Forgetting Rafael’s veiled mistrust, his careful question about whether I was okay, the implication that maybe he didn’t trust me the way I’d thought he did. Forgetting Drew’s maddening presence, the way he’d looked at me this morning with something like heartbreak in those steel-gray eyes when I’d told him it meant nothing. Forgetting Vance’s two-week deadline, his threats, the way he’d been squeezing me tighter and tighter until I could barely breathe under the weight of his expectations.
The whiskey helped with all of it.
I lost count somewhere around the eighth or ninth glass. The office had gone dark around me, the sun sinking below the Chicago skyline, and I was sprawled on the floor with my shoes kicked off and my shirt half-unbuttoned when a knocked sounded on the door.
For a second, I thought I’d imagined it. Then it came again—firm and commanding—and I knew exactly who it was.
“Fuck off,” I called out, not bothering to move.
The door opened anyway. Of course it did. Drew had somehow gotten a key, or maybe he’d just kicked it in—I was drunk enough that I wouldn’t put it past him. He filled the smallspace like a storm front, all dark intensity and coiled violence, his eyes cataloging the empty glasses on the floor with the kind of cold precision that made me want to either punch him or kiss him.
Possibly both.
“You’re not driving,” he said, his voice pitched low and calm and carrying that dangerous edge that made my skin prickle with awareness. “Not like this.”
I laughed, and it came out hollow. “I didn’t know you were the sober police now, Kamarov.”
He didn’t respond. Just crossed the room in three strides, pulled me up off the floor with more gentleness than I deserved, and started moving me toward the door.
I went without fighting. Went because resistance seemed like too much effort, and because some part of me—the part that was always calculating, always strategizing—recognized that Drew right now was more dangerous than any enemy I’d ever faced. The kind of dangerous that made you want to surrender completely.
His car smelled like him. Expensive cologne and something sharper underneath—the scent of the forest after rain, or maybe that was just my drunk brain making metaphors out of fragrance. He settled me into the passenger seat, pulled the seatbelt across my body with meticulous care, and didn’t say a word as he pulled into traffic.
The silence stretched between us, heavy and loaded with all the things we weren’t saying. The kiss on the dance floor. The night at his place. The way I’d tried to reduce it all to nothing this morning because acknowledging it meant acknowledging something I wasn’t equipped to handle.
“If you’re doing anything against the Bratva,” Drew said finally, his voice so quiet I almost missed it, “I will be the first one to kill you.”
The words were meant to be a threat. Should have been a threat. Instead, they hit something deep inside me and cracked it open.
I knew what I was doing. Knew it with absolute certainty. I was working with Vance, feeding him intelligence, trying to bring down the organization that had taken everything from me. And Drew—beautiful, intelligent, infuriatingly observant Drew—knew something. Not the full picture, but enough to suspect. Enough to warn me that if I made him choose between me and his family, he wouldn’t hesitate.
I’d known that from the beginning. Had built my entire plan around the assumption that when he found out, he would choose the Bratva without a second thought. Because that’s what loyalty meant in his world. That’s what family demanded.
But hearing it said aloud—hearing him give voice to the execution that was already written somewhere in our shared future—broke something in me that I didn’t know could break.
Tears started streaming down my face, hot and violent and completely uncontrollable. I hated crying. Hated the vulnerability of it, the loss of control, the way it exposed all my carefully constructed armor as nothing but illusion.
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” I said through the sobs that were wracking my entire body. “I’m not. I never wanted—”
His hand came up, thumb brushing away the tears from my cheek, and that gentle touch shattered me more completely than any threat ever could. He pulled me against him awkwardly over the console, one arm wrapping around me like he could shield me from every terrible choice I’d made, every impossible situation I’d created.
“It’s okay,” he said into my hair. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
But it wasn’t okay.Nothingwas okay. I was betraying him and his family, and he was holding me like I was somethingworth saving, and the guilt was suffocating me from the inside out.
I reached for him without thinking, desperation overriding every rational thought. My lips found his, and the kiss was nothing like the others. It wasn’t about passion or possession or proving something. It was desperate and wet and bruised, tasting like whiskey and tears and the flavor of a girl trying to apologize without using words.
His hand slid into my hair, fingers tangling in the strands, and I clawed at his jacket like I could burrow inside it and disappear. Like if I held on tight enough, none of this would be real. None of the lies, the betrayals, the impossible position I’d put us both in.
The kiss tasted like fire. Like goodbye. Like all the things I wanted to say but couldn’t because they would require me to tell him everything, and I wasn’t ready to lose him yet.
His other hand came up, cradling my face, and he kissed me like he was trying to hold me together while I fell apart. And then—slowly, inevitably—the exhaustion and the alcohol and the emotional hemorrhaging caught up with me.
The world tilted. The edges of my vision went soft and dark. And somewhere between one breath and the next, I passed out against his chest.
***
I woke up in Drew’s bed.
