Chapter 38
CHAPTER 38
ARTEM
"W hy didn't you leave?"
Those were the first words I managed since waking up in the lake house. He words scraped against my throat like sandpaper.
I had drifted in and out of consciousness for days.
Mikhail had patched me up with brutal efficiency, and since then, reality had been a series of fragmented moments.
The only constant was my girl.
Every time I clawed my way back to consciousness, she was by my side, her fingers twisted with mine, silent tears tracking down her face as she slept with her head resting on my uninjured shoulder. Her presence was more than comfort—she was my tether to this world.
Now, I was healing, and she was still here.
I wanted to trust it—I wanted to trust her—but I wasn't sure I would survive the next time she ran from me.
So I needed to know why she stayed.
My voice wasn't as strong as it should have been, but it cut through the stillness of the room like a blade.
I was lying on the comfortable leather sofa, just close enough to the wood-burning fireplace to feel its heat against my skin. The scent of pine and smoke hung in the air, reminding me that I was still alive.
Viktoria was sitting on the floor beside me, her slender fingers still tangled with mine. The firelight caught in her hair, turning the dark strands into molten copper. Even exhausted and worried, she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
"You were shot. Twice. Do you remember what happened?" she asked, as she held a glass of water to my lips. I didn't like feeling helpless, but there was something unexpectedly intimate about having her care for me this way.
I drank deeply, wishing it were something harder to numb the relentless throbbing pain, or at least bring it down to something more manageable. Her fingertips brushed against my jaw, and the contact sent a jolt through me that had nothing to do with pain.
"Some," I answered, the memories fragmented but slowly returning.
"Let me tell you what I saw." Her eyes met mine, and I saw something there I hadn't noticed before—a hardness that hadn't existed before all this.
"You shouldn't have seen anything. You were protected in the panic room." Something twisted painfully in my chest at the thought of her witnessing the violence.
"The panic room had a monitor hooked up to the security system." Her fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around mine.
"What happened?" I asked, hating that she saw any of it, but needing to fill in the gaps in my memory.
She shifted closer, her knee brushing against my arm. "From what I could see, and what I've pieced together listening to Pavel and Kostya when they thought I was sleeping, Solovyov hired a local gang as a distraction. He sent about thirty men in total through those tunnels."
"I fought thirty men?" That didn't seem right, even for me.
"No," she said, a ghost of a smile playing at the corners of her lips. "You killed over a dozen, but the men split up. That's why it took the others so long to reach you."
I nodded, but the room began to spin, forcing me to lay my head back down. I took long, slow breaths through my nose, waiting for the fresh stab of pain to subside.
Viktoria's hand moved to my forehead, brushing back my hair in a gesture so tender it almost hurt more than my wounds.
"At first, I didn't understand," she continued barely above a whisper. "Why wouldn't you just stay in the panic room with me? But then I watched you hunt them down, taking them out with single shots. Quick, merciful deaths." She paused, her gaze drifting to the fire. "I understood then. You're not the kind of man who puts his safety in the hands of others."
Her eyes returned to mine, dark and knowing. "Then there was the man who threatened to do terrible things to me."
"You heard that?" The memory crashed back into me—the rage, the cold precision with which I'd slowed down that particular death.
She nodded, her beautiful hair falling forward to curtain her face. I fought the urge to brush it away, to feel the silk of it between my fingers. "His death was personal to you. You made him suffer. Why was that one different?"
"Because he wasn't there just to do a job," I said, my voice hardening despite the pain. "He wanted to take pleasure in your pain. I couldn't let that happen."
"You take pleasure in my pain." Just from the way she said it, my chest ached more than it already did. It made sense that was what she thought.
She didn't see the man who saved her from a drunken frat boy. She saw the man who spanked her with a belt, leaving red stripes across her ass, and then made her ride his thigh until she came apart beneath his hands.
She didn't see the man who moved her out of the dorm when her dead father’s actions were catching up with her. She saw the man who put her in a fancy apartment without explanation, a pet in a gilded cage.
When she ran, she must have seen a monster who took her and punished her with his cock, not a man who was terrified he'd almost lost her when she ventured into enemy territory.
I didn't know what I would do if I couldn't be certain she was safe. But instead of telling her, instead of showing her and explaining it to her like the brilliant woman I knew she was, I'd acted like a monster.
My need for control expected her blind obedience.
I had become the very thing she feared.
Which begged the question: why was she still here?
"I—" I took a deep breath, expanding my lungs; the resulting agonizing pain from my screaming ribs was welcome. I used it to clear the haze from my mind and focus. There was too much riding on this conversation for me to fuck it up. "I take pleasure in punishing you, but I would never hurt you, not the way those men would have."
One of her perfectly shaped eyebrows rose in a judgmental arch. Despite everything, heat rose over my skin at that loaded look.
"I might inflict pain to prove a point," I continued, "but I always temper it with pleasure."
She considered that for a moment, her teeth catching her bottom lip in a way that made me want to replace them with my own. Finally, she nodded reluctantly. "You do."
"And you like it," I added, trying to give her a cocky smile that probably came out as more of a grimace when another wave of pain rocked through me.
A noncommittal noise came from the back of her throat, but her cheeks flushed pink. Yeah, she liked it. The knowledge sent a surge of possessive satisfaction through me that had nothing to do with my injuries.
"If you don't like it, why did you stay?" Asking again was probably pushing my luck. A wiser man would have just been grateful she was here. I, however, needed to know.
Her eyes met mine, unblinking and intense. "Because I have questions, and you're the only one who can answer them."
"What questions?" I asked, fighting to keep my eyes open. Her voice was musical, and I was afraid that if I let myself sleep, I'd never hear it again.
"Why did that man threatening me make his death personal?"
I reached out, ignoring the pain that shot through my shoulder, and traced my thumb along her jawline.
Her skin was impossibly soft beneath my calloused hand. "Because you're personal. Everything with Solovyov is business. The way he's coming after my family feels personal but it's not, it’s business. It's not driven by our personal vendettas, no matter how much we hate each other. It's driven by the need for power and influence. Business."
She stared at me, waiting for me to finish, then lifted the glass to my lips again for another drink. Her fingertips lingered on my bottom lip for a fraction of a second too long to be accidental.
I reached out and gently brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear.
She pressed her cheek into my palm, and a strange calm settled over me.
I was alive, and she was here with me.
For now, that was enough.
"Them coming after me, trying to take my life, was about business," I continued, my thumb absently stroking the soft skin behind her ear. "You are not business. The way I feel about you is personal. That man hurting you wasn't business."
The part I didn't say out loud was that they were still operating within the rules by targeting her.
She did not bear my last name.
Until she did, she wasn't untouchable.
Her eyelids fluttered at my touch, and she leaned imperceptibly closer. "How do you feel about me?" she asked. My blood ran hot at the sly smile playing on her lips.
"I feel like I want to know why you didn't leave." I held her gaze, unwilling to let her distract me from the question that had been burning inside me since I woke up.
Viktoria cast her eyes to the floor as a pink flush colored her cheeks, spreading down her throat to disappear beneath her shirt.
I found myself wondering how far down that blush went.
"I'm here because you killed for me," she said finally. "You flipped the dining room table and took cover to keep those men away from me. You stupidly tried to sacrifice yourself to keep me safe."
Her eyes snapped up to mine, suddenly fierce. "Never do that again."
She stopped, her eyes flashing over to the fire as her teeth sank into her bottom lip.
God, I wanted to taste those lips, to soothe the sting with my tongue, but I held back.
There was more she wanted to say.
All I had to do was give her the time and space to say it.
"I could've run," she continued, her voice stronger now. "I could have left a dozen times. Hell, I probably could've convinced your brother to give me a lift to the nearest train station."
She shifted, rising from the floor to perch on the edge of the sofa beside me, her thigh pressing against mine. The heat of her burned through the thin fabric of my sweatpants. "I stayed because I wanted to. We fight because you don't give me choices. Have you ever considered that if you had told me what was happening, if you had brought me into the thought process and given me a choice, I would have chosen you?"
"If either of my brothers tried to take you to the train station, I would have gutted them." The words came automatically, but her statement was still sinking in.
Did she say she would have chosen me?
Or had Mikhail given me too large a dose of pain medication?
Slowly, I started testing my range of motion. The stitches in my arm and side burned.
Viktoria helped me sit up and lean back against the sofa. She tried to pull away, but I caught her wrist, holding her close.
“I asked you a question. Why did you stay?” I asked, my thumb tracing circles on her inner wrist.
"Because I wanted to." Her pulse jumped beneath my touch.
"You wanted to?" I repeated, still not quite believing what I was hearing.
She pulled away from me again and wrapped her arms around her body. She was still close, but not close enough to touch or pull to me.
I immediately felt the loss of her warmth.
"I saw everything," she said, "and I saw the way you looked at me when you opened the door to the panic room. When you collapsed, my heart stopped, and I realized I could run. I considered it." Her eyes met mine, dark and serious. "But then I saw you lying on the floor bleeding out, and I realized I didn’t want to live in a world where I don't have you looking out for me and protecting me."
"You stayed. You chose to stay," I said again, the words still not quite making sense.
I had been horrible to her.
Every opportunity she had given me to be better, I had failed miserably.
The one time I thought maybe we were making progress, hours later I shoved her into a panic room without saying a damn thing to her.
"Artem." She said my name like a prayer. "I want to be here. I just..."
She moved closer, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from her body, smell the sweet jasmine scent of her shampoo. "I need you to listen to me. It can't be just you demanding things, barking orders and expecting me to blindly follow. I know you will never tell me everything, but I need to have choices. I need agency and control in my life. If you just lock me in a house, I will go crazy, and I swear to God I will take you with me."
I suppressed the laugh that bubbled in my gut. It would have hurt too much, and in that moment, I needed every ounce of strength I had.
Carefully, deliberately, I got to my feet and stood in front of Viktoria.
Her eyes widened in alarm, but I ignored the pain shooting through my body as I cupped her face in my hands, brushing away tears she had never let me see before.
"I'm so sorry for everything I've done," I said, low and rough. "I can't promise to be perfect, but I will be better."
She nudged me back a step and stood from the sofa, her body now flush against mine as she carefully laid her head on my chest. Even through the pain, I was acutely aware of every point where our bodies connected—her soft curves against my harder planes, her breath warming my skin through the thin T-shirt.
"That's all I can ask," she murmured, her hands coming to rest lightly on my hips.
The tension between us hung heavy in the air, unspoken but palpable.
There was so much more for us to figure out, but for the first time, I believed we might have a chance. I needed her with me more than I needed my next breath.
I tilted her chin up, forcing her to meet my eyes. "You're stronger than you think," I said, my thumb tracing the outline of her bottom lip. Her breath hitched. "But you'll never have to be strong alone again."
Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, inadvertently grazing my thumb.
The small contact sent a voltage shock racing through my veins.
She must have felt it too—her fingers tightened on my hips, and her body swayed infinitesimally closer.
We stood there, suspended in that moment, neither of us willing to be the first to cross the final line.
So close to admitting what we both knew but weren't ready to say aloud.
The confession hovered between us, unspoken but undeniable.
For now, this was enough—this fragile understanding, this tentative peace.
The rest would come in time.