Chapter 24 Ivy
IVY
Lettie’s words refuse to leave me.
Wouldn’t it be better to be under Maksim’s protection when his enemies come sniffing around again, than to be here alone without it?
I tell myself to forget them, to let it go like everything else I’ve been trying to shove into the back of my mind lately.
But they echo again the moment the house gets quiet, looping through my thoughts with ruthless persistence like a song I can’t stop humming.
A question I can’t stop turning over in my head a hundred different ways.
Protection.
Such an innocent word when not attached to something as terribly unpredictable as a Russian Bratva.
For so long I mourned a version of my life that could never be, the one where Leo had a father, the one where I had a partner who loved me. I mourned it like a widow even though I was never really a wife.
Then Maksim appeared again, alive when I had buried him in my mind and heart years ago, and suddenly, all those dead fantasies clawed their way back to life inside my heart.
I thought I would feel joy. Relief. Hope.
Instead, all I felt was terror.
Because what once lived only in daydreams is now a possibility, and possibilities carry the weight of decision. They demand for choices to be made.
I am scared shitless.
If I go back to Maksim, back to the Bratva, I don’t know if we will survive. Even if he swears he’d keep us safe, even if he swears he’d keep Leo separate from that world, I know better. A Pakhan’s son is never truly separate. He can’t be as the next heir in line.
Would Maksim even want him to be his heir one day? It seems likely. He’s the kind of man who sees lineage, legacy, and inheritance not as abstract concepts but as obligations.
That also terrifies me.
Leo, my bright boy who cries when we find a dead worm on the sidewalk, who still wants me to sing him lullabies at night to fall asleep to.
My baby who had been caught in the same deadly predicaments his father finds himself in almost daily, would be responsible for an entire underground organization in a little over a decade.
What if another coup happens?
I can’t do it. I can’t hand my child over to a future like that. I’ll never be able to live with myself if something horrible happens and I had every chance in the world to fix it a decade earlier.
So I tell myself the answer is clear. I can’t go back.
After that, the days pass in a blur after my decision has been made.
The first thing I do is put Leo back in school.
He clings to me at drop-off the first week, his little body pressed tight against mine, his eyes glassy with the fear of me disappearing again.
I sit with him longer than the other parents when the kids start filing in for class, rubbing his back until he finally lets the teacher coax him inside the front doors.
I walk away with my stomach in knots every morning, promising myself that tomorrow will be better.
I go back to my job at the diner.
It’s the same tables, same menu, same regulars with their gripes about how strong the coffee is and how bland the food is, but now it all feels so… fake. Like I’m acting in a play where I already know the ending but have to recite my lines anyway.
But the only way to move on is to move forward.
So that’s what I try to do.
It’s a weekday morning rush, the diner packed with travelers and college kids coming home for their first semester, the hiss of the coffee machine drowning out my thoughts.
I’ve been moving on autopilot since my shift started four hours ago, pouring coffee, wiping down counters, balancing trays of food to my tables.
When I spot a man with his face buried in a menu at a nearby table, I grab my notepad and plaster on my customer service smile.
“Good morning, sir. What can I get started for you?” My pen scratches against the surface of my notepad, outlining the tab number to keep track of when it gets back to the kitchen.
“Whatever you recommend,” he says, letting the menu drop from in front of his face.
The pen slips from my fingers. It’s a voice that doesn’t belong here. A voice that doesn’t belong anywhere in the fragile life I’ve cobbled back together again.
For a moment, I can’t breathe. My heart gallops in my chest, loud enough that I’m sure the whole diner can hear it. Maksim appears at the table like he belongs here, his massive frame folded into a chair too small for him, his dark eyes locked on mine.
“Ivy.” His voice is steady, too familiar.
Panic surges in me.
I stumble backward, mumbling something to him, but the words don’t make sense even to me. My body is moving before my mind catches up, pushing past tables, dodging my coworker, heading for the back through the kitchen, out the back door and into the alley.
The warm mid-morning air slaps me across the face.
I double over with a hand grasping the side of the brick wall to hold me up. My hand claws at the thin T-shirt covering my chest, over where my heart is. The panic swallows me whole.
After everything I told myself I was done with, and swearing to build a life away from him, Maksim appears out of thin air.
I have no idea what I’m going to do.
“Ivy.”
I jolt away from the wall, spinning around to see Maksim standing in the mouth of the alleyway.