22. Kira
KIRA
When Timur walks away, I feel the tension in my body start coiling back up.
I wanted to tell him what Morin had done to me, but all I could manage to do was to plead with him for comfort.
Now I feel foolish that he interpreted my need for comfort as a desire for sex, which I was never going to turn away.
And that connection has made it so much clearer to me what I have to do.
Timur and I have this bond now, and Victor told me to use that.
Morin is hellbent on murdering my family, so much so that he almost killed me right here in Timur's home.
I have to tell him what Morin is up to, and I have to make him see that my family is not his enemy—before he allows his men to slaughter all of us.
I slide out of bed, grabbing the robe Sonya left lying on the chair, and put it on, lashing the belt around my waist before climbing back into bed. I wait patiently until I hear the toilet flush, and when he walks into the room, I don't give him a chance to even lie down.
"Timur, I need to—"
"Who are you?"
Timur's eyes narrow on me and I see the phone in his hand. He's still naked, but clearly not at all ashamed to confront me for what he's clearly deduced about me without pants on.
"What?" I ask as he stoops to pick up his boxers, glaring at me like he won’t let me out of his sight for an instant.
"I mean, who the fuck are you?" Now he sounds angry, raising his voice as he jams his feet into the boxers and yanks them up, then grabs his pants.
"What do you mean? I'm—"
He turns the phone toward me with one hand while he tugs his pants into place with the other.
On the screen is a photo of a woman I've never seen before.
She's painfully thin, with dark hair and high cheekbones and pale skin.
She's standing in a garden next to an older man and she looks nothing like me.
"That is Kirianna Belova," he says. "That is Sergei's niece."
My heart threatens to stop beating as I glance up at his face and feel fear bubble up.
Timur knows, and not only does he know, but he also has proof.
He swipes to another image of the same woman, older, sitting in a chair with a blanket over her legs.
She's been sick. That much is obvious from how frail she looks. And she is not me.
"So I'm going to ask you one more time." He pulls the phone back and clutches it in a tight fist at his side. "Who are you?"
"Timur, please let me explain." I start to get up but jolt back as he lurches forward.
He sweeps the lamp on the nightstand off the surface with his forearm and the ceramic shatters across the floor.
I flinch back so hard, my head hits the headboard, before I bring my knees to my chest and hug them.
It wasn't supposed to come out like this.
We were just so close and I was going to tell him everything.
"You’ve been lying to me every day since you got here!" he shouts, now pacing angrily at the foot of the bed. His hands are curled into tight fists, and I'm surprised he hasn't broken his phone in half.
"I was scared. That horrible man just dragged me here after slaughtering my whole fucking family. What did you want me to do!" I'm hysterical, clawing at my hair, pulling it. Trying to make the fear stop collapsing inward on me. "Please, don’t shout."
Tears sear across my cheeks, and now it appears the man I thought I was falling for has turned into a bigger monster than the one who brought me here to begin with.
"And you kept saying it—every fucking day... Every night. You could have told me the truth at any point and you didn't." He has every right to be so pissed at me. I did those things. I did lie to him and kept lying, but what was I supposed to do?
"Because I thought you would kill me," I sob, shaking my head. "Timur, you have to—"
"I wouldn't have killed you." He runs a hand through his hair, the same hair I just buried my fingers in while kissing him. God, what's going on?
"But you would have..." I swipe at my eyes and blurt, "Your men are killing my whole family. They have orders to kill everyone—orders you gave."
Timur screams a slew of profanities, causing me to cower back in his bed crying harder, but he never stops pacing. I think for a second in a moment of clarity that if he wanted me dead, he'd have come in here and killed me right away, but then maybe he doesn't want my blood on his sheets.
Or maybe he knows we have a connection. I can still draw on that. I need to draw on that for my family's sake.
He stops pacing and turns on me. "Your real name. Now."
"Kira," I whimper, shaking. "That part was always real."
"Your last name."
I swallow hard. My throat is tight and my eyes are burning.
Suddenly, it doesn't matter that I'm Victor Mirov's niece or Timur Kuzin's enemy.
I'm not fighting for my life as I raise my chin with quivering lips to tell him the truth.
I am a woman desperately in love with a man who only sees in black and white. And I am a shade of grey.
"Mirov," I say. "My uncle is Victor."
Timur's jaw sets tight as he clenches his teeth together.
I watch his nostrils flare and his shoulders square while his eyes bore into me.
But there is more than anger in that gaze.
He feels desperately hurt by my lie, more than a simple business thing he has to deal with.
I let him get close to me. I let him fall for me.
And I was lying. This is what I was afraid of.
"Mirov." He says it slowly, like it's a piece of glass shredding his tongue.
"Yes... but please..."
"Victor Mirov's niece."
"Yes."
He turns away from me and walks to the window, staring out into the dark night.
I could run right now, out the front door into that darkness where I could hide and try to find help, but I don't want to.
I need Timur to call off his dogs and stop killing my family.
I need him to see that everything I said about what I feel for him is real.
That I let him see the real me and that I love him.
"He planted a fucking bomb, Kira! A bomb!"
His shout makes me jump and I think of what Victor said. It was Baron... Morin strapped a bomb to my cousin's chest. Does that mean Timur watched my cousin die?
"It wasn't my uncle, Tim. It was—"
"Don't you dare defend him to me." He whips around on me with such an angry glare on his face, I believe he could hurt me any second.
"I pulled a man out of my club tonight with explosives strapped to his chest. I watched him fucking blow up right in front of me.
" His chest is heaving as he leans over the bed and comes close enough to spit in my face.
"I'm telling the truth." My voice is so tiny after his explosion, but I still try. I promised Victor I would.
"The truth? You want to talk about the truth now?"
"Tim, please," I plead, sobbing. "Please just listen to me." I crawl toward him, but he flinches away like I'm toxic and if I touch him, he'll die.
"I protected you." His fists rise in front of him, shaking like he wants to strike me but he's controlling himself. "I went to war with my own people to keep you safe. I lied to my brother. I put my reputation, my family, everything I have on the line because I believed you. Because I trusted you."
"Tim.."
"You don't know what it cost me to stand in front of my brother—" He snarls and throws his phone at the wall. I watch it smash and fall to the ground with a dark screen and wonder if it's broken now.
"I'm sorry," I whimper. "I was scared."
"Sorry." He laughs, and it's the ugliest sound I've ever heard come out of him. "You're sorry?"
"I didn't have a choice. From the moment I woke up on your couch, I was fighting to survive.
Everything I did, every lie I told, was because I was terrified.
Not because I wanted to hurt you." This time, when I crawl toward him, he doesn't rush away.
But he's not the same compassionate, caring man who just comforted me.
"But you did hurt me. You understand that, right? Whatever your reasons were, whatever fear was driving you, the result is the same. I opened my life to you. I let you in. And none of it was real."
"It was real. What happened between us was real." I slide off the bed, touching his chest. He snarls and bares his teeth but doesn't pull away. His heart is hammering and so is mine. He's letting me touch him, though. That’s a good sign.
"How would I know? How would I possibly know which parts of you were real and which parts were another performance?
You played the role so well, I didn't question it once.
Not once, Kira." He grabs my wrist and plucks my hand off his chest. "I fucking fell in love with you.
I was going to ask your uncle if we could be together. "
His confession makes more tears come. I don't know what to say to him. I knew he'd be hurt, but it was my life on the line. My family...
"The whole fucking time, you were gaslighting me."
"No," I whimper, reaching for him again, but he pulls away. He picks up his shirt and slides it on like he's preparing to leave, but I haven't said my piece. He has to know what Victor told me.
"Timur, listen to me. There's something you need to know about Morin."
"Don't."
"He fucking did this..." I pull the robe back, showing him the bruises that ring my entire neck. "He was going to rape me, and I kneed him in the fucking balls and ran out."
Timur's eyes darken, but he pauses and his hands still their work on the buttons of his shirt. Then his jaw rises a notch as he looks down his nose. He's trying to decide whether he believes me. He shouldn't even doubt my word, but I've given him no reason to trust me.
"Dryden told me you slipped in the shower."
"It's the story I told them because I was scared. Morin threatened to kill me and tell you who I really am, but—"
"Give me one reason I should believe that.
One." Timur stalks forward, grabbing my neck with one hand, the way Morin had, except when he does it, I fear nothing.
I let my shoulders relax and my jaw go slack.
Even as his fingers tighten down, pressuring my pulse so it hammers in my head.
"Tell me why I should believe you're being honest about my right-hand man now, after every lie you've told. "
"Because I have nothing left to gain by lying." I say it boldly while not looking away from his eyes. I'm not afraid of him.
If he doesn't love me now, so be it. If he wants to send me away instead of being the man I know he is deep down, then let it be done. But I cannot—I will not—desert my family when they need me.
"You're lying to me, and you've done nothing but—"
"Morin is playing both sides." I talk loudly enough that he stops to listen.
"He's been feeding information and escalating this whole war because it profits him.
He's not protecting your family, he's using it.
If you let him keep going, he's going to destroy the Mirovs and then he'll turn on you next. "
"You're a Mirov begging me to spare the Mirovs. That's all I'm hearing right now."
"I'm begging you to open your eyes. My cousin Baron is dead.
Morin's men strapped a bomb to him and sent him into your club.
My uncle saw it with his own eyes." My chest is still heaving and my hands still shaking, but I'm finding boldness I never knew I had.
"Morin is using some lie cooked up that my family is attacking yours as a means to get you to kill every one of us off...
And it's working. He's covering up his own ass by what he's doing. "
His hand loosens, and I suck in a slow, deep breath as he asks, "And you know this how?"
"Because my uncle told me when I called him this evening."
Confessing that it was my Uncle Victor whom I had called makes him seem angry again, but he backs away, running a hand through his hair like he's trying to fight back the truth.
But one thing I've learned living this life I've come from is that truth is a lion. You never have to tell someone when a lion walks into the room.
"I love you, Timur." I don't try to reach out and touch him, though I desperately want to.
"Don't you fucking say that!" he shouts, exploding at me again. Spittle flies from his mouth as his eyes go wide and his chest puffs out.
"I will say it every day the rest of my life if I have to, because it's the one true thing about me that you will never change. No matter what sort of a monster you turn out to be." I feel myself trembling as more tears leak from my eyes.
"You may hate my family, but if you do it's because of lies that evil man fed you.
And you may want revenge, but you're taking it out on the wrong people...
" I swipe at my cheeks again as I say, "But I love you.
And you won't change that. Not now. Not if you kill my uncle and my father.
Not if you put a gun to my head. I choose it, because I know who you are. "
When he leans in close, hot breath dusting my face, I think he may turn and forget this nonsense and come back to bed with me. But his eyes go black as the inky sky and his jaw clenches as he spits through his teeth, "You are a Mirov. And you disgust me."
Then he storms out, slamming the door and leaving me to stand there shaking and angry and scared.
My eyes well up over and over, even as I climb back into bed, sobbing and blubbering like a broken-hearted child.
I did my best, and I've failed. And I can only pray Victor and my father are ready when the Kuzins come. Because they're coming, and when they do, I have a feeling there will be no survivors.