24. Lena
LENA
I am lying on the very edge of the mattress, the “Republic of Lena” reduced to a narrow strip of silk and shadow.
My body is a coiled spring, every muscle vibrating with a restlessness that feels like it’s scraping against my bones.
Beside me, the vast expanse of the king-sized bed is empty, but the ghost of Razvan’s presence is everywhere.
For three days, I have been a ghost in this house. I have perfected the art of the blank stare. I have looked through him during dinner, ignored his questions about my day, and moved through the hallways as if he were nothing more than a structural pillar of the estate.
I expected a explosion. I expected him to snap, to grab my chin and force me to look at him, to remind me with a roar or a threat that he is the Pakhan and I am his property.
I wanted the monster. I needed the monster.
If he’s a monster, then my hatred is a righteous shield.
If he’s a monster, then the way my heart stutters when I hear his boots on the stairs is just a survival instinct.
But he hasn’t reacted. He’s been…patient.
He’s been quiet. He hasn’t forced a single word or a single touch since we returned from St. Petersburg.
And that patience is the cruelest torture of all, because it makes me remember the man who stood between me and a hail of bullets.
It makes me remember the man who holds Theo as if the boy is made of glass.
“He killed your father,” I whisper into the dark, a mantra to steady my soul. “He kept you in a dungeon. He forced a ring onto your finger while your father’s blood was barely dry on the floor.”
But then my traitorous mind flashes back to the hotel. To the way he looked at me when I was naked and shivering in his arms. To the way he growled “zayka” against my skin as if I were the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth.
Why won’t my body get the memo? Why does the scent of his sandalwood cologne lingering on the pillows make my stomach flip with a sickening, honeyed heat?
The heavy oak door to the master suite creaks open.
I instantly squeeze my eyes shut, slowing my breathing into the rhythmic, shallow cadence of sleep. I roll onto my side, facing away from the door, pulling the duvet up to my ears. My heart is a frantic bird hitting the cage of my ribs.
I hear his footsteps. They aren’t the usual, measured strikes of a predator. They’re heavy. Slightly uneven. There’s a dragging quality to the sound that makes the hair on my arms stand up. He stops by the foot of the bed.
A long, low groan ripples through the silence—a sound of genuine, unvarnished pain that he would never let me hear if he thought I was awake.
I stay frozen. Don’t move. Let him go to sleep. Don’t let the wall down.
I feel the mattress dip. He’s standing right beside my side of the bed.
A shadow falls over me, blocking the faint moonlight from the window.
Then, a hand—large, calloused, and trembling slightly—reaches out.
His fingers graze the top of my head, a touch so light it’s almost a prayer.
He pets my hair, smoothing the strands back from my forehead with a tenderness that feels like a betrayal of everything I know about him.
He groans again, a sharp, hitched intake of breath, and pulls his hand away. He tries to stand, but I hear his knee buckle slightly against the frame.
And then, I smell it.
It’s not sandalwood. It’s the sharp, metallic tang of iron. It’s the smell of the dungeon. It’s the smell of the floor of my father’s study.
Blood.
Before I can stop myself, before the “Republic” can issue a cease-and-desist, I am sitting up. I twist around, my eyes wide and frantic in the dark.
“Razvan?”
He freezes, half-hunched over, his hand gripping the bedpost so hard the wood creaks. He looks at me, his face pale and slick with sweat in the moonlight. His dress shirt is unbuttoned halfway, hanging off one shoulder.
“Go back to sleep, Lena,” he rasps. His voice is a wreck, a hollowed-out version of his usual baritone.
“You’re bleeding,” I say, my voice rising with a panic I can’t suppress. I scramble across the bed, ignoring the way my silk nightgown rides up my thighs. “Why is there blood on you? What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m fine.”
“Don’t lie to me!” I snap, reaching out to grab his arm.
He winces, a hiss of pain escaping his teeth, and that’s when I see it. The white silk of his shirt is soaked through on his left side, a dark, spreading bloom of crimson that looks black in the dim light.
It’s the wound from the shootout. The “graze” he told me was nothing. The injury he’s been minimizing for days while he flew me across the country and managed a Bratva war. He’s been walking around with a hole in his side, pretending he’s invincible, and now it’s finally demanded its tithe.
“Sit down,” I command.
He looks at me, a flicker of his old, arrogant self dancing in his eyes despite the agony. “Since when do you give me orders, zayka?”
“Since you’re bleeding out on my expensive rug! Sit. Down. Now.”
To my utter shock, he obeys. He sinks onto the edge of the mattress with a heavy thud, his head dropping forward. The shift in our dynamic is so sudden it’s dizzying. For months, he has been the mountain, the immovable force. Now, he’s a man. Just a man. And he’s hurting.
I bolt for the bathroom, returning seconds later with a first aid kit and a bowl of warm water. My hands are shaking so hard the medical tape rattles in the box.
“Take the shirt off,” I say, kneeling between his legs on the floor.
He fumbles with the buttons, his fingers clumsy and unresponsive. I growl in frustration and push his hands away, my own fingers flying over the silk. I peel the fabric back, and I have to bite my lip to keep from crying out.
The wound is ugly. It wasn’t a graze. The bullet had taken a chunk of flesh from his side, and the stitches—likely done in haste by a field medic—had torn completely open. The area is angry, swollen, and weeping fresh blood.
“You idiot,” I whisper, the anger and the fear mixing into a volatile cocktail in my chest. “You absolute, arrogant idiot. You’ve been walking around like this? For three days?”
“I had things…to attend to,” he grunts. He leans back on his elbows, watching me through hooded eyes. “The Petrovs, they needed to understand the cost of the St. Petersburg incident.”
“I don’t care about the Petrovs! You could have gotten an infection. You could have fainted while holding Theo!”
The mention of our son makes his expression soften for a heartbeat. I don’t give him time to respond. I dip a cloth into the water and begin to clean the wound.
The tension in the room is suffocating. I am inches from him, my face level with his stomach.
I can feel the heat radiating from his skin, the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest. Every time I dab at the blood, his abdominal muscles ripple and cord under my touch, a silent testament to the pain he’s refusing to voice.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter as he flinches when I apply the antiseptic.
“Don’t be,” he says. His hand reaches out, hovering over my shoulder before finally settling there. His thumb traces the line of my collarbone, a slow, heavy movement that sends a different kind of shiver through me. “I like your hands on me, Lena. Even when they’re trying to sting me.”
“Shut up, Razvan.”
I work in silence for the next twenty minutes.
I re-stitch the tear with a needle and thread from the kit—my hands steadying as the adrenaline of the task takes over.
I am focused, clinical, but the vulnerability of the moment is a weight on my chest. He is letting me do this.
He is sitting here, bleeding and broken, and trusting me with a needle near his vital organs.
Me. The woman who told him she hated him yesterday.
When I finally tape the fresh bandage into place, I am exhausted. I sit back on my heels, wiping a stray smudge of his blood from my thumb.
“There,” I say, my voice trembling. “It’s clean. But you have to stay still. No Petrovs. No dragons with Theo. You stay in this bed.”
“Stay with me,” he says.
It wasn’t a command. It was a plea.
I look up at him. His eyes are dark, searching mine, stripped of all the Pakhan’s armor. He looks tired. He looks like a man who has been carrying the world on his shoulders and just wants to set it down for five minutes.
“I need to wash my hands,” I say, standing up quickly.
I retreat to the bathroom, scrubbing the blood from my skin with frantic motions. I stare at myself in the mirror. My hair is a mess, my eyes are wide, and my heart is screaming. Get out. Go to the guest room. Don’t go back in there.
But when I walk back into the bedroom, he’s already slid under the covers. He’s lying on his back, his eyes closed, his breathing heavy. I think he’s asleep, so I move toward the door, intending to flee.
“Lena.”
His voice is a low, pained ghost of a sound. He reaches out blindly across the bed, his hand searching for mine.
“Please. Just for an hour.”
The “Republic of Lena” crumbles into dust. I walk to the bed and slide back in, keeping as much distance as I can. But as soon as I’m settled, he moves. With a pained groan, he rolls onto his side and pulls me toward him.
He doesn’t try to initiate anything. He just tucks his head into the crook of my neck, his arm draping over my waist, pulling me flush against his heat. He moans against my skin—a sound of pure, desperate relief, as if my presence is the only thing stopping the pain.
“I needed this,” he mumbles, his breath hot against my ear. “I needed you.”
I should push him away. I should remind him of the blood on the floor of my father’s house. But in the quiet of the night, with his heart beating against my back and his arm holding me safe, the hatred feels like a heavy coat I’m tired of wearing.
I close my eyes, and for the first time in months, I don’t fight the pull.
The shift happens somewhere in the blue-gray light before dawn.
I don’t know who started it. Maybe it was the way I turned in his arms to check his bandage. Maybe it was the way his hand slid up my thigh, his touch questioning rather than demanding.
But suddenly, the air in the room isn’t just heavy with pain. It’s thick with a desperate, frantic hunger.
He kisses me, and it’s not the conquest of the hotel. It’s a slow, starving exploration. He tastes of iron and peppermint, and I find myself pulling him closer, my fingers tangling in his hair, my body arching into his despite the wound between us.
“Razvan, your side—” I gasp against his mouth.
“Fuck my side,” he growls.
He moves with a careful, deliberate grace, hovering over me so as not to put weight on his injury. He strips my nightgown away with trembling hands, his eyes devouring me in the pale light.
“You are the only thing that makes sense,” he whispers, his lips traveling down the center of my chest. “The only thing that isn’t a lie.”
When he enters me, it isn’t a claim. It’s a homecoming.
It’s slow, rhythmic, and agonizingly deep.
I wrap my legs around his waist, my heels digging into his glutes, pulling him as deep as he can go.
Every thrust is a vibration of sensation that travels from my core to my toes, turning my bones to liquid.
I watch his face. He is grit-toothed, his eyes locked on mine, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.
I can see the flicker of pain when he moves too far to the left, but he doesn’t stop.
He is focused on me—on the way my breath hitches, on the way my eyes roll back, on the way I am falling apart beneath him.
“Look at me, Lena,” he rasps, his hands pinning mine to the pillows. “Tell me you’re mine.”
“I’m here,” I sob, my climax beginning to build in a terrifying, tidal wave of heat. “Razvan…I’m here.”
It’s enough for him. He picks up the pace, his breathing turning into a rhythmic, animalistic grunt.
The friction is perfect, the heat is absolute, and when I finally break, screaming his name into the quiet room, he follows me.
He buries his face in my neck, his body shuddering with a release that feels like it’s tearing him apart, his internal muscles clenching around me in a desperate, final hold.
We lie there as the sun begins to bleed over the horizon, painting the room in shades of violet and gold.
I wait for the guilt to come. I wait for the nausea to return, for the memory of my father to scream in my ears. But as I look at Razvan—now truly asleep, his face peaceful for the first time since I met him—all I feel is a profound, terrifying clarity.
I can’t make this mean nothing.
I stand up, my body aching in a way that feels like a reminder of every moment we just shared. I walk to the window and watch the sun rise over the Moscow skyline.
I’m going to go see Theo now. I’m going to be a mother. I’m going to live the life I’ve been given.
I look back at the man in the bed. The monster. The protector. The husband.
I don’t hate him. God help me, I don’t hate him at all.
And as I walk out of the room, I stop trying to pretend I do. The Republic has fallen. And for the first time, I think I might actually be free.