25. Adrik
ADRIK
A fter I returned from killing Morovov, I had to hurry to a standoff with one of the smaller Bratva families who were trying to argue that we had no leader.
This shit was getting old. My father hadn’t died yet, and even if I wasn’t fully and actively taking over his role as the interim leader, there were three more of us brothers.
Maksim, Viktor, and Nikolai were all waiting behind me in succession.
There would never be a question about the throne staying in our family.
I hadn’t wanted the unnecessary headache, and after I was through with the leaders from the Konstantin Bratva, I felt like they wouldn’t be forgetting what I’d said.
In short: Back the fuck off.
I came back to the estate and asked about where Elena was.
For as much as she was a hardworking woman who seemed to enjoy spending hours with numbers and spreadsheets, I thought she might still have been in the big house.
Or maybe she’d wanted to stay for as long as possible on the chance she could see me.
Yeah, fucking, right.
I shook my head as I paced in my office, two days after I’d killed Morovov.
She wouldn’t have wanted my company after knowing I’d just gone to kill her father.
But I was concerned about how she was holding up.
Nothing prepared me for rushing into the guest house while I kept Maksim on the phone, with him looking for her elsewhere on the property—not that she ever explored.
When I followed the sound of water running and hurried into the bathroom, I swore my heart stopped. I feared the worst. That she’d fallen. That she’d tried to kill herself, as outlandish as that intrusive thought was.
Finding her in the shower, curled up on the floor and hugging her knees to her chest like that, scared me.
She worried me.
And angered me.
I’d gotten her out of there and immediately realized she’d shut down.
No answers. No reactions. I wasn’t reaching her at all as I dried her off and covered her with blankets in her room.
Unsure what to do and not wanting to make anything worse, I called for the one cook who seemed friendliest with her.
I asked her to sit with Elena and get her to sip hot tea and soup.
Under no circumstances was she freezing herself, starving herself, or otherwise getting into such a severe state that she’d need medical intervention.
I left when the cook explained that she was sleeping well and warmer to touch.
Instead of waiting at the guest house, I relocated to my suite in the mansion. I paced and kept checking on the cook and guards who would report that Elena was resting.
The irony killed me. That morning, I’d gone to kill her father. Now, in the aftermath of that action, I was stressed about keeping her alive.
Viktor frowned at me when I made a comment about it in the morning. “Keep her alive? She wasn’t near hypothermia.”
I scowled.
No, she wasn’t. But something shifted in me when I saw her so shut down.
It was why, with bated breath, I waited for her to show up for work.
I doubted that she’d want a day off. She was too hardworking and industrious to want a day off.
To be idle. And sure enough, she showed up to work in the office, taking over the complete accounting work of what had been staying with her father’s firm.
I had to give her credit for coming to me, with Sacha and Igor, to tell me that she had deactivated the accounts at her father’s firm.
It was anyone’s guess what would happen to Morovov’s things or the company Elena used to work for.
He was dead, and he’d never be a financial service provider again.
Elena was clear and concise, as usual, as she showed how all the accounts were now strictly connected to our in-house network.
I didn’t miss that as she spoke, she lacked a solid ability or willingness to make or keep direct eye contact with me.
She didn’t sound excited or upbeat at all, which she sometimes did when she lowered her guard.
How talking about numbers and formulas could be a thrill was beyond me.
But she wasn’t. She wasn’t thrilled.
“It seems like she’s just forcing herself through the day,” Lev commented at the end of the week.
She’d shown up to work every day. She kept conversations with me to a minimum, strictly using one-word replies to anything I asked.
Lev’s assessment was spot on, but I didn’t have anything to say for a solution to it. She was here, she was safe, and she was working. That wasn’t all that she was good for, though.
She mattered, dammit, but I was too tongue-tied to figure out how to explain that she did—despite the fact that I’d had to kill her father for what he’d done.
The amount he’d stolen wasn’t much. It was the principle of it, though.
It was the fact that he was trying to run and hide at all.
And it would take days to investigate who he was working with against us—if it was Gregori or not.
More than anything, as I watched her act like a shell of her former self, I struggled with the guilt.
Guilt, of all things. I hadn’t been raised as Dmitri Volkov’s heir and Mafia prince with cuddles and story time.
I had lived a hard life. I’d killed many.
And I was sure I would take the lives of many more until it was the end of my time.
Violence was a standard in our world, and I’d never let it affect me personally.
John Morovov’s death was an example and punishment that had to have been made. I stood by my choice. My brothers and cousins supported my decision as well.
“What if you…” Nikolai winced as he came to talk to me one afternoon. He, as well as the others, had observed how subdued Elena was now.
“What if I what?”
“What if you apologized to her?” he suggested weakly.
At my deadpanned smirk, he rolled his eyes. “I know. Stupid thing to say. But…” He shrugged. “Something’s got to give, right?”
“It’s not going to be me giving her an apology,” I replied.
I had to stick with the firm belief that strength was the only path forward.
“And I’m not sorry,” I told him.
He nodded.
“I fail to understand how the fuck she’d even care about that man when he sold her to me. When he gave her up and sacrificed her life and freedom to spare a punishment for himself.”
“I don’t think she did care about him too much,” he replied. He quickly held his hands up. “I’m not saying I know her to make that claim. None of us know her like you do.”
Shit. I wondered if they knew I’d fucked her. If they were aware of how obsessed I was with keeping her. Or making her mine.
“But she never mentioned wanting anything else than working here.”
I scoffed. “Because she’s not stupid. She knew she was stuck here, with me. She was given to me.”
“Sure. But she never expressed any attitude about being here. Tell me I’m wrong. She never tried to escape. She never contacted her father. She never even fucking wandered around the property or went to the pool or anything.”
“Because she didn’t come here as a guest.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but is she just an employee? She’s not fitting into any category or label. Whatever she is, though, is loyal. Not to her father, but to you. To the family.”
I shook my head, not wanting to get my hopes up. “If she was so loyal and committed to this family, she wouldn’t be this down and moping about it.”
Maksim approached, walking up behind us on the patio. He must have overheard the end of our discussion because he said, “She’s not moping, you dumbass. She’s just lost.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Nikolai nodded. “The fuck?”
“It’s not so much that you killed Morovov that’s bothering her,” Maksim said.
I crossed my arms. “Did she tell you that?”
“No. I can tell, though,” he replied. “It’s not that you killed him, it’s that she has no one now.”
I stared him down, confused how he could even come to such an asinine conclusion.
“That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.
” I wanted to shout and rail against that.
Elena was so down and sullen and detached from life because she had no one?
That was bullshit. I was so possessive of her that I couldn’t believe he’d think such a thing.
“Her mother died when she was young.” He ticked up a finger.
“Both sets of her grandparents died before she was born,” Nikolai added. Maksim put another finger up.
For fuck’s sake. I loathed that she had opened up to them at all, and not exclusively me.
“No aunts or uncles,” Maksim added, putting up another finger.
“Not that having an uncle is anything I’d want with the one we had,” Nikolai said. He frowned. “Or the one we still have, if that’s the case.”
“No siblings,” Maksim said. “No friends. She is a homebody and doesn’t even talk about going out. She has no one . With you taking out her father, the last person who could’ve been part of her family, she is alone.”
“That’s bullshit ,” I argued. While all that they said was true, this was not. Elena wasn’t alone. She was here. With me. Hell, even my brothers and cousins and that cook were all part of her life now.
More than anything else, though, she had me . We’d come together, and it wasn’t a farce. We’d connected, albeit in a torrid, physical burst of lust both times, but it wasn’t as though she was alone .
They both left me, and while I stood and let the sun warm my back, wanting the fresh air for a little longer before I headed back inside, I considered how wrong I was and how right they could be.
Admitting I erred wasn’t something that I did lightly.
But in this case…
Fuck. They have a point.
I was so blinded by my obsession with her and how smart and dedicated she was, on top of how unbelievably gorgeous she was, that I couldn’t stand the idea that I didn’t have her.
Not from a transaction, but as a woman I wanted in my life.
She had me.
But repeating that in my mind forced me to understand that it wasn’t like that at all.
I had her, because her father gave her as a payment of debt, but I hadn’t let it get deeper between us. Not once had I actively and deliberately given her the illusion that she was my woman. Or my friend. Or my lover.
I’d only outwardly viewed her as an asset. A smart accountant who could handle any task in front of her. I had brought her here to my property with an overarching expectation that she would stay here, more like a prisoner who turned into an employee I needed.
Thinking it over and trying to test out a foreign concept like seeing things from her perspective and not mine, I realized how it had to look to her.
She was a debt paid by the man I’d just killed.
A man who, for better or worse, represented the last semblance of her family.
But isn’t there any hope and truth to the concept that she could choose a family with me? With the Volkov Bratva and the future of my leading us past the imminent death of our Pakhan?
I hung my head and sighed at how difficult this had to be.