My first kiss flashes unbidden into my head, dragged up from the place I’d buried it years ago. I was fifteen, awkward and hopeful and foolish enough to believe that attention meant interest. It happened behind the school gym, quick and clumsy and all teeth. He’d tasted like a cheap energy drink and cheaper cigarettes.
I remember thinking I should be disgusted, but I was too taken up in the fact that someone wanted to kiss me.
By the end of the day everyone knew it had been a dare. A joke at my expense.
He never looked at me again without an arrogant smirk and a snort of laughter.
That kiss hadn’t warmed me. It had hollowed me out.
This…this isn’t comparable at all. Gennady Petrov isn’t a boy from school. He’s a man who ordered my brother’s death without raising his voice. A man whose world is built on violence and consequence. A man I barely know.
And yet it all feels like some strange kind of normal.
The car stops while I’m lost in my own thoughts. The weight of his jacket is still around my shoulders. It smells faintly of him, something dark and clean and unmistakably male, and I don’t know why it brings me so much comfort.
He doesn’t touch me again.
That almost makes it worse.
It wasn’t a dare this time. It was a regret.
Inside the house, everything is quiet. All soft lighting and wide corridors and a sense of order so complete it makes me feel like the floor is about to fall away from beneath me. This is his world. It fits him.
He leads me to a bedroom, efficient and composed, like nothing unusual happened in the back of the car at all.
"It’s still early," he says, stopping at the door. His voice is calm again, unreadable. "Make yourself at home."
Home.
I flinch. Is this my home now? Or is this just a place for me to find my feet before I can make it on my own?
"Okay," I manage, shrugging out of his jacket and handing it back to him. He watches my every move, his eyes raking over me in a way that would ordinarily make me want to cover up. Butnot here, with his hungry gaze taking in every part of me like I’m the answer to a question he had never considered before now.
I find that I don’t want to hide myself from him. The nightgown isn’t transparent, exactly. The gathers see to that, all those tiny pleats catching and diffusing what little light there is. But it's thin. Thin enough that I'm painfully aware there's almost nothing between my skin and Gennady’s gaze. There’s almost nothing between us at all.
He takes the jacket from my fingers and nods once, already stepping back without even a lingering glance.
The door closes softly behind him.
I stand there for a moment, alone in the quiet. The bed looks impossibly inviting. I crawl into it, not entirely registering the way it smells like him, and let exhaustion crash over me now that I’m no longer running on adrenaline.
As I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, my fingers brush my mouth again.
I don’t know what that kiss meant. I don’t know if it meant anything at all. But I know this much, nothing in my life has ever made me feel like that before. And the thought of Gennady Petrov being the one to do it terrifies me far more than the fact that I followed him here ever did.
Gennady
I don’t sleep but I never do on nights like this.
I sit in my office with the lights low and a single glass of vodka in my hand, the bottle open on the desk where it always goes. This is my ritual. After every kill, I check in with myself. I make sure there’s nothing loose inside me that might fester later.
The burn hits my throat, sharp and clean. It doesn’t soften anything. It never does.
Sergei deserved to die.
That certainty sits solid in my chest, unmoving. He hurt Mila. He crossed a line that doesn’t bend, doesn’t forgive, doesn’t negotiate. I didn’t hesitate, and I don’t regret it. Family means protection, not entitlement, and men who confuse the two infect everything they touch. If I’d let him live, I’d be telling the world that my very blood is negotiable.
It isn’t.
