Chapter 12
VIKTOR
We drive back home in silence for the first half of the trip. The weight of what just happened lingers in the air. Lydia's usually vibrant eyes are clouded with a mix of confusion and something I can't quite place. Maybe acceptance? I don't know. But I know I need to make this right for her.
“Do you have a doctor you could see?” she asks, her voice breaking the heavy silence.
“I don’t need a doctor.”
She reaches for my right hand and lays it gently in her lap. It’s bloodied and bruised from delivering a beating that had to happen. She doesn’t flinch or pull away, and that steadiness in her touch unexpectedly grounds me.
Today, Lydia watched me beat a man before I sliced his throat right in front of her. It was brutal. It was vicious.
It was necessary.
I saw the shock in her eyes, but she didn’t look away. Why isn’t she more disturbed? Why isn’t she running from me?
I glance at her, blowing out a breath. “Alright, then. I’ll clean you up myself. Tell me you have a first aid kit.”
“Yeah, baby,” I respond, the term slipping out naturally.
She shivers and moves a little closer to me, that small gesture sending a wave of warmth through my chest. Solidarity I didn’t expect and never hoped for.
“What happens now?” she asks, turning to me, uncertainty evident in her eyes.
“I will take you home. We get cleaned up, we get some dinner, and we go to sleep.” I shrug, trying to sound nonchalant.
“And tomorrow, we plan our wedding.” I let go of her hand and scrub it across my brow, feeling the adrenaline still pumping through my veins.
“After a night like this, I need to let it bleed off.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, her voice soft but probing.
My eyes are focused on the road. “When I fight, when I let that part of me take over, it’s not easy to just turn it off.
It’s like… it’s like an engine that’s been running at full throttle and suddenly slams to a stop.
The energy, the power—it doesn’t just disappear. It has to wear off, or it consumes me.”
She swallows hard, trying to grasp the weight of my words. Her acceptance of this part of me brings a strange sense of relief.
“Makes sense. So what do you need to do?” she asks, her voice steady.
“I need to come down slowly. We need to come down slowly. That means I don’t want to talk much or do anything outside of routine. It’s how I cope, how I keep it all from spilling over.”
“You need aftercare?” she says, a hint of teasing in her voice, trying to lighten the mood.
I growl softly. “How the fuck do you know what aftercare is?”
“Okay, alright, don’t change the subject,” she says, sobering quickly.
Her understanding sends a chill through me, but she continues. “Okay, Viktor. I get it. After something intense, I need to go for a walk or something. Though, I mean, to be clear, I've never done anything like that.”
I nod, a glimmer of something—gratitude, maybe—warming me before I turn away, feeling the tension in my shoulders slowly easing.
“I’m honestly… well, I’ve never done what you did, but I’ve had intense moments of…” She looks away and doesn’t give me details, but I know exactly what she’s talking about. I know she’s been arrested, and her time in boarding school was more like a reform camp than school because of her vices.
“What do you find helps?” I ask her.
She sighs. “A hot shower. Sometimes a drink, but that's my least favorite way of handling it. Weed.” She looks out the window, pausing. “Sex. You?”
My vision momentarily clouds, but I shrug it off. Sex.
Fucking sex.
Her openness surprises me, but it’s exactly what I need. I grip the steering wheel tighter, knowing that tonight, we'll both find our ways to cope—to come down slowly and face whatever comes next together.
“Some of that, or sometimes I lift. Sometimes, I just need to sleep for hours and hours.” I don't tell her that sex isn’t part of my toolbox.
It's been at least five years. Yeah, some people would call it a dry spell for guys like me. But sex with anybody else would be like licking pavement to try to satisfy my appetite. Never.
“I want to tell you that I'm sorry you saw that,” I begin. “But I don't want to lie to you, Lydia.”
She nods and swallows. “Do you think he was lying, though?”
“I do not. I wouldn’t have killed him otherwise.”
“Oh,” she says in a little voice. “Right.”
I have the sudden desire to break something.
If she's even entertaining the slightest notion that Yudin was even the least bit redeemable…
Fuck.
When I get my hands on him… I don't think she'll be able to look at me that time.
By the time we get back to my house, it's late. She's tired and I am too, but I'm fucking starving.
“I don't think we've eaten anything since breakfast, and I'm famished. You?”
She nods. “I could literally tear the legs off one of your tables and eat it with a little ketchup right now. Maybe even without the ketchup.”
I smile. It feels good to smile. It feels good to become human again.
“You like pizza?” I just told her I'm not gonna lie to her.
Is this a lie? I'm trying to be polite and not freak her the fuck out.
Because I happen to know for a fact that pizza is one of her favorite foods in the entire world.
Especially New York style, with all the meat.
It's almost unfair how much I know about her and how easily I will be able to use that to my advantage.
I look over at her. Her hair is disheveled, her face streaked with tears, dirt, and blood. She needs cleaning up as badly as I do.
“How the fuck did you get blood on yourself?”
“You did a lot of… splattering?”
I grunt under my breath but don’t reply.
“Alright, so we're gonna order food, and then you're gonna get your ass in the shower.”
She gives me a sidelong look. “Are you going to personally wash me, sir?”
Shit. What happened back there?
“Maybe I'm an old-fashioned man. Maybe I don't think I should touch you until we're married.” I pull up in front of my house and park the car. “Don't touch your door.”
I think I've earned at least this one little crumb.
I wonder if she'll push me. I watch as she sits with her hands in her lap. When I get around to her door, she reaches for the handle. I stand on the other side of it. Our gazes lock, but she doesn't open the door. She seems torn, unsure of what to do next.
Good. I want her to at least keep guessing about contradicting me.
I open the door and reach for her hand. In this short time, it's already become my thing.
I like the feel of her hand in mine. She doesn't trust easily, but it's the slightest gesture and gives me no small measure of comfort.
For this one brief moment in time, when her hand is connected to mine, her fingers entwined, she's not going to get away from me. And no one's going to take her away.
It's quiet here, set apart from everyone else. My little sanctuary in the city. From my front door, I can see the bright lights of Manhattan in the distance.
My family owns this area of New York known as The Cove. Businesses pay us to keep them safe, and we employ over two-thirds of the residents. It's a power move that has served us well.
I wonder what it's like being back in New York for her.
Her family home is thirty minutes from here, but she didn't spend her childhood there.
I open the door and touch the app on my phone.
“New York style pizza,” I tell her. “I like it with a lot of meat. Sausage, bacon, pepperoni. Red sauce, none of that white sauce bullshit. You order anything you want.”
I'm not just trying to appease her this time. The truth is, I've been eating it this way since the first time I saw her.
I place it in the cart and hand her my phone.
It's dark when we enter the foyer. I don't bother to flick on overhead lighting. I know from my distance surveillance that this house has been undisturbed, just how I like it. I had a cleanup crew sent to where she set fire, but luckily the damage was contained and you’d never know what happened.
“I don't need anything else. That looks fine,” she says quietly. She doesn’t want to admit it’s her favorite.
“They're kinda known for their handmade ice cream. It might help… the bleed off.”
She fucking adores ice cream more than any chocolate or baked goods or anything like that. She gives me a sidelong look. “You want to fatten me up?”
No, baby. You're fucking perfect. You don't need to change a fucking thing.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Fine, I want ice cream; I’m getting it.” I take the phone and add two hot fudge sundaes to the cart, an extra large order of french fries, and a salad, just to appease her conscience. I know what she likes. I tap the button and order it.
“It'll be here in thirty minutes. Let’s go shower.”
She heads to the shower, but her shoulders slump. I wonder if her bravado has failed her. Before she gets to the bathroom, she turns and sits on the bed and buries her face in her hands. Her shoulders shake, and I can't tell if she's crying.
I stare and look at her, unsure of what to do. Adrenaline still surges through me. I haven’t crashed yet.
“Are you all right?”
I don't know what to think of this. I don't know how to help her. I reach tentatively to rest my hand on her shoulder.
This time, she doesn't flinch or turn away, but she also doesn’t answer my question.
“You go first,” she says shakily. “Go shower and I’ll go after you.”
Is she playing me? Is she trying to get out of this room so she can attempt to escape again? I doubt it, but I’m not taking risks either.
I shake my head. “No. You either come with me, or you go alone.”
Her shoulders sag. I want to make it better. I hate that she's distraught, and I know that I had something to do with this.
“You’ll feel a lot better after a shower and some food.”
Finally, with a deep sigh, she gets to her feet. “I guess that’s sensible. I don't know how I feel about you showering in the same room with me. I know we’re going to get married, but I don't trust you. We hardly know each other.”