“Choose, Alina,” Dominik says. He doesn’t dress it up. He doesn’t offer me a long, meaningful speech, just the choice. “If you go with him, I’ll give you a head start from Gavriil. Or, you stay with me, we leave town, and your brother fends for himself.”
Archer makes a raw noise in the back of his throat. “What kind of choice is that?”
“I’m letting her decide where she’s willing to stand if men are pointing guns at us,” Dominik says.
I feel like my lungs can’t hold any of the air I’m trying to breathe.
The decision he’s placed in front of me will decide not only the trajectory of my life but also his and Archer’s. He’s handing over all the cards to me, allowing me to play the next move. And I can barely even think straight.
For the first time in my life, I’m not just surviving someone else’s mess, I’m choosing whose blood might spill because of me.
Archer takes two quick steps, and the chain jerks his wrists and the sound is ugly. “Alina. You’re my only family. We run and we disappear, and we make new names like we used to make stories for the landlord. Remember? I would buy us bus tickets, and we would sit at the back and pretend we were on a flight to Paris. We can do it again.”
The memories hit with the strange gentleness of a bruise you thought had healed: the blue vinyl seat sticky under my thighs, how safe I felt with the lie because it was ours to share. It’s so achingly easy to want that simplicity again, even if it was mostly sad and awful.
“I was sixteen,” I say. “We were children then. This isn’t another landlord. This is a man who started out calling me a hostage for your mistake, then stood in front of bullets to protect me and bled out on my hands.”
“Because he wanted to,” Archer snaps. “Because he’s a fucking drama king who gets off on it. He doesn’t love you, Alina.He’s just convinced you that you need him to protect you, but you don’t.”
Every muscle in Dominik’s jaw goes still. He doesn’t speak. That somehow makes it worse.
“You don’t get to talk about love as if you know anything about it,” I tell Archer, and my eyes burn so sharply I have to blink or I won’t be able to see at all.
“The hell I don’t,” he huffs. “I’m the one who held your hair when you threw up that winter we got sick on dollar-store ramen. I’m the one who stole the old lady’s change jar and paid rent when you were sure we’d have to sleep in the laundromat. I’m the one who came to your school play and clapped like you were famous even though you had two lines.Thatis love.”
“That was survival,” I say. “Which is a kind of love. But it also feels like a bad habit. You don’t get to use love like a chain and drag me along behind you while you keep making monumental mistakes that affect me too.”
“You think he won’t do that to you?” Archer jerks his chin toward Dominik without looking at him. “You think he didn’t chain you to him the second he took you? You think this isn’t just a prettier leash?”
I want to say yes, but the truth is slippery. And when I reach for it, what I get instead is the image of Dominik standing up to his brother and when his breath was hot on my neck when he said, “Mine,” like it was both a request and a promise.
Dominik steps sideways, and I feel heat lick across my skin where he passes. He stops within Archer’s line of sight, close enough that the chain could catch on his thigh if Archer flailed. “Archer wasn’t lying about one thing,” he says. “The Bratva will not allow him to have a life. If you go with him, he lives a while longer until they send someone to find him. If you stay with me, he likely won’t live that long. We don’t get to make the truth less ugly by lying about it to ourselves.”
“Why are you doing this?” Archer demands. “Why give her a say? You could kill me and be done, but you don’t want her to hate you. You want her to hate herself instead, and that’s fucking cruel.”
Dominik looks at me again. His stormy eyes are tired, and not just from lack of sleep. “I’m giving her a choice because she hasn’t been given a say since you left her with your mess. She deserves to make her own choices, not have us make them for her.”
The sentence opens a door in my chest I didn’t know I’d been standing outside of, one that’s cold and beautiful and terrible. I steady a hand against the wall when they tilt.
There’s still a third option, one Dominik would never suggest or consider. But I can’t stop thinking about it like it could be the only way to keep Archer alive for more than a handful of days.
“I won’t make this easy for you,” Archer says fiercely. “You choose him, and that’s it. You don’t get to call me next week and say you changed your mind. He’ll lock you in a room and pretend that he’s a good man by saying it’s for your own protection. And if he fails to do that one thing for you, you’ll end up locked in a worse place with Gavriil.”
“Stop,” I say, holding up my palm to try and make him quit talking before he talks me out of doing what I know I have to do.
“You think a man like him knows how to love anything but control? Do you really think he could protect you fromGavriil?”
“Stop!” It comes out like a command this time, and he actually obeys. The surprise of that takes a second to settle.
For a minute, nobody in the room breathes.
“I need to know the truth,” I say finally, needing to confirm what I’ve already figured out. My voice is thin, but it’s not trembling. “Dominik, if I pick Archer will you really let us go?”
“I’ll give you a head start,” he says. No hesitation. No softened words. “I won’t let my brother start the huntimmediately. I’ll take you to the car myself, I’ll put money in your pocket, and I’ll make some calls that buy you silence for two days, maybe three. That’s all I can offer.”
That all adds up to him betraying Gavriil, an insult that wouldn’t go unpunished.
“And if I choose you?” The question is barely a sound.
