Chapter 16 - Janella
“Are you sure about this?” Iosif asks me for the fifth time today.
No, I’m not. But that’s the point.
I’m not sure, and I am still here. My nerves are fried, my stomach is cramping with an onslaught of anxiety, and I am walking around with my broken heart in my throat. And I am still here.
The Pit looks exactly like it always does in my nightmares. What a sleight of hand, since it isn’t. The ever-changing location is part of the operation’s appeal. Even still, a warehouse is a warehouse. Within the concrete underground and beneath the neon lights, it’s comparable.
Tonight, I’m not being hauled through the premises like a prize hog.
I am cutting through the crowd, my every step matching Iosif’s, and my arm through his.
Clutching at the firm swell of his bicep feels a lot like holding a weapon.
Though, just in case, he watched me strap a dagger into a holster at my thigh earlier, too.
“The only way out is through,” I tell him.
“Ugh.” He gags, reminding me laughably of Nadya in this moment. “I fucking hate fortune cookie wisdom.”
There’s no real bite to his words. It’s impossible to miss the concern swimming in his torrential gaze. That this concern for me exists isn’t insignificant. Neither is it how countless heads turn our way and watch us long after we’ve passed by.
“Careful not to step on any cracks. You know what they say,” I joke halfheartedly.
Me, I expected they’d leer at. I almost forgot how scared they are of him.
Hadn’t I been, too, once? It seems longer ago than it has been.
They are two separate entities in my mind now—monstrous, bloodthirsty Yuri who’d bought me impulsively, and protective, kind Iosif who has turned his life upside down to alter my fate.
I’ve never understood more why only the first of those entities may remain widely known. The second is a privilege to uncover.
The sounds lash at my ears. The cacophony of shouts, slurring jeers, insidious laughter, and the errant thuds of weapons finding marks—it all blurs together, threatening to engulf me completely.
Iosif guides me as far away from the thick of it as possible. He’s purposeful, steering me to a private corner, away from the main throwing stations where the crowds are mostly hanging.
He summons my attention, selecting a sword from the selection on the wall. “Do you remember what I taught you?” he asks, the question edged with challenge.
I lift my chin in answer. Instead of taking the one he holds out, I step up to the array and pluck a sword for myself. Holding its heavy weight in my hand, its power pours down my arm and floods me.
Maybe it’s all in my head. That doesn’t stop it from helping.
My shoulders square, and I whip around in a jousting position.
I’m instantly glad I didn’t opt for the dress it had been my impulse to reach for.
In a pair of trousers and a champagne-colored blouse that draws Iosif’s eyes to my collarbones, I don’t feel exposed. If anything, I am spry, free-flowing.
“One way to find out.”
Playfully, his sword clangs against mine. The vibration thrums up my arm, snaking its way to my heartbeat.
His smirk is feral. “Oh yeah?”
I suck in a sharp inhale and strike his sword back.
We fall into a rhythmic back-and-forth, only switching up weapons when my arm begins to ache from the weight of the sword. Knives are lighter. When I confront the targets, they are buoyant in my grasp.
It’s a target itself that makes me stall. The sight of it, of those gleaming red rings, has a phantom ache needling in my arm. Even the stitches have long healed over. And yet…
“Janella.”
Iosif pulls me out of the depths of my memories.
It jars me, how close he is. His chest is a warm, hard wall against my back. His head dips, his lips at my ear—“I’ve got you. Let it go.”
The deep-set brag of his voice is hypnotic. Of its own volition, my hand sends the knife flying. It buries an inch deep into the second outermost ring of the target,
Iosif hums, considering. “Not too shabby. You can do better, though.”
Unsurprising. He’s always daring me to rise to the challenge. It’s taken me this long to understand what it really is—him, having faith in me.
“Trust your strength,” he advises against the shell of my ear. “Don’t tense up at the end. That’s what’s fucking you over.”
I shudder at the way his breath tickles me. He retrieves every blade I throw, bringing them back for me to try again and again. Somehow, throw after throw, the aching knot of anxiety in my chest unspools.
When I land my fourth throw dead center, Iosif grins wider than I do.
“You’re a fucking natural!” he exclaims, thrilled.
I can’t help giggling. “Oh, that’s a dream come true. A natural at violence? I’ve always wanted to be that.”
The look on his face is knowing. I fight another shiver.
“Think I could take you in a fight?” I ask him, half-teasing.
His brows crawl up his forehead, the corners of his lips twitching with amusement. “I think I’d enjoy watching you try, kukolka.”
There it is again. Little doll.
Heat gathers at my nape over the endearment. The Russian always sounds lyrical from his mouth—wicked, somehow. I’m anything but unaffected. How could I be, when he’s looking at this?
I’m surprised my hands hold steady when I take back the knife in his hand and take aim once more.
My heart goes haywire in my chest at the brush of our fingertips.
***
Time flits by. The other side of an hour finds us at the bar, our laughter intermingling seamlessly. I’ve learned so much about myself tonight.
Once I got used to the weight of the axe, I had a blast conquering it. My aim is still best with knives. Iosif looked impossibly pleased about it, just as he looked affronted when we discovered that I adore a rum and coke but find vodka gross. “We just can’t make an honorary Russian of you.”
“Leonid prefers whiskey, too!”
“He was lying so he could fuck with me about you.”
“Oh.”
The urge to lean in and do something reckless, like kiss his horribly handsome face, doesn’t dissipate so much as it fades to the background. In the forefront, we talk. Incessantly. About nothing and everything—the café, his siblings, my old school friends, and even when pineapple belongs on pizza.
I’ve never laughed this much in my life.
Every inch of my skin is flushed and buzzing when he leans in, his hand covering my knee. Squeezing it. “You’re amazing, do you know that?” Those words are quiet and soft, an intimacy reserved for me alone in this arena of casual violence.
His praise is like the sun to me. It warms me down to the marrow.
“Are you hoping flattery will get you somewhere?” I look him in the eye. I’ll be blaming the rum for how breathless I sound.
His mouth opens.
“Well, well, well. Look what we have here,” someone drawls behind us.
Iosif whips around. My spine is ice. Every muscle in my body freezes. I know this voice, thickly accented and sickeningly lecherous.
Kavinsky looks the same. He’s plucked right out of my nightmares—the same white-blonde hair, greasy-looking with gel, still in the black mesh tank he was that night, though his motorcycle jacket is missing now. When he smiles, his silver canine winks at me. My stomach roils in terror.
The wound he cut into me—the one he roared with stone-cold laughter about—goes cold and tight.
“Yuri, you couldn’t send someone to make the return?” Kavinsky clucks his tongue. I can’t look at Iosif’s face. I can’t. “She’s in pretty great shape. Huh. I would’ve thought you’d broken her in worse. Looks like no wear and tear.”
Iosif is still as a statue. Yet I can viscerally feel the storm that is roiling within him. When my gaze finds his hands, they are in tightly wound fists. I see one twitch toward his knife.
“Don’t,” I find myself insisting.
What surprises me most is that it isn’t because I don’t want him to do to Kavinsky what he did to Hernandez that night. I could live with standing in a pool of Kavinsky’s blood. But I’m through being a pawn.
No more.
“Surely, you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of her now,” Kavinsky scoffs. His eyes rake over me again and again. I am numb to it, so cold.
Iosif’s gaze finds me. I’m not sure what he sees in my face. Whatever it is elicits an exhale from him, and he makes a sweeping gesture in front of himself, telling me to go on.
“Is he done using you?” Kavinsky hollers from across the room. “I’ve been fucking dreaming about that pretty little mouth. Been thinking about it since I had you up on that wall, all helpless and—”
I’ve drawn the dagger before he knows what I’m doing. It whistles through the air, plunging by his head. I wouldn’t be surprised if I sliced off a few strands of his disgusting hair. The hunger pulsing in his bottomless eyes, watching me bend at the waist and drag up my pant leg, snuffs out.
I don’t have to look back at Iosif to know he’s looking at me with another hunger entirely. Something purely Iosif.
“I’ve been dreaming about you, too, svolotsch,” I admit. Nadya taught me that one as a part of my Russian education.
When I hold out my hand, Iosif automatically slips the handle of his knife into it.
“I want that back,” he mutters in my ear.
I look down to find it’s the one he pulled from the target by my head that first night.
“Tough luck, bitch,” Kavinsky sneers.
“Luck?” I can’t help but laugh. “I can’t say I’ve ever been accused of that one before.”
My heart is pounding overtime, making my chest heave. Iosif’s dagger lands between Kavinsky’s legs, so close to his balls that he squeaks. There’s nowhere to go but up against the wall behind him.
Who’s scrambling now?
“You crazy fucking whore—”
“Mrs. Yuri’s fine,” I correct sternly, like he’s no more than a misbehaving child.
He doesn’t stick around longer after that. He scrambles a leg over the dagger’s handle and takes off, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to get away.
Holy fucking shit.
Laughter bubbles up my throat all over again, fizzy as champagne. My head is light from it, threatening to float up into the sky like a lantern.
“Did you see that?!” I shriek, excitedly looking up at my husband. “Iosif, did you see?”
“I couldn’t look away,” he says firmly, never looking away or backing down.
His eyes are ablaze with unmistakable pride. And it’s all for me. No one has ever looked at me like that before. Then again, what has Iosif Yuri brought me but a tsunami of newness?
I don’t even think about it. My arms are around his neck before I’ve decided to walk back to him. “Thank you,” I press into his jugular. “Thank you for tonight. For teaching me. For—”
“Nell,” Iosif interjects, his hands on my hips. “It’s all you, doll.”
I think we both know that isn’t true. Some of it is me, yes—I can see that now. This strength has been in me all along. But when he offered me that open door months ago, I hadn’t imagined that door was inside me.
He’s blown it wide open now. Every day, it blows me away, the angels and demons that spill out of it.
I stay huddled against his chest, ensnaring him to my body like an anchor to keep me from slipping away with the tide of adrenaline.
Eventually, it’s he who has to disentangle himself. My heart skips a beat when he takes my hand.
“Come,” he commands, hoarse. “Let’s go home.”
***
By the time we’re back at the penthouse, I’m drunk on euphoria.
Okay, and the rum—and the champagne I’d demanded before Iosif steered me out of the Pit. But, mostly, it’s the euphoria.
“Did you see how fast he scampered away?” I bounce in my seat with undiluted glee.
The elevator doors open, and I stumble out, my heartbeat whooshing in my ears.
“Easy there,” Iosif tuts.
I’m too distracted by how his touch burns at my waist, his hold cinching to keep me upright. I like everything about it.
I like everything about you, I think.
“Dear God,” he laughs tiredly, and sweeps my legs out from under me, lifting me against his chest.
I must’ve said the words aloud.
“What’re you going to do with all your free time now that I can save myself?” I tease him, bumping the tip of my nose into his jaw. His stubble scratches me. I could purr about it.
“You can, now, can you?” he echoes, disbelief all over his beautiful face.
Adamantly, I nod. It blurs everything. Not a great idea, oops.
I must look winded. He makes me feel it.
“Hold still,” he murmurs, and opens my bedroom door with the hand beneath my thighs.
My lips press to his cheek. His cologne smells delicious, warm, earthy, and masculine. I rub my face into the side of his neck. He’s most soft, right here. It inspires another kiss, and another, all the way up to his jaw.
The very sight of his lips is an invitation. Like he can read my thoughts, his tongue sweeps over them, wetting them, tantalizing me.
“You’re ridiculous,” I sigh to him. “You’re so sexy, it hurts my feelings.”
I’m worried he hasn’t heard me. At least until he sets me down on my bed and sinks to his knees beside me. My hips lift of their own volition, ready to be disrobed. I’m ready this time. I want his head between my thighs. I could be so good for him. Then he’d say those words again, won’t he?
Good girl.
The only thing he pulls is the covers, and gestures for me to get in.
I blink up at him.
“I want a kiss,” I assert, tugging at his shirt.
Iosif is immovable. He looks pained. I look him over to check for any wounds I may have missed on his body. I know I’m a little tipsy, but I wouldn’t have missed something like that, would I?
He dispels my panic with a handful of words: “Not like this. I don’t want to just kiss you. And the things I want to do to you, I won’t when you won’t remember in the morning.”
I open my mouth, baffled. I’m certain forgetting him isn’t a possibility. Doesn’t he understand the imprint he leaves? Physical, metaphorical, spiritual?
But then his palm cups my cheek, and my head sinks into the warm cradle of his hand. My eyes flutter shut, like he’s pushed a button and I’m powering off now.
The last thing I know is his lips pressing against my temple.
The last thing I hear is, “My little lion girl.”