I nodded once. “Fine.”
She smirked. “That kiss didn’t lookfine. It looked like a damn claim-staking, panty-melting, ruin-your-life kind of kiss. You sure you’re not gonna spontaneously combust?”
I shrugged, grabbed a towel, and started wiping down a table.
But my hands were still shaking.
Chapter eighteen
Ididn’t request the car. Could’ve had Rory waiting curbside with the engine idling, but I needed the walk. Needed the cold.
The sky over Manhattan was a sickly pre-dawn gray. This was the start of most people’s day but the end of mine. Slushy snow clung to the sidewalks. The morning was already a gloomy mess, a good match for my goddamn state of mind.
I didn’t have time for this obsession. And it annoyed the hell out of me that this girl got under my skin so badly.
“She called me…mea fucking rapist,” I growled, earning me a nasty look from the woman walking her dog along the curb.
Of all the things I’d been called in my life—hacker, criminal, killer, bratva heir, Pakhan—nothing had ever hit like that word from her mouth. It was as though she’d taken a blade and driven it straight into the last part of me that still held a shred of my soul—a quiet place I’d buried years ago. In that place lived the last flicker of hope I hadn’t managed to kill, the piece of my humanity that still believed I could be touched without beingused, trusted without being betrayed. It was the one fucking scrap of me that wanted someone to look at me with something other than fear, the part I kept alive just enough to believe I wasn’t my father’s son.
Delgado, she’d said, was better than me.
Delgado.
That cartel-funded, girl-selling parasite who would happily watch her suffer for a dollar.
And me?Iwas the monster.
My jaw clenched so hard it popped. I stomped down Sixth Avenue, splattering slush all over my pants. Let people stare—I didn’t care that I looked like a madman in a black wool coat at five in the morning, storming through Manhattan with murder in my eyes.
I’d been born into this shit. I hadn’t chosen it.
Born to Viktor Volkov, a sadist who’d raped and murdered his way through half of the world with a smile on his face and a knife in his hand. My mother wasn’t much better. She loved money more than she’d ever loved her children.
The only thing I’d ever really gotten to choose was to keep my sister out of the underworld. To build her a different kind of life. Maybe I couldn’t claw my way out of this world, but I’d be damned if I dragged Anastasia and her baby down with me.
Which meant the last thing I needed was another woman to protect, to feel anything for.
But fuck—
When she’d looked at me with those stormy blue eyes and said I was no better than Delgado, it had landed harder than any bullet I’d ever taken, because no decent man wanted to be seen like that.
The girl was trouble—a walking complication with a gymnast’s body and a martyr’s heart.
And now she was in deep. Really deep.
Delgado’s man had witnessed the kiss. That message would reach him before the hour was up. And Lyla Oakley—the little Broadway dreamer with scraped knees and sparkly outfits—was officially in the middle of the biggest turf war this city had ever seen.
All because I couldn’t keep my fucking hands off her.
She didn’t know it, but she just became a prize.
Something men like Delgado—and men like me—fought over.
And I’d ignited that war with a kiss.
I could claim it was for her protection, but that would be a lie.
The truth? I’dwantedto claim her.
