“I know.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I can feel her gaze on the side of my face even though I can’t bring myself to look at her. Then she reaches for my hand, her fingers closing around my wrist and turning my hand over palm-up, examining the split knuckles in the dim light filtering through the tinted windows.
She reaches into the glove box and pulls out the first aid kit we keep there, and she tears open an antiseptic pad with steady hands.
“Did he suffer?” she asks, pressing the pad to my knuckles. The sting makes me hiss through my teeth.
“Yes.”
She looks up at me with those mercury eyes that miss nothing, and she holds my gaze while she cleans the wounds I earned beating a man’s face into pulp.
“Good.”
The word hangs between us in the blood-scented air, and she doesn’t show any sign of the horror I expected to see.
“It was Vadim,” I say, watching her wrap gauze around my knuckles with careful movements. “The hit. Cyprus shell company, but the signature matches his operations.”
Her fingers are still on the gauze. “He tried to kill you.”
“He tried to kill both of us.” I take her chin with my bandaged hand and force her to look at me. “And if he’d succeeded, you know what happens—Bratva law.”
Understanding dawns in her eyes, cold and terrible. “Yuri.”
“If I die, you belong to him.”
The words land between us, and they hit.
“Then don’t die,” she says.
“I’m not just going to not die.” I shift closer to her on the leather seat, close enough that I can smell her perfume underneath all the blood, and my hand slides up her arm until my fingers wrap around the back of her neck. “I’m going to make you untouchable.”
“How?”
“You finish the antidotes—the real ones.” My grip tightens on her neck. “Vadim poisons this city. Contaminated product in every district. Thousands of addicts are dependent on the supply he controls. So when I burn his network, they die in withdrawal—unless someone holds the cure.”
“You want me to—”
“I’m not just burning his empire, Anya. I’m replacing his poison with your medicine.” I pull her closer until our foreheads are almost touching, until I can feel her breath on my lips. “I’m going to make you the most valuable thing in this city—not just to me, to everyone. I’m going to make you a queen so that even if I die, they won’t dare touch you because you’re the only thing keeping their streets from burning.”
Her breath catches, and her eyes go wide. “You’re weaponizing me.”
“I’m making you untouchable.” I cup her jaw with my bandaged hand, the gauze rough against her soft skin. “Every addict you save owes you their life. Every clinic becomes your territory. Every captain in this city will know that hurting you means watching their people die in the streets. That’s not just power, solnyshko—that’s immortality.”
“And what does that make you?”
“The man who put you there.” I hold her gaze and don’t look away. “The man who’s going to use everything you are to burn my uncle’s empire. And I’m not sorry.”
She stays exactly where she is, pressed against me in the back of this blood-scented car, and her eyes don’t leave mine.
“I’m already complicit,” she says quietly, and her voice is steady in a way that makes my chest hurt. “I made the weapons. I stayed after the warehouse. I let you make me come while assassins aimed. Whatever innocence I had left, I burned it myself.”
“You could still walk away.”
“Could I?”
The question hangs between us, and I know what she’s really asking.
“No.” The truth scrapes out of me, raw and ugly and true. “If you tried to leave, I’d find you. Drag you back. Keep you whether you wanted it or not.”
