Chapter 25 #2
I turned and walked out, locking their whispers and hatred behind me.
After that night, I didn't go to Hailey right away.
Not because I didn't want to. Because I couldn't. The family's net was torn to shreds. If I showed up with my problems, Yuri and his crew would scent her like sharks. I had to clean out the trash around me first—then I could stand in front of her with nothing on my back.
A full month. Thirty days and nights.
I crushed the Council of Elders under my boot and handled the crisis like a machine built to kill.
I slept less than three hours a day, running on black coffee and instinct. When Philly and Baltimore routes collapsed, I patched the holes through two neutral families, hard and ugly.
As for the rot inside—
In the interrogation room under the estate, blood dried, got wet again, dried again.
Dmitri followed the gunman from the garage and ripped out a chain of buried moles.
Screaming became my soundtrack for a month.
We found a few suspicious names, but Yuri—the sly bastard—kept cutting the trail midstream.
He hid himself deep. Deep enough to make me sick.
I didn't care. I had one goal—keep the board stable. As long as I sat in the Pakhan chair, they wouldn't dare move in the open.
Those thirty days, I touched those leather gloves in the dark more times than I could count.
Every time I wiped out one problem, I felt one step closer to her.
Finally, one month later, at dusk, the purge slowed. I forced the Council of Elders back into line.
I stripped off the suit that stank of blood, scrubbed the gun smoke off my skin. When I stepped out of the main house, even the air felt easier to breathe.
Dmitri handed me an address. For a month, Hailey had stayed at her red-haired friend's place—Samantha's apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. A normal three-story building with a small yard.
The second I got it, I grabbed my keys.
I didn't take a driver. I drove an unremarkable black sedan off Long Island. The wheel was in my hands, but my brain barely touched it—my body moved faster than reason, like every goddamn thing I'd done for a month had been for this exact moment: sitting in this car, heading toward her.
I parked on the corner across the street.
Rain came down hard. The wipers fought the windshield and lost.
I sat there, locked on that building. A second-floor light glowed.
I'd planned to storm up right away. Kick in the door. Pin her to the wall. Tell her how I'd survived the month. Tell her I'd cleaned up every threat to us. Make her say, out loud, she wasn't leaving me.
Then my hand hit the door handle—
And I saw her.
She stepped out under a clear umbrella. She wore a slightly oversized beige trench coat. Her hair was loosely twisted back. Her face looked pale. She hurried across the street and slipped into a neighborhood coffee shop on the corner.
My heartbeat skipped, and the knot in my nerves loosened for the first time in a month.
She looked... okay. She was here.
I was deciding whether to walk in and yank her out of that shitty little café and hold her—
Then I saw him.
He pushed through the rain, opened the café door, walked to Hailey's table, pulled out a chair, and sat across from her.
Golden-brown hair. A smug, respectable face I wanted to grind into the pavement.
Matthew.
The weak, persistent, holier-than-thou assistant DA. The ex-fiancé who'd betrayed Hailey and still haunted her like a bad smell.
My hand clamped around the leather steering wheel. My knuckles creaked.
The café had huge windows. Even through the rain, I saw everything. I saw Matthew lean forward slightly over the table, talking to Hailey.
He wore that expression I hated most—gentle, harmless, good guy.
And Hailey—
Hailey didn't tell him to leave.
She sat there and listened, calm as still water. She even lifted her cup now and then and took a sip. No tension. No fear. Not a single flicker of the violent emotion she'd shown with me.
She looked so damn peaceful.
Peaceful like the barefoot woman who'd run for her life from my garage had never existed. Like the name Viktor Ivanov had never touched her life.
She forgot me.
I'd spent a month soaking in blood, damn near losing half my life, just to see her again. And she sat here, sipping coffee with the man who'd pushed her into hell, like it was nothing.
The hate I'd shoved down exploded.
It tore through my chest and ran hot through my veins, all the way into each finger gripping that wheel.
Good. Perfect.
I'd gone to war with my own family for her, and she sat here safe and steady, sliding right back toward the "clean" man.
I should've known.
Every night I'd missed her that month felt like a slap across my face.
My fingers dug into the wheel, nails threatening to rip the leather. Every drop of blood in me screamed to go in there, to move, to make that man stop breathing.
But I couldn't.
I could've killed Matthew. I could've killed anyone on that street.
But I couldn't touch Hailey.
Even now—when I wanted to storm in, tear her away from him, and demand an answer—the one person I couldn't hurt was her.
I forced my shaking hand to peel off the steering wheel, inch by inch.
Calm down. Viktor. Stay calm.
If I barged in, I'd only shove her farther away. If she watched me lose control in public, it would only seal it again in her mind—that I was the bloody-handed monster.
I needed an answer, not a circus.
I slammed my back into the seat and stared at the glass. I swallowed every urge to charge in, crammed it down into the deepest part of my chest, and let it burn there until my organs ached.
I stayed still.
The rain eased. The sky sank into full dark. Streetlights blinked on one by one, throwing yellow light across the window, turning the two silhouettes inside into something sharp and brutal.
I didn't know how long I sat there. I only knew the hand that had held the wheel went numb.
Finally, Matthew stood.
He seemed to try to say something else. Through the glass, I saw Hailey shake her head. Her expression looked complicated—something I couldn't quite read. Matthew hesitated, then turned, pushed out of the café, and vanished into the thick night.
He left.
But in that window, Hailey's seat—the space where another man had just been—burned into my eyes like a red-hot nail.
The question in my head turned razor-clear.
Did she still love me?
Or had she finally woken up and decided to crawl back to the man who could give her a clean life?
The hate I'd held down and the longing I'd had nowhere to put for a month twisted together in my chest, choking me.
I needed an answer.
Even if it punched straight through me like the bullet that had ripped into my left shoulder.
I watched Hailey finish the last of her coffee, stand, leave the café, cross the street, and go back into the lit building.
I stared up at the second-floor window when it glowed again, the gloves against my chest digging in, painful.
The little bit of calm I'd been holding snapped—piece by piece.
I opened the car door, stepped out into the wet, and walked—one step at a time—toward that apartment with the light on.