make more sense the more I ramble.
He moves like lightning, his hand closing around my throat. “Shut the fuck up, Alina. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
His grip isn’t crushing, but it’s firm enough to be a very real threat.
I can feel the tremor in his hand, the barely leashed violence vibrating through every point of contact between us.
His eyes are wild, but not the controlled darkness I’ve grown used to.
It’s something raw and splintered, like I’ve taken a crowbar to the vault he keeps everything locked inside.
I don’t fight him. I don’t claw at his wrist or kick him in the balls, even though every survival instinct I have is screaming at me to do exactly that.
Instead, I hold his gaze and let him feel my pulse under his palm, steady and sure, because I’m not afraid of him.
I’m afraid of what he’ll do to himself if he doesn’t hear this.
“Then tell me I’m wrong,” I whisper. “Tell me your father—a man who survived decades at the top of a Bratva empire—just sat there and let someone walk in and shoot him without lifting a finger. Without tripping the duress alarm. Without reaching for a single one of the weapons I guarantee he had within arm’s reach. ”
His grip tightens for a fraction of a second, and then his forehead touches mine gently. His eyes are squeezed tight shut, and I count.
One.
Two.
Three.
His eyes snap open. “Do you realise what you’re implying? Do you realise how many people could’ve heard what you just said?”
“Yes, and nobody heard me,” I say, my voice barely above a breath against his lips. “Nobody heard it except you and me. Dima walked out.”
“Dima is trained to hear a mouse fart a hundred yards away.”
“But you trust him.”
His hand loosens on my throat, but doesn’t drop. His thumb traces the line of my pulse, and I don’t know if it’s a threat or a caress. With Arkady, it’s probably both.
“You didn’t know my father,” he says, and the crack in his voice is so small that anyone else would miss it. I don’t miss it. I file it away in the same place I keep the three-second count, the split knuckles, the way he packed my hoodie without being asked. “You don’t know what he was capable of.”
“No. But I know what fathers do for their children. Mine handed me to you rather than risk my life. Yours—” I stop, because the look on his face is a warning I’d be stupid to ignore.
He releases my throat and steps back. He turns away from me.
“If I’m wrong, then you can spank me until my arse is so red, I won’t be able to sit for a week,” I say. “But if I’m right…” I don’t finish because he spins around and grabs my upper arms, pushing me against the wall.
His lips crush mine in a kiss that devours me.
It’s brutal and desperate and nothing like what I expected.
His mouth is hot, demanding, tasting of black coffee and fury, and I kiss him back because my body has been screaming for this since the shower, since the spanking, since he slung me over his shoulder outside the club and ruined every other man for me without even trying.
His hands grip my arms hard enough to bruise, pinning me against the wall as his tongue sweeps against mine.
I arch into him, fingers curling into the front of his shirt, pulling him closer because there isn’t enough of him against me.
He groans into my mouth, and the sound vibrates through my chest, down my ribs, straight between my thighs.
Then he tears himself away.
We stand there, both breathing hard, his forehead inches from mine. His eyes are a storm—anger, grief, desire, all crashing into each other with nowhere to go.
“Don’t,” he says, and his voice is wrecked. Absolutely wrecked. “Don’t talk about my father like you knew him.”
“I’m not claiming to know him. I’m trying to help you see all angles.”
“You don’t see shit.” He steps back.
“Now you’re just being mean. Let me attend the meeting tomorrow.
Let me study everyone in the room. Let me prove my theory right, or you can do whatever you want to me.
Because I can tell you one more thing. If I am right, you have bigger issues than who agreed to put a bullet between your dad’s eyes to save you.
You have the issue of who was trying to eliminate you in the first place. ”
If anything was going to make him stop and think, for even a second, or three, it was that.
I’m figuring this man out quicker than he suspected I would, which he probably thought would be never. But I see him. I understand him in ways he hates, and which I don’t understand.
He stands there, chest rising and falling, fists clenched at his sides.
I can practically hear the gears grinding behind those blue eyes.
He wants to dismiss me. He wants to shove me back upstairs, slam the lock, and forget I exist. But he can’t, because the seed is planted, and it’s already growing roots in the part of his brain that knows I’m right, or might be right enough that he has to do something about it.
“You want to attend a Bratva meeting,” he says, each word bitten off like it physically pains him.
“Yes.”
“A meeting of brigadiers. Men who have killed more people than you’ve had hot dinners. Men who will take one look at you and see a weakness to exploit.”
“Then don’t let them see me as a weakness. Introduce me as an asset.”
He laughs. It’s sharp, incredulous, and slightly unhinged. “An asset.”
“You keep underestimating me, and I keep proving you wrong. At some point, you’d think the pattern would sink in.”
He drags a hand down his face. The exhaustion is catching up with him, whether he admits it or not.
“You introduce me as Alina Belova. The name will resonate.”
“That blows your cover life right out of the water.”
“I think that ship has sailed.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“I do. My mother left because she couldn’t sit around waiting for Dad to end up dead or worse. I swore I would never be that weak.”
“You were abducted from a club, drunk off your arse. I’d say that’s pretty weak.”
“Yeah, by you, who wasn’t trying to hurt me, but save me. It doesn’t count.” I brush it off with a wave of my hand. “I knew this day would come. I knew Alina Ashworth would die, and Alina Belova would rise from the ashes.”
“So fucking poetic,” he drawls. “You going to write me a sonnet next?”
“Fuck you,” I spit out. “You can keep deflecting with sarcasm, but I am here, so you might as well use me. Either that or let me go, and you can sort this out on your own because I don’t really give a shit.”
The challenge, laid bare, hits the nerve I was looking for. “If I let you go, you are dead.”
“And if I stay, I might just get you some answers.”
He is silent for a very long time. Uncomfortably long. Three seconds has been and gone ten times over, and yet, he says nothing.
When I’m about to crack and break the silence, he steps back and walks out, slamming the dining room door behind him, hard enough to rattle the windows.
“Well, that went well,” I mutter, my hands shaking as I sit back down and pick up my lukewarm coffee. I drink it anyway because my mouth has gone bone dry.
Less than a minute later, Dima re-enters and growls something like “Move” at me.
I’m guessing I’ve put Arkady in a foul mood, and everyone is getting the brunt of it.
“I want a phone to call my dad,” I say, rising steadily. “You can monitor the call if you must. I’m not going to try to convince him to storm the fortress to rescue me. But I need to ask him something.”
Dima stares at me with those pale green eyes that see everything. “If he finds out—”
“He won’t,” I interrupt hurriedly. “Please, Dima. This is to help him. He is so stubborn…”
“Upstairs,” he clips out. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I nod my thanks. It’s more than I thought I would get.
I follow him upstairs and back into the bedroom, where I’m locked inside, but this time it doesn’t bother me because I’m too busy plotting what I’m going to say to my dad when Dima capitulates because he knows better than Arkady does that I can help.