Chapter 21 #2
I see it all, the fear and the disgust and the knowing that she’s sitting next to a man who just ripped out someone’s fingernail and enjoyed it.
Shame floods through my chest so fast I can barely breathe because I’m bringing the slaughterhouse into her space, sitting beside my wife reeking of another man’s suffering while rain drips from my hair onto the seats.
“Is he dead?” she asks quietly.
“No. Cooperating. Intel on Vadim’s network. Poland by Friday.”
“You pulled out his fingernail. I had to come.”
“I know.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I can feel her gaze on the side of my face even though I can’t bring myself to look at her.
Then she reaches for my hand, her fingers closing around my wrist and turning my hand over palm-up, examining the split knuckles in the dim light filtering through the tinted windows.
She reaches into the glove box and pulls out the first aid kit we keep there, and she tears open an antiseptic pad with steady hands.
“Did he suffer?” she asks, pressing the pad to my knuckles. The sting makes me hiss through my teeth.
“Yes.”
She looks up at me with those mercury eyes that miss nothing, and she holds my gaze while she cleans the wounds I earned beating a man’s face into pulp.
“Good.”
The word hangs between us in the blood-scented air, and she doesn’t show any sign of the horror I expected to see.
“It was Vadim,” I say, watching her wrap gauze around my knuckles with careful movements. “The hit. Cyprus shell company, but the signature matches his operations.”
Her fingers are still on the gauze. “He tried to kill you.”
“He tried to kill both of us.” I take her chin with my bandaged hand and force her to look at me. “And if he’d succeeded, you know what happens—Bratva law.”
Understanding dawns in her eyes, cold and terrible. “Yuri.”
“If I die, you belong to him.”
The words land between us, and they hit.
“Then don’t die,” she says.
“I’m not just going to not die.” I shift closer to her on the leather seat, close enough that I can smell her perfume underneath all the blood, and my hand slides up her arm until my fingers wrap around the back of her neck. “I’m going to make you untouchable.”
“How?”
“You finish the antidotes—the real ones.” My grip tightens on her neck. “Vadim poisons this city. Contaminated product in every district. Thousands of addicts are dependent on the supply he controls. So when I burn his network, they die in withdrawal—unless someone holds the cure.”
“You want me to—”
“I’m not just burning his empire, Anya. I’m replacing his poison with your medicine.
” I pull her closer until our foreheads are almost touching, until I can feel her breath on my lips.
“I’m going to make you the most valuable thing in this city—not just to me, to everyone.
I’m going to make you a queen so that even if I die, they won’t dare touch you because you’re the only thing keeping their streets from burning. ”
Her breath catches, and her eyes go wide. “You’re weaponizing me.”
“I’m making you untouchable.” I cup her jaw with my bandaged hand, the gauze rough against her soft skin.
“Every addict you save owes you their life. Every clinic becomes your territory. Every captain in this city will know that hurting you means watching their people die in the streets. That’s not just power, solnyshko—that’s immortality. ”
“And what does that make you?”
“The man who put you there.” I hold her gaze and don’t look away. “The man who’s going to use everything you are to burn my uncle’s empire. And I’m not sorry.”
She stays exactly where she is, pressed against me in the back of this blood-scented car, and her eyes don’t leave mine.
“I’m already complicit,” she says quietly, and her voice is steady in a way that makes my chest hurt. “I made the weapons. I stayed after the warehouse. I let you make me come while assassins aimed. Whatever innocence I had left, I burned it myself.”
“You could still walk away.”
“Could I?”
The question hangs between us, and I know what she’s really asking.
“No.” The truth scrapes out of me, raw and ugly and true. “If you tried to leave, I’d find you. Drag you back. Keep you whether you wanted it or not.”
“I know.” Her hand comes up to cover mine, where it rests against her jaw, and she turns her head and presses her lips to my palm, to the bandage wrapped around my knuckles, to the blood I can still smell on my skin. “That’s why I’m not running.”
“Because you can’t?”
“Because I don’t want to.” She looks up at me, and her eyes are steady, certain, terrifying in their clarity. “I’m choosing this. Choosing you. All of it.”
I kiss her hard and desperately with my bloody hands tangling in her wet hair. She tastes like rain and fear, and when we break apart, our foreheads are pressed together, and we’re both breathing hard.
“We take the Pakhan seat,” she says against my mouth. “Or we die trying.”
“No middle ground.”
“No middle ground.”
The car pulls through gates—safe house, industrial district, somewhere Vadim can’t reach tonight—and I help her out into the rain with my hand on the small of her back as we walk toward the door.
Inside the safe house is cold and smells like dust and disuse, but the locks are solid, and the windows are reinforced, and right now that’s all that matters.
I close the door behind us and turn the deadbolt, and the metallic click echoes in the empty hallway.
I check the windows one by one, all six of them, making sure every latch is secure, and then I check them again because I can’t stop seeing Yuri’s hands on her skin and I need to do something, anything, to feel like I’m keeping her safe.
“Roman.”
I turn, and she’s standing in the doorway of the bedroom, still in that blood-spattered emerald dress with her hair plastered to her face and her makeup smeared from rain and tears. She looks exhausted and terrified and beautiful.
“Come here,” she says.
I go to her because I can’t not go to her. After all, she’s the only thing that makes sense anymore.
She pulls me down onto the bed and wraps herself around me, and I hold her so tight my arms ache with it. She falls asleep first with her head on my chest and her breath warm against my throat.
I don’t sleep at all.
I just lie there in the dark listening to her breathe, counting every heartbeat like a prayer, planning exactly how I’m going to make my uncle pay for every second of fear she felt tonight.