Chapter 12
Twelve
Onyx
Kon left a small white pharmacy bag on the bathroom counter three days ago. I haven't opened it. I'm not ready to think about why. But I can’t find it in me to open it and take the pills.
Nor can I deny the man when he comes looking to make love to me.
Love.
I dash the word away. It’s too soon for that word to enter my brain. Not that L word. The other one works though. I am very much in lust with Kon.
Fourteen days. Has it really only been two weeks since a Bratva enforcer bought me at auction?
Fourteen days since I walked into a converted foundry expecting a cage and found a man who cooks breakfast at four-thirty in the morning and grows roses on his roof because they remind him of his grandmother.
Old habits die hard. That's what I tell myself as I open my laptop in the gray light of early morning, the screen casting a blue glow across the sheets still warm from Kon's body.
He left for the training room twenty minutes ago.
The muffled fall of his bare feet on the carpet carried through the quiet, followed by the careful click of the door, closed gently so it wouldn't wake me.
It woke me. Everything about that man wakes me now, his presence and his absence equally impossible to ignore.
I pull up the Syndicate files. The folder I created on my first real day at The Foundry, the insurance policy I told myself I needed. My fingers hover over the keyboard, the cursor blinking against the white screen, patient and accusing.
I start typing.
Rafael Milano: controls banking, judges, politicians. Launders money through legitimate institutions. Corrupt to the core.
I add everything I noted about Persia, about Katriana and Ilona. Then I add the limited amount of data I have on Massimo and Luca.
My fingers stop. The cursor blinks. And all I can see is a man in a tailored suit making airplane noises while his daughter smears pureed carrots across his jaw, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, gray temples catching the kitchen light.
The most powerful man in Chicago's underworld, undone by a toddler's giggle.
I delete everything and try again.
Drake Moses: controls unions, docks, infrastructure. Known for brutal enforcement of territorial boundaries.
But the words blur and I'm back in Rafael's penthouse watching Drake cross a room in three strides to cup his wife's face in both hands and kiss her with an unhurried tenderness that made the air leave my lungs.
Katriana's crooked glasses. Charlotte's tiny fist wrapped around his finger.
The way he carried his daughter out the door with the careful reverence of a man holding the only thing in the world that matters.
Fuck. Delete.
Luca Valentina: intelligence operative. Manipulative. Uses information as a weapon.
But Luca is the man who hovered near Ilona for an entire afternoon, gravitating back to her side every time he drifted, pressing his lips to the blue tips of her hair while their daughter slept against his chest. His gold-flecked eyes, sharp enough to cut, going soft as butter when Lucia grabbed a fistful of his long dark hair and yanked.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
I stare at the empty screen. My throat tightens. My fingers tremble over the keys. What the hell is wrong with me? This is my job.
One more. I have to try one more.
Konstantin Vetrov: Bratva enforcer. The most dangerous of the six. Handles "problem resolution." Body count unknown but presumed significant.
But my fingers won't type the next damning line because all I can think about is his hands in my hair last night, calloused palms cradling my skull with a gentleness that contradicted every scar on his knuckles.
The way he whispered огонёк against my temple while I drifted off, the Russian syllables warm and rough and reverent.
The garden he tends on the rooftop at dawn, coaxing roses to bloom in a Chicago climate that should kill them, because he refuses to accept that beautiful things can't survive harsh conditions.
I force myself to type in everything I deleted on the men, but I leave off anything about their wives. My stomach churns as I read through the material, but I leave it on the page. I have to. This is who I am as much as who they are, damn it.
I close the laptop. Press my palms against the warm surface and exhale through my nose.
The lie is getting harder to swallow. Every day, the distance between what I'm writing and what I'm living grows wider, and I'm standing in the gap with one foot on each side, the split threatening to tear me apart.
I grab my phone from the nightstand. Not the burner. My actual phone, the one Kon gave me last week with a number only he and his brothers have. I pull up a new message and type before I can talk myself out of it.
Can we meet? Just us. I need to talk.
I send it to Persia.
The reply comes in under a minute. Absolutely. There's a café on Halsted I love. 11am? I'll send the address.
Getting out of The Foundry requires negotiation. Kon emerges from the training room with damp hair and a black t-shirt clinging to the sweat still cooling on his skin, and his expression shifts the moment I tell him where I'm going.
He notices I don't ask and I particularly love how his dark brows draw together, the scar bisecting his left eyebrow pulling tight, and his jaw sets in that particular way that means he's calculating threat levels behind those black eyes.
"I'll drive you."
"I can take a cab."
"I'll drive you." He says it the same way, same tone, same volume, but the finality underneath turns the repetition into a wall I can't climb over.
"Kon, it's coffee with Persia. In a public café. In broad daylight."
"And I'll be parked outside. You can take all the time you need." He crosses his arms, the muscles in his forearms flexing beneath the barbed wire ink, and looks at me with the patient immovability of a man with a stubborn streak wider than mine.
"Non-negotiable, Onyx."
The frustration flares hot behind my ribs.
I want to argue and remind him that I survived twenty-five years without a six-foot-four Russian shadow and I can handle a damn coffee date.
But the stubborn set of his mouth and the genuine concern darkening his eyes take the fight out of me before it fully forms.
"Fine." I grab my jacket and shove my arms through the sleeves. "But you're staying in the car."
"Da."
"I mean it, Kon. No lurking. No watching through the window. No scaring the baristas."
The corner of his mouth twitches. Almost a smile, gone before it fully commits. "I don't lurk."
"You absolutely lurk. I can’t shower without you passing in front of the bathroom door five times."
“That’s because I am convincing myself not to stalk inside that shower and fuck you senseless. Passing helps.”
Oh.
He leaves it at that and ten minutes later we are in the car heading toward Persia. He showered in record time and smells fuckable, I mean deliciously tempting.
I force myself to focus. The café is a narrow brick-front shop on Halsted with mismatched furniture and the warm, yeasty smell of fresh pastries layered over dark-roast coffee.
Persia is already seated at a corner table when I walk in, Sofia balanced on one knee, a half-eaten scone on a plate beside a latte topped with foam art.
She's wearing a flowing lavender dress that somehow makes her violet hair look lovely, and the smile she gives me when I approach is warm enough to heat the entire room.
"You came." She stands and pulls me into another one of those hugs I'm slowly learning to accept, Sofia squished between us, the toddler's chubby hand grabbing a fistful of my hair.
"Sit. I ordered you a cortado because you seem like a cortado person.
If I'm wrong, I won't be offended. I'll just silently judge. "
I smile. “Noted.”
Sofia stares at me with those dark, assessing eyes she inherited from Rafael and shoves a piece of scone in my direction with a fat fist.
"She's sharing." Persia's aqua eyes sparkle with amusement. "That means she likes you. She bit Luca last week so I would take the mushed scones if I were you."
"Smart kid."
"The smartest." Persia settles Sofia on her lap and turns those perceptive eyes on me, the sparkle fading into a quieter attention, a stillness that reminds me she didn't survive an abusive arranged marriage by being oblivious. "So. You said you needed to talk."
I wrap my hands around the cortado, letting the ceramic warm my palms, and stare at the foam dissolving into dark liquid. The café buzzes around us, the hiss of the espresso machine, the low murmur of conversation, the scrape of a chair against tile. Normal sounds. Safe sounds.
"I need to ask you about Rafael." I lift my gaze to hers. "The real version. Not the sanitized one. I need to understand how you ended up where you are and whether..." I trail off. Swallow. "Whether it's real."
Persia doesn't flinch. Doesn't bristle or deflect or offer the polished version I expected. She takes a sip of her coffee, wipes a smear of foam from Sofia's cheek with her thumb, and meets my eyes with the steady gaze of a woman who has long since made peace with her own story.
"Believe it or not, I’ve had this same conversation with Katriana.” She pauses and takes a sip of her latte. “Let me start at the beginning, okay?”
I nod.
“I was engaged to a man my father chose for me.
" Her voice is calm, measured, pitched beneath the café noise so only I can hear.
"The engagement was a business arrangement.
My feelings weren't part of the equation.
And when I tried to express them, he made sure I understood how little they mattered. "
“I know the feeling.”
“So Kon has expressed.”
“Has he told you everything?”
Her fingers tighten around her mug, just slightly, the knuckles going pale beneath the freckled skin. She notices me noticing and loosens her grip deliberately.