Chapter 14 - Janella
My hands bury themselves in my hair, undoing the knot I’d piled my hair into and shaking the waves out. But it’s no use. The restless melancholia in my bones is unshakeable. It has been for days now.
I slam the door of his dark, empty office shut behind me. Even sleuthing has lost its luster to me. Neither answers nor escape are to be found in any corner of this decadent, awful penthouse.
God knows Iosif isn’t either.
At this point, I’m certain even stern, dispassionate Oksana pities me.
I wish—I really, really do—that any of it was enough to get me to give up and go to bed. To hate him and regret him and damn him to hell. To be satisfied with leaving it at that. I should. If I were smart, that’s what I would do.
Hadn’t Leonid more or less confirmed the other night, how stupid I’d been to have sex with a certified manwhore?
“He’s never slept with the same woman twice,” had been Leo’s exact words. Darya and Nadya had sheepishly confirmed it yesterday over lunch.
Clearly, Iosif’s reputation precedes him.
Who would I be, though, if I gave up? How would I have survived my life?
Whether it is a good thing or a bad one is a matter of opinion.
That I deserve more than being captured, captivated, used, and discarded is a matter of fact.
And whether he likes it or not, my husband is going to confront that fact tonight.
So—Fuck going to bed.
The only place my feet walk me to is the kitchen. It’s two in the morning, and I’m brewing a pot of tea. He has to come home sooner or later.
***
I awaken to a cool hand cradling my cheek. Sleepy as a kitten, I tip into the touch. My eyelids are too heavy to lift. Yet, “Silly girl,” Iosif’s deep timber vibrates above me, and my eyes fly open all the same.
“You’re here,” I croak.
“I live here,” he points out.
I frown. “Could’ve fooled me.”
Without another word, he lifts me in his arms and sweeps me off the couch.
My arms fly around his neck of their own accord.
Despite my frustration, my body relaxes against his.
I bury my face into the crook of his neck, knowing this won’t last. Nothing with Iosif seems to, except for the constant mixed signals.
“You’re glaring.”
“You’ve given me no reason not to, have you?”
His breath fans across my face in hot puffs of laughter. Exhaustion weighs my eyelids back down. It doesn’t stop me from nipping at his shoulder. I don’t expect him to actually wince. I can tell he isn’t faking it just for my benefit, either.
“Iosif?”
“I’m fine,” he says too quickly.
That wakes me the rest of the way up. “Put me down,” I order, wriggling, impatient. “Right now!”
He curses—and obeys, glowering at me the whole time. The fact that he actually listens to me and sets me on my feet is all the proof I need. His eyes can’t distract me from the fact that he’s limping and favoring his left side.
“What happened?” I reach out and still him with my hands on his arms. I’m terrified he’s going to pull away. I feel no relief when all he does is sigh.
“Bratva stuff.” Succinct. He gives nothing away. It isn’t an accident.
My lips purse into a hard line.
If he doesn’t want to talk? Fine. Right here in the hallway, I reach for the buttons of his shirt and start undoing them.
Iosif stiffens, stunned. The element of surprise lets me get halfway down his chest—nothing I haven’t seen before, I can say now.
Or I could, if he didn’t have such an effect on me.
“No,” he says firmly, ripping my hands away from him.
I let out an agitated laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself,” I snap, and smack at his hands until he lets me have a real look. “You’re favoring that side. Which means something is wrong here. Let me see. God knows you’re not going to see a doctor.”
Iosif shoots me a dark look. “I already saw Yulia,” he corrects. “My ribs are bruised. I’ve already been instructed to—”
“Ice for two to three days, then switch to a warm compress when the swelling subsides,” I finish for him.
Pointedly, despite the question in his eyes, I don’t explain either.
Two can play this game. “I’ll get the ice and meet you in your room.
Try to have your pants on this time.” I give it my best attempt at playing an ice queen.
At least he has the grace to look disgruntled by it.
It’s a satisfying note to turn away from him on. The high of it is enough for me to ride the wave of—I do, all the way to the kitchen and back.
The sight of his shirtless body, for the first time since we—
It knocks the breath from my lungs.
He’s so sexy.
At least he’s slumped in one of the chairs in front of the windows instead of his bed. That’s something, right?
My heart still does a funny little dance in my chest when he looks up at me. I scold it, reminding and reprimanding the fickle thing, while I wrap the icepack in a towelette and dare my hand not to shake as I bring it to his side.
Any surge of vindication is snuffed when he flinches.
I almost do, too, when he insists, “I can do this, Janella. Just go to bed.”
It stings, this game of Russian Roulette we’re engaged in. Will he pull me in now, or shove me aside? Will it numb, wound, or maim? These stupid games only ever have stupid prizes.
Fine. I shove the icepack at him and retreat.
“I’ll pack my stuff and go sleep where I’m wanted,” I say resolutely.
I anticipate the moment he reaches out for me, trying to grab me and root me here for him to do whatever the hell he wants.
I dodge his grasp. “No. You either want me here, or you don’t.
I’m either a part of this world, or I’m not.
Let me in or let me go. Share your life with me, or leave me to whatever mine is going to be. You can’t have it both ways.”
In the face of all of my emphatic words, his heavy silence is intimidating.
It’s only when I’m about to turn away once more, this time for good, that he exhales. “It isn’t a big deal. This shit adds up. I’ve told you before—this is the deal, in this world. Sometimes we get fucked up. Most times, the other fuckers get fucked up worse.”
Worse, he says. Worse than bruised ribs. Worse than—what, the man he’d stabbed the night he took me?
He says it like it’s nothing.
To him, maybe it is. Maybe most things are. Hurting people, spilling blood, pushing a part of his body with another human being in a moment of profound connection. Maybe he’s a hedonist without a soul.
Nausea barrels through me. My head shakes. “I don’t understand you.”
That’s a real understatement.
“Why is that?” Iosif asks with narrowed eyes.
Determined not to be the one who flees, as if I can set some sort of example here, I take a seat in the chair beside his.
I pause. Then answer, “I don’t understand how you can hurt people like it’s nothing.
I don’t understand how you can sleep with someone and not talk to them for two weeks after that, like it’s nothing.
Sometimes, I start to believe I’m seeing you—really, truly seeing you.
And then you turn it into nothing more than an illusion. ”
“You see more of me than I ever planned for you to,” Iosif admits, sounding none too happy about it. Tough shit.
“I thought you didn’t make plans.”
“Sometimes,” he says wryly, “you have to. Tonight was one of those nights. If I told you what the people I killed tonight were up to, I don’t think you’d make a different choice in my position.” He slouches back in his seat, the muscles in his hard, ridged abdomen rippling with the movement.
I force my eyes to his face. “You never give me a choice,” I remind him. “And I take it. Because what other options are there? I go back to my dad and get prostituted. Or I stay here and feel cheap in a different way. Either way, I’m lonely.”
My eyes drop to my lap.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t say anything at all. Or I get another semi-patronizing speech about how the world isn’t black and white.
“There’s a mindblowing market for European girls between twelve and sixteen years old,” is what comes out of his mouth.
I choke on air. It doesn’t deter Iosif at all.
“If you want to debate selective morality until we’re blue in the face, Darya’s probably your best bet.
But I don’t have complicated feelings about wiping evil off the earth.
None of my brothers do, either. And I’m not sorry about not wanting to expose you to it.
Any of it. That darkness takes up most of my life. ”
I have to swallow the lump in my throat to get words out. “Then why did you pull me into it? Why won’t you let me go?”
I can’t look at him. I can tell he isn’t looking at me—not even when his hand, frigid from the icepack I hear him set aside, covers mine.
“I don’t make plans,” he repeats my words back to me. “You’re right about that. I didn’t plan this with you. But you are still the brightest thing that’s ever walked into my life. I’m selfish and arrogant and a hundred other monstrous things. And I will not let you go.”
It should disturb me, I think. The quiet ferocity of those words, and their innate possessiveness. But they cocoon me. They are a balm to a wound that has been stinging, screaming about the salt of his vanishing act.
“You have to let me in then. If you don’t sleep with the same woman twice, fine—don’t. We don’t have to do that. But stop avoiding me, Iosif. It’s fucking insulting.”
Now, I can tell, can feel my skin buzzing beneath his attention; he is looking at me.
“I miss you when I’m not around,” he confesses, so softly I’m almost sure I imagined it after all. “You’re an addictive pain in the ass.”
With the same sedate, inevitable way tectonic plates beneath the earth do, I can feel something between us begin to shift. To what, I’m unsure.
But I can meet his eye—and Iosif, mine—when I quip, “You say the sweetest things to me, Iosif Yuri.”
The words elicit another laugh from him. Discounting the subsequent grimace that crumples his face, it is a win. I reach for the discarded icepack. “Hold still,” I instruct.
Iosif rolls his eyes. He doesn’t argue, though. He relents, letting his head loll back, and his eyes fall shut. I’m under no illusion he’s close to sleep. I can almost hear his mind whirring.
“Does it hurt?”
“Ask me a better question.”
I wrack my head, inspired to rise to his challenges, maddening as they are. “Did you save someone else tonight?”
His brows knit together above eyes that don’t open.
Eventually, he nods.
The quick, impulsive admission has my heart on fire.