Anya Chapter
The laptop screen glows cobalt in the darkness, and the man hunched over it isn’t a guard or Vadim.
I freeze in the doorway with my hand still on the brass handle and my heart trying to crack through my ribs because Dmitri Volkov is copying files to a USB drive in the office where I was supposed to be alone.
Roman’s diversion bought me five minutes. Luka secured the corridor. Everything went exactly according to plan except for the part where Roman’s cousin got here first.
My Louboutins are hooked over my fingers because heels announce your presence. The marble is cold under my bare feet, and the midnight silk of my dress whispers against my thighs as I consider backing away slowly before he notices me.
Too late.
His head snaps up, and those whiskey eyes find mine in the shadows. Vadim’s eyes but emptier. They widen for half a second before something ugly slides across his face, something that tells me he’s been waiting for exactly this opportunity.
“Little cousin-bride. Playing spy in your pretty dress while Roman plays hero upstairs?”
He steps toward me, and suddenly the office feels smaller than it did three seconds ago.
“What are you doing with my formula?” My voice comes out steadier than my heartbeat, which is hammering so loud I’m surprised he can’t hear it.
“Your formula.” He laughs, short and sharp. “The weapon. The one you built. The one you’re trying to hide.”
“I knew exactly what it was.” I don’t back away. “That’s why I’m here. To destroy it.”
“Destroy it.” Another step forward, and now I can smell his cologne over something metallic. Gun oil. “While Roman’s busy creating chaos on the casino floor so his obedient little wife can play saboteur?”
“Put the USB down. Walk away. Pretend this never happened, and I won’t tell him.”
“You’ll tell him nothing.”
I’ve seen this look on Roman. But on Roman, it promises safety. On Dmitri, it promises a grave.
“Vadim wants to sell MX-42.” He’s close enough now that I can see the pulse beating in his throat. Roman wants to burn it. I want to use it properly. On people who deserve to choke on their own blood.”
“By stealing from both your uncle and cousin?”
“By taking what was always supposed to be mine.” His gaze drops to the sapphires at my throat, then lower to where silk meets skin. “Including you. Eventually. Once Roman’s guilt eats him alive and you need a man who isn’t afraid of what he wants.”
“I chose Roman.” The words come out fiercer than I intended, and my fingers tighten on the hairpin I slipped from my hair when I saw the wrong shadow at that desk. Galina’s hairpin. Platinum tipped with what she called insurance. “I’ll choose him every fucking time.”
His expression shifts from calculating to hungry in a way that makes my stomach turn.
“You chose survival.” He moves faster than I expected, crossing the distance between us in two strides, and suddenly his hand is closing around my wrist. “Survival changes. Husbands die. Widows need… management.”
He yanks me forward, and I crash into his chest, bare feet sliding on marble, and the world tilts because this isn’t Roman’s arms where roughness means safety. This is a man who looks at me the same way he looked at that USB drive.
Asset. Leverage. Something to be acquired.
“Get your fucking hands off me—”
His palm cracks across my face, snaps my head sideways, and fills my mouth with copper.
The second blow comes before I can recover, knuckles this time, catching my cheekbone with a sound that echoes off the marble walls.
Stars explode across my vision, and my knees buckle, but his grip on my wrist keeps me upright, a puppet on a string.
“Roman’s wife should know how to take a hit.” His voice is conversational, almost bored. “He’ll give you worse once he realizes I had what was his. You think any man wants a wife who—”
I drive Galina’s hairpin into his eye.
The platinum tip sinks in. Pop.. Wet. Then the scream is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
His grip on my wrist disappears as both hands fly to his face, blood and vitreous humor streaming between his fingers, and I stagger backward until my spine hits the wall.
Mishka’s face flashes behind my eyes.
I can’t die here. I won’t fucking die here.
“You fucking cunt—” Dmitri lurches toward me with one ruined eye socket streaming crimson and the other burning with something worse than rage.
His hands find my throat before I can run, and suddenly I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything except claw at his wrists while the world narrows to a pinpoint of light and my lungs scream for air.
“I was going to make it good for you.” His thumbs press harder into my windpipe, and the edges of my vision go grey. “Now I’m going to make it hurt.”
The door explodes inward.
Roman crosses the distance in three strides, and his fist connects with Dmitri’s temple.
I hear the crack of bone against bone. Dmitri’s grip goes slack, and I slide down the wall, gasping, choking, dragging air into lungs that burn with every breath while Roman slams his cousin’s skull into the marble floor once, twice, until Dmitri stops thrashing and goes limp.
But Roman doesn’t let him stay down.
He drags the half-conscious body away from me by the collar, flips Dmitri onto his back, and drops his full weight across the man’s hips to pin him flat.
“You touched her face.”
He takes Dmitri’s right hand in both of his.
“This hand.” Roman examines it with detached curiosity while Dmitri groans and tries to focus his remaining eye. “This hand hit my wife.”
Three fingers break at once with a sound that makes my stomach lurch. Dmitri’s scream tears through the office, raw and animal, and his legs kick uselessly against the marble, but Roman’s weight keeps him pinned.
Roman rotates the wrist joint past its natural limit until something inside it pops wetly.
“Roman—” My voice comes out shredded, barely a whisper. “Roman, the USB—”
“I know.” He doesn’t look at me. His entire focus is on the man bleeding beneath him. “I also know my cousin was planning to fuck my wife after he choked the fight out of her. Weren’t you, Dmitri?”
Another finger breaks. The screaming gets louder.
“Weren’t you?”
“Yes—” Dmitri’s voice is a wet gurgle through blood and tears. “Yes, fuck, please—”
“Na huy.” Roman draws his Makarov from his shoulder holster with the smooth motion of a man who’s done this a thousand times. “This is for hitting her.”
The first shot takes Dmitri’s left kneecap.
“This is for threatening her.”
The second shot takes the right.
“And this—” Roman presses the barrel against the ruined socket where Galina’s hairpin did its work, and his voice finally cracks, finally shows something underneath the ice. “This is for thinking you could ever take what’s mine.”
The third shot paints the marble red.
Silence crashes through the office like a wave.
Roman stays kneeling over the body for three heartbeats, four, five. Then he rises in a single fluid motion, holsters his weapon, and turns to face me.
I’m still pressed against the wall with my bare feet tucked under the ruins of my dress and my throat on fire and blood drying on my cheekbone from where Dmitri’s knuckles split the skin.
My hands won’t stop shaking. My vision keeps blurring at the edges.
I drove a platinum hairpin into a man’s eye socket, and I don’t recognize the woman who did that.
Roman crosses the room and drops to his knees in front of me.
“Solnyshko.” His hands frame my face so gently that it makes my eyes burn. “Look at me.”
I do.
There’s blood spray across his white shirt, and he’s looking at me like I’m something precious. Something worth destroying men for.
“You’re safe.” His thumbs trace carefully below the bruises already forming on my throat. “He can’t hurt you. No one can hurt you.”
“The formula.” My voice is a rasp, barely human. “The USB. I need to—”
“After.” His forehead drops against mine, and a tremor runs through his hands, the barely leashed fury still coiled in his shoulders. “Let me look at you first. Let me see what he did.”
His fingers trace the split on my cheekbone, the swelling already puffing my eye half-shut, the finger-shaped bruises on my wrist where Dmitri grabbed me. Each touch is featherlight. Each touch makes me want to cry.
“I should have killed him more slowly.” Roman’s voice cracks on the last word. “I should have taken hours. Days. I should have made him beg—”
“You came.” I press my palm flat against his chest, where his heart is pounding rabbit-fast under blood-spattered cotton.
“I will always come.” His arms close around me carefully, so carefully, like I’m made of something that might shatter. “Anyone who touches you dies. That’s the only rule that matters anymore.”
I bury my face against his throat and let myself shake apart in his arms because I just killed a man. I drove a platinum into his brain. I listened to him scream. And God help me, I liked the sound.
I would do it again.
I would do worse.
Roman helps me to my feet, his arm solid around my waist, and I lean into him because my legs aren’t ready to hold me yet.
“The dress.” I look down at the midnight silk, at the straps torn during the struggle when Dmitri was describing what he planned to do once I stopped fighting. “I can’t go back to the casino like this.”
“You’re not going back to the casino.” Roman crosses to Dmitri’s body and retrieves the USB from where it fell during the fight. He presses it into my palm. “This belongs to you.” Then he puts two bullets into the laptop tower. Sparks fly. The screen dies.
“It’s done,” he says.
The drive is warm from Dmitri’s pocket. Small enough to disappear. I reach under my dress and slide it into the lace garter holster strapped high on my thigh, the one Galina insisted I wear tonight because a Bratva wife should always have somewhere to hide her secrets.
The USB settles against my skin, secure and damning.
Roman watches me with something raw in his eyes. Pride and hunger and a possessiveness so absolute it should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
“Ready?” His hand finds the small of my back.
“Ready.”
We step over Dmitri’s body without looking down.