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 intohis 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.
ROMAN — Yacht Nerissa, Service Corridor, 23:57
The Petrov brothers fill the service corridor with two hundred kilos of Spetsnaz-trained muscle, and the emergency lights strobing red turn their matching buzz cuts into something bloody.
Nikolai and Pavel. Vadim bought their loyalty when their father died owing the brotherhood six million rubles, and they’ve been paying off that debt with broken bones and shallow graves ever since. Their Glocks center on my chest for half a second before drifting to the woman pressed against my back.
My hand finds Anya’s waist through the midnight silk of her dress, and I pull her behind me. Her wrist brushes my hip, and she’s shaking.
The split on her cheekbone makes my vision red. The bruises on her throat make me want to burn the world.
“Going somewhere, boss?” Nikolai’s voice is too cheerful, the sound of a man who genuinely enjoys hurting people. “Midnight auction is about to start. Vadim wants the whole class present.”
“Vadim can wait.” My voice scrapes low against the rage sitting in my throat.
