Zoya #2
“That is not comforting.”
“What did he do?” he asks again.
I sigh and look at the water. “Nothing dramatic. That was the worst part. He didn’t cheat. He didn’t steal my money. He didn’t hit me. He just slowly made me feel like I was too much and not enough at the same time.”
Ruslan’s jaw shifts.
I laugh softly, uncomfortable now that I’ve started. “He used to call me intense when I cared about things. Dramatic when I got hurt. Sensitive when he was cruel. And I stayed because I thought if I became easier, smaller, less annoying, he’d love me properly.”
The wind blows my hair into my face. I push it back.
“Then one day he told me he didn’t see a future with me, and I realized I had already packed myself away for a future he never planned to give me.”
Ruslan says nothing.
I keep going because stopping now feels worse. “So I moved. Got a job at Alderwood. Rented a tiny apartment I could barely afford. Bought secondhand furniture. Made friends with Karina because she cornered me in the break room and said I looked like a Victorian ghost who needed tacos.”
That gets a real sound from him. Almost a laugh. “She sounds accurate.”
“She’s awful and I love her.”
“And your parents?”
I tuck my hands into the sleeves of my sweater. “My mother is a second-grade teacher. My father fixes boats. They live two hours north in a town where everyone knows everyone and half the people still think I’m sixteen. They love me. A lot. Too much sometimes.”
“You haven’t told them.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because my mother will come here with a rolling pin and my father will bring a wrench, and both of them will die immediately because they are brave and normal and have no idea what men like yours can do.”
He doesn’t deny it. I wish he would.
After a minute, he says, “I can put men on them.”
My head snaps toward him. “Absolutely not.”
“They could be watched discreetly.”
“No.”
“Zoya—”
“No. You don’t get to turn my parents into part of your… infrastructure.”
His brows lift slightly. “Infrastructure?”
“I don’t know mafia terminology. I’m improvising.”
That almost-smile comes back. “Fine,” he says.
I blink. “Fine?”
“For now.”
“Do you ever agree without making it ominous?”
“No.”
I hate that I smile.
I hate that he sees.
We walk farther. The water comes close enough once to wash over my toes, and I yelp at the cold. Ruslan catches my elbow even though I’m not falling. His hand stays there a second too long.
I look up at him. He looks down at me.
The beach is empty except for us and the men behind us.
For a second, I think he might kiss me there, with the wind and the waves and my feet half-buried in wet sand.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he says, “The man who made you smaller was a fool.”
My throat tightens so suddenly I almost hate him for it. “That’s a very neat conclusion.”
“It’s an accurate one.”
“You didn’t even know me then.”
“I know you now.”
I look away because that’s too much. Too simple. Too steady. My life is still in ruins, and this man is still dangerous, and wanting him has not become less insane just because he can say one good thing at the right time.
But I keep walking beside him.
That night, he shows up in my room.
“Couldn’t sleep?” I ask.
“I sleep better naked,” he replies, taking his shirt off.
He’s on me before the laugh fully leaves my mouth, one hand braced beside my head, his weight settling over me with that careful heaviness I’ve started craving.
The sex that night is different. Less frantic at first. He lets me touch him more. Lets me explore the hard planes of his chest, the old scars across his ribs, the faint roughness of his jaw under my palm. I ask about one scar near his shoulder.
“Knife,” he says.
I ask about another near his side.
“Bullet.”
I stop touching him.
He catches my hand and puts it back on his skin. “Old,” he says.
Like that makes it okay. Like the history of violence carved into him is just a list of closed files. I kiss the bullet scar because I don’t know what else to do.
His whole body goes still. Then he says my name in a voice I feel between my thighs.
After that, there’s no more talking for a while.
There are flashes of the days like that, pieces that don’t line up into anything sensible.
Ruslan bending me over the bathroom counter after I tease him about how many identical black shirts he owns, his hand over my mouth because I’m too loud and there are men downstairs.
Me riding him in the gray morning light, nervous until his hands settle on my hips and he tells me, in that low voice, “That’s it. Take what you want.”
Him on a call in Russian while I sit beside him on the couch, trying to read, until his hand slides under the blanket and between my legs without his voice changing once.
Me slapping his shoulder afterward and whispering, “You are a menace.”
Him saying, “You were very quiet,” like he deserves praise.
Me telling him he’s impossible.
Him proving it again in the shower.
But it isn’t only sex. That’s what scares me. If it were only sex, I could file it under temporary insanity. Trauma. Attraction. But I’ve started to realize it’s more than that.
In the morning, he wakes me up with his fingers, and I ready myself for our fifteenth sex session. Yep, I was counting. Then his phone vibrates on the table.
He looks at the screen, and everything in him changes.
Not visibly, maybe. Not to someone who doesn’t know how still he can become.
But I know now. I know the difference between Ruslan relaxed and Ruslan pretending to be relaxed.
I know the way his jaw sets before he speaks.
I know the way his hand stops halfway to the phone, like his body has already decided what his mind hasn’t heard yet.
He answers. “Yes.”
One word. Then silence.
I sit up slowly, pulling the sheet to my chest.
The room is cold outside the bed. The windows are pale with dawn, the sea restless beyond them. For a few seconds, the only sounds are the waves below the cliffs and Ruslan’s breathing, controlled enough that it scares me.
He turns away from me. That scares me more.
I can’t understand the voice on the other end, but I hear it faintly, urgent and low. Ruslan doesn’t interrupt. He listens, one hand braced on the edge of the table, head slightly lowered.
Then he says, “Where?”
Another pause.
His fingers tighten against the wood. “Alive?”
My stomach drops. I don’t move.
He listens again. Whatever answer he gets, it does not please him.
“No,” he says. “No one touches him until I get there.”
A longer silence.
Then, colder: “I said no one.”
The call ends.
For a moment, he stays exactly where he is, phone still in his hand, back to me. The soft thing between us—the bed, the sheets, the warmth, the strange half life we’ve been living for the past few days—seems to pull away all at once.
He’s not the man who kissed the inside of my wrist last night when he thought I was asleep.
He’s not the man who listened to me talk about my father’s old boat and my mother’s terrible singing and the tiny apartment I’m probably losing.
He’s not even the man who touched me in the dark like he had forgotten every violent thing he knew how to do.
He’s the other one now. The one men call when there’s blood. He’s a Pakhan.
“Ruslan?” I say.
He doesn’t turn immediately.
That makes my voice smaller when I ask, “What happened?”
He looks over his shoulder then. The expression on his face is unreadable, but his eyes are not. There’s something alive in them now, something hard and ugly and satisfied.
“We found the mole,” he says.