Chapter 17 #2
And I see the exact moment Andrei notices. One second, he's standing in front of me, telling me to go inside. The next, he's turning toward the man, looking to see where my gaze went, and then he sees the guard checking me out.
He crosses the distance to the guard in three strides, and before the man can react, before he can even register what's happening, Andrei has a knife in his hand. Not the same knife he was using inside. A different one—smaller, pulled from somewhere I didn't see.
He grabs the guard by the front of his shirt and drives the blade upward, through the man's eye.
The sound is wet and horrible. A soft squelch followed by a choked gasp and a low, gasping moan of pain. The guard's body goes rigid, then limp, and Andrei lets him drop to the ground like discarded trash.
I can't breathe. I stare at the body on the ground, the knife still embedded in the man's skull as blood pools on the stone path.
He killed him. Just like that. No hesitation. No warning. One moment the guard was alive, and the next he was dead, and Andrei didn't even blink.
The other guard has gone pale, his eyes wide and his hands raised slightly like he's trying to show he's not a threat. Andrei turns to him, and his voice is cold enough to freeze blood. "Get rid of this. Then get back to your post."
"Yes, pakhan." The words are rushed, terrified.
Andrei doesn't wait for a response. He turns back to me, his hand closing around my upper arm, and starts walking. I stumble after him, my legs barely working, my mind still stuck on the image of the knife driving upward and the guard's body crumpling.
"Andrei—"
"Not now."
"You just—"
"I said not now, Liesl." He's pulling me back toward the main house, his grip on my arm unbreakable, his pace quick enough that I have to half-jog to keep up. We reach the door. He opens it, pushes me inside, follows me in, and slams it shut behind us.
Then he rounds on me, and the expression on his face makes my breath catch. He looks furious, raw and barely controlled.
"No one else looks at you." His voice is low and dangerous. "No one else gets to see you like this. No one else can have you."
"Andrei—"
"After what happened last night?" He steps closer, backing me against the wall.
"After I had you in your bed, after I was inside you like that, after you came apart for me, over and over and fucking over while I could still fucking taste you on my tongue?
You're mine, Liesl. Mine. And I don't share. "
I should want to fight him, run away… do anything except stand here and let him claim me like I'm a possession instead of a person. But there's something else beneath the fury in his eyes—something that looks almost like fear.
Like the thought of someone else looking at me, wanting me, touching me, is unbearable to him.
"I'm winning this war," he continues, his hand coming up to cup my face, his thumb brushing across my cheekbone. "And when I do, we'll figure out what comes next. But I'm not giving you back. Not to your father. Not to anyone. You're mine now."
I stare at him. All I can think about is the guard's body on the ground. The knife through his eye. The casual brutality of the kill.
All because he looked at me.
"What happened last night," I say, my voice shaking, "was me seeing a man I'm not sure exists."
Andrei goes still. His hand is still on my face, his body still crowding mine against the wall, but something in his expression shifts. "What?"
"The man who held me last night. Who was gentle with me." I force myself to meet his eyes and hold his gaze even though everything in me wants to look away. "I don't know if that man is real. Or if he's just something I imagined because I needed him to be."
His jaw tightens. "Liesl—"
"You just killed someone for looking at me."
"He was—"
"I know what he was doing." I cut him off, my voice stronger now. "I saw. But you didn't even warn him, or… or threaten him. You just killed him. Like it was nothing. Like his life meant nothing."
"His life didn't mean anything." Andrei's voice is ice cold. "He disrespected what's mine. There are consequences for that."
"I'm not yours unless I decide I am."
The words hang in the air between us, sharp and clear and undeniable.
Andrei stares at me, and I can see the war happening behind his eyes—the urge to argue, to push back, to remind me that I'm here because he allows it. That I don't have power in this situation, that he could take what he wants whether I agree or not.
But he doesn't say any of that.
He just looks at me, his hand still on my face. I see his jaw tighten as he looks down at me. "You are mine," he grits out between clenched teeth, and he sways forward, his hand sliding to my chin as he goes to claim my mouth with his.
And at the last second, disobeying every urge in my body to let him have me—right up against this fucking wall if he wants it—I pull away.
"No!" I almost shout it, jerking away from him and bolting toward the hall that leads to the stairs. I half expect him to grab me, but I put distance between us, and just as I reach the bottom of the stairs, I look back.
He's standing there, staring at me, a helpless expression on his face.
He let me go, I realize.
So I run, to the only place that has some semblance of being mine.
—
I make it back to my room before the tears start. They come in waves, hot and overwhelming. I collapse onto the bed, burying my face in the pillow, and let myself break apart.
I don't even know what I'm crying about. The violence? The guard's death? The way Andrei looked at me like I was something precious one moment and something he owned the next?
Last night, he was tender. Gentle. He touched me like I was more than a captive. He held me like I was something worth protecting.
And then this morning, he tortured a man and killed another without hesitation.
Both versions are him, and I don't know how to reconcile them. I don't know how to want the man from last night while being horrified by the man from this morning.
The sobs wrack my body, making my chest ache and making it hard to breathe. I clutch the pillow tighter, trying to muffle the sounds, trying to hold myself together.
But I can't.
Because the worst part—the part that makes me cry harder—is that even after everything I just witnessed, even after watching him kill a man for the crime of looking at me, even after seeing the blood on his hands and the coldness in his eyes…
I still want him.
I still want the man who held me last night. I still want the tenderness and the vulnerability and the connection that felt real even if it might not be.
And I don't know what that makes me. So I just lie there, alone and confused and terrified, waiting for something—anything—to make sense.