Chapter 23 - Iosif
Close to nightfall, the buzz of my phone steals my attention from the surveillance footage of Viktor’s last known location.
It’s a bank notification alerting me to a transfer from the joint account I gifted to Janella in the prenup agreement.
She uses it, but who the hell’s account would she move money to?
Realization carves into me.
I’m moving before I’ve fully processed it. My feet carry me down the hallway to the room Janella’s forgone for my bed the past week. What I’m bracing myself to find, I don’t know. When I throw open the door, my chest aches. The ache worsens as I tear through her things.
There’s only one reason she’d transfer money to a secret account.
“Fuck.” The word drips with the anguish that seizes me.
She’s going to leave me. She’s going to run away.
There’s a tremor in my hands as I pull up the full transaction history on my phone. I must’ve dismissed the notification before, wrapped up in spending time with Nadya before she went back home. Now, I can see Janella made another transfer five days ago.
I don’t have to consult any calendars to know it was the night she’d come home looking out of sorts, and I’d coaxed her into bed with me.
There’s only one person in the world who rattles her like that. And he wanted her to run away with him. He wanted them to get money and start over anew.
The clarity is devastating when it dawns on me.
She’s been so distant. She has been coming home later and later—and when she does, she swears she’s too gross and needs to have a shower, or has a headache and needs to lie down. When she lies against me, she won’t look at me. I don’t think she’s fully looked me in the eye in days.
I’m a fucking idiot, giving her space.
She’s going to use that space to leave me.
I haven’t thought of my father in years, but now, I remember how he used to say love makes men stupid. There’s a reason men go to war for it, and it isn’t ever a good one. It blinds them.
Is that what Janella has done to me?
All this time, I’ve thought of her opening my eyes. Has it just been the edges curling in on themselves amidst the fire, concealing the fine print? The man I was six months ago would’ve been in his car by now.
It would cost me nothing to yank answers from Cillian Driscoll himself, one nail at a time.
He’d fold like a cheap suit. And then, I’d deal with her.
I’d drag her out of that quaint fucking café and force a fucking explanation out of her.
Make her tell me why she made me need her.
If she was going to flee all along, why make my family care about her if she could sell them out like it was nothing?
That man wasn’t in love with her.
I’m no longer that man.
Where the fuck does that leave me?
My phone is still in my hand, and it automatically pulls up Janella’s number. My thumb hovers over the button. I want to call her and scream myself hoarse.
Instead, I call Ivan.
“Boss?”
“I need more equipment. Not just imaging; I want to be able to hear like she’s talking right into my fucking ear.”
“She?” Ivan is perplexed.
I’m just astonished my voice doesn’t waver. “I want it installed all over my wife’s café, her car, and the penthouse before the end of the day.”
There’s a pause.
Then, “On it.”
By 3 AM, the feed is live.
In an attempt to leash myself, I’m hunkered down in Leonid’s study. Three coffees deep, I stare at my wife asleep in my bed without me. I fucking hate the way my most lingering thought is about how fucking beautiful she is.
“Have I mentioned how fucked up this is?” Leonid asks from the doorway. I didn’t hear him come in.
“Several times.”
I don’t look away from the screen.
I’ve no interest in confronting the concern lurking in the eyes we both inherited. “You really think she’d run, man?” It’s more of a sigh than a question.
“She’s transferring money. A few weeks ago, Driscoll showed up at the café, looking sober, and asked her to sell our family out and run away with the money from it.
Last week, Nadya got shot at. Since then, she hasn’t let me touch her for more than a few minutes without running off.
” I list the facts, one after another, because I’ve been going over them and over them in my head. “What does it look like?”
“I don’t know,” he admits after a heavy pause. “But I know that woman loves you, bratan. I know that I don’t believe she’d leave you.”
Now, I look over at Leonid. It’s rare to see my smartass of a brother looking so earnest. But he’s blinded, too. He likes Janella. They all do.
It makes this easier and difficult.
With a harsh breath, I scrub my hands over my face. “Guess we’ll find out one way or another.”
***
The days meld together.
Day after day, I watch her go through the motions at work.
I feel my chest constrict every time she throws her head back and laughs—with Carmen and Jin, with her customers—like nothing is wrong.
I watch the careful way she checks the register after every shift, as if the bills might have disappeared over the course of the day.
To look at her? No, she doesn’t look like she’s planning to run.
When she comes home at night, she looks hollowed out. Her shoulders are hunched in on themselves, as if fatigued from carrying the weight of the fucking world.
Weight that she doesn’t share with me. Maybe the weight of all her secrets, as if we never decided not to keep any from one another.
Every day, betrayal courses through me, acidic.
When I break and go home for the night, sick of Leonid’s fucking dogs slobbering over me, she doesn’t come to me. She stays sealed away in her own room.
The distance between us isn’t one crossing the hallway could fix.
It kills me that she doesn’t even try.
***
It’s a week into surveillance that the wait ends. One moment, I’m reviewing footage from the night before. Next, the feed is parsing through the mid-afternoon rush. Frame by frame, footage captures Cillian Driscoll stumbling into The Great Escape.
In my head, I’d been envisioning a taller, polished version of him. The reality is worse than the last time I laid eyes on him, the night I bought Janella out from under him and swept her away to my world.
His clothes are a disaster, wrinkled and stained. The man in them is a worse mess. Even through the pixelated stream, I don’t miss the glassy, manic gleam in his eyes as they search for her.
All activity in the café comes to a simultaneous standstill as Driscoll shouts her name.
The look on Janella’s face is not joyous. There is no relief. The closer she moves into the camera’s view, the clearer it is.
“Look!” Driscoll hollers, throwing his hands up in the air as if to rejoice. “It’s my favorite daughter!”
“It hasn’t been a month,” Janella says flatly, her gaze vacant.
“Agreed,” he mocks her voice, spittle flying from his lips. “Fuck off. You’re not in fucking charge, in case you forgot. I am. And your little payment didn’t go as far as I’d hoped. Cost of living, Nellie, you know how things—”
“You spent it all? Already?” her words sharpen into an accusation.
“Don’t you fucking look at me like that. I need more. Just give it to me.”
Janella’s hands are in quivering fists at her sides. I’ve seen her like this before. I thought she was past it. I’m a fucking idiot.
She says it so softly, I have to read her lips, “I don’t have more.”
“BULLSHIT!” Driscoll screams in her face, his face turning puce. I see red. In that blur, I only hear Janella ushering her customers out. Her employees, too. She steps around him and gets everyone else to safety.
What about her?
“You’re a Yuris whore,” he spits. “You’re fucking swimming in.”
“I gave you everything I had,” she maintains, not backing down. A look at her frame tells me it’s costing her spine everything not to break. “My savings. I gave it all to you.”
Driscoll gestures madly, like he’d like to literally shake sense into her. “Then take it from him!”
If he so much as lays a hand on her…
“I will never give you his money. You don’t get to have anything of his. Not money, and not information about his family. Not a fucking thing.” My rose is all thorns now.
“Don’t be so fucking selfish,” Driscoll wheezes. “You think you can just—”
“I did what you asked.” She lifts her chin, her gaze stony. “I gave you the money to keep you from hurting the people I love. I protected them from you.”
“Protected them?” Driscoll’s face contorts with fury.
“You’re a coward when it comes down to it.
I used to think you’re a monster, but you’re right.
You’re just a desperate man who got my sister shot because I wouldn’t spy for you.
You’re pathetic, and that’s why you do whatever you have to.
And you get fucked up after, so you don’t have to live with any of it.
” Her voice cracks, so beautifully human.
“You never saw me. But I’ve always been paying attention, Dad. ”
Tears begin to stream down her rosy cheeks.
The sight tears me up inside.
What happens next, I don’t expect any more than fucking Driscoll.
Janella reaches into her pocket, and I recognize the stationery. It’s mine—the Yuri vigil monogrammed at the top. The scrawl on it is hers.
“Do you remember how you threw in my face that Iosif bought me?” She nods slowly, gathering her courage.
It’s there for her to gather. It’s always been inside of her.
“He wasn’t the only one there. And my husband…
The killer, as you call him? He’s a jealous man.
A vicious one. He knows his enemies. All Yuris do.
Which means I know many, many secrets now. Secrets you were never careful with.”
She shakes her head at her father, as if he’s disappointed her.
That’s the least of what he’s done.
“Tell me, Dad. What happens in your circle when someone finds out you can’t be trusted?”
How does it feel for her to inspire fear in her father’s eyes?
Regardless, pride for her surges through me in dizzying waves.
“You’re bluffing.”
“Am I?” Her eyes go wide with feigned innocence.
“So, Joseph won’t be pissed you cut a deal with his daughter’s boyfriend to skim money from his operations?
What about Mick? Do you think he’ll turn the other cheek when he finds out you told the Chens where to find him when he ran out of town?
I can only imagine what the Zakharovs would do to erase the shame of being associated with you. ”
He balks at her, like he doesn’t recognize her.
When she leans back against the counter, both elbows propping up on it, I’m reminded of Nadya.
I’m not the only one who’s changed.
“Nellie,” Driscoll wobbles.
“My name is Janella Yuri now,” she cuts clean through him, sharp as any blade I’ve ever wielded. “And here’s how this is going to work, Dad. You’re going to leave Boston tonight. And then neither I—nor my family—is ever going to see you again.”
“Or what?” he demands.
Driscoll doesn’t know when to quit, does he?
“I will have to make some calls I don’t want to make,” she says without missing a beat, as if she expected him to push back.
“I’m not broken. I’m not weak. And I’m not a killer, you’re right, but I’m not the girl you raised either.
That girl wasn’t loved. I am. And I don’t want to see how my love will make you pay for your sins. ”
Driscoll, for an endless beat, stares at her. My heart stops when he lunges for her, scrambling to snatch the paper in her hand.
He’s fucking wasted, at least. Janella sidesteps him swiftly. By the time I’ve blinked, there’s a knife in her hand. She aims it between them.
“Dad.” The pain in her voice shatters me. She digs into her pocket without looking and pulls out an envelope, which she flings his way. It hits Driscoll’s chest with a thwack. “Just take this and go. Just go. Don’t make me do this.”
Driscoll is hypnotized by the cash. He isn’t even listening to her. He doesn’t give a shit about the agony in her voice. He just walks away, leaving her in his wake with all of the wreckage. He never even looks back.
That’s when my wife, my beautiful lioness, collapses against the counter with a relieved sob. She breathes hard, her white-knuckled fists beating against the counter.
I should have known.
I should have fucking known.
My hands shake as I dial her number. My vision is blurred. She doesn’t let it ring for long before her voice sounds from the other side—and through the CCTV audio, echoing.
“I know,” I tell her. “I saw everything.”
“Wh—what?” She tries not to swallow her tongue.
“There’s a camera in the clock,” I confess, and she looks up, looks right into the camera. Her eyes sear me down to the core. “I’ve been watching you since you transferred the money. I thought—I thought you were leaving me.”
My throat is raw.
“Iosif,” she sniffles on the other side.
“But you never were. You never would, would you? You were protecting us. My family.”
I watch her eyes shut, and a fresh round of tears rolls down her cheeks.
“Our family,” she corrects.
“I love you.” How could I have thought these three words would be hard to say? With her, they’re only hard to keep in. Saying them is easier than breathing. “I’m so lost and fucking in love with you, Janella. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
She’s crying hard. Every sob strikes me like a blow.
“All you’ve done is save me, and I’m why Nadya got hurt. I—I couldn’t live with myself if you knew that,” she whimpers.
“There is nothing you could do,” I say, hoarse with endless emotion. “Nothing that could make me not love you. That could make me not fight for you.”
“I love you,” she weeps into her hand. I want to lick every tear away. “I love you so much, I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. I couldn’t—”
She’s shaking all over, clutching at the nearest table for support.
I need her in my arms.
“You won’t. You won’t, ever. Stay right there, okay? I’m coming to you. I’ll be there in—”
I never get to finish the sentence. She never gets to hear it. She drops her phone, stunned by three figures that barrel into the café. Each face is covered by a ski mask. All three tower over her, obstructing my view of her entirely.
“RUN!” I scream, already on my feet, my gun already in my hand.
But it’s no use.
I watch her do her damnedest, punching and kicking and scrambling toward her knife. She’s outnumbered. No matter what, she’s outnumbered.
She is magnificent. She is the love of my fucking life.
And she doesn’t stand a chance.