“I know.” Her hand comes up to cover mine, where it rests against her jaw, and she turns her head and presses her lips to my palm, to the bandage wrapped around my knuckles, to the blood I can still smell on my skin. “That’s why I’m not running.”
“Because you can’t?”
“Because I don’t want to.” She looks up at me, and her eyes are steady, certain, terrifying in their clarity. “I’m choosing this. Choosing you. All of it.”
I kiss her hard and desperately with my bloody hands tangling in her wet hair. She tastes like rain and fear, and when we break apart, our foreheads are pressed together, and we’re both breathing hard.
“We take the Pakhan seat,” she says against my mouth. “Or we die trying.”
“No middle ground.”
“No middle ground.”
The car pulls through gates—safe house, industrial district, somewhere Vadim can’t reach tonight—and I help her out into the rain with my hand on the small of her back as we walk toward the door. Inside the safe house is cold and smells like dust and disuse, but the locks are solid, and the windows are reinforced, and right now that’s all that matters.
I close the door behind us and turn the deadbolt, and the metallic click echoes in the empty hallway. I check the windows one by one, all six of them, making sure every latch is secure, and then I check them again because I can’t stop seeing Yuri’s hands on her skin and I need to do something, anything, to feel like I’m keeping her safe.
“Roman.”
I turn, and she’s standing in the doorway of the bedroom, still in that blood-spattered emerald dress with her hair plastered to her face and her makeup smeared from rain and tears. She looks exhausted and terrified and beautiful.
“Come here,” she says.
I go to her because I can’t not go to her. After all, she’s the only thing that makes sense anymore.
She pulls me down onto the bed and wraps herself around me, and I hold her so tight my arms ache with it. She falls asleepfirst with her head on my chest and her breath warm against my throat.
I don’t sleep at all.
I just lie there in the dark listening to her breathe, counting every heartbeat like a prayer, planning exactly how I’m going to make my uncle pay for every second of fear she felt tonight.
ANYA — Safe House, Rublyovskoye, 02:34
The shower runs scalding, and I scrub until my skin is raw, but I can still smell him—along with winter air and the metallic trace of adrenaline that feels like safety now.
My hands won’t stop shaking, no matter how hard I press them against the heated marble, and I keep replaying the moment the violin exploded, the moment I thought he was dead, the moment my last coherent thought washarderwhile a sniper lined up a headshot on the man I’m supposed to hate.
I came while someone was trying to kill him.
Fuck. What the actual fuck is wrong with me?
Through the bathroom door, I hear his voice—low Russian, the tone he uses when he’s moving pieces across a board only he can see.
“Naydi podryadchika. Ne ubivay.” Find them all. Don’t kill them.
A pause, then: “Vyvedi lyudey iz kvartala. Segodnya noch’yu.” Pull our people out. Tonight.
The call ends, and I stand there with water beating down on my shoulders, and the sick truth is that I feel safer now than I did ten minutes ago. Roman making a move means I can breathe for another night, and I don’t know when I started finding comfort in violence, but here we are.
I shut off the water and wrap myself in a towel, and open the door before I can talk myself out of it.
He’s sitting on the bed cleaning his gun.
The Makarov gleams under lamplight, and his hands move slowly, and I hate how my body reacts—heat pooling low in my belly, my nipples tightening against the rough terry cloth, my thighs pressing together.
He’s stripped down to his trousers with his chest bare, all that scarred skin on display, and I want to trace every mark with my tongue and ask him who hurt him and then hurt them worse.
His head tilts when I enter, those grey eyes finding me wrapped in nothing but a towel with my hair still dripping, and hunger flickers behind the ice in a way that makes my stomach clench.
