He says it like it’s nothing.
To him, maybe it is. Maybe most things are. Hurting people, spilling blood, pushing a part of his body with another human being in a moment of profound connection. Maybe he’s a hedonist without a soul.
Nausea barrels through me. My head shakes. “I don’t understand you.”
That’s a real understatement.
“Why is that?” Iosif asks with narrowed eyes.
Determined not to be the one who flees, as if I can set some sort of example here, I take a seat in the chair beside his.
I pause. Then answer, “I don’t understand how you can hurt people like it’s nothing. I don’t understand how you can sleep with someone and not talk to them for two weeks after that, like it’s nothing. Sometimes, I start to believe I’m seeing you—really, truly seeing you. And then you turn it into nothing more than an illusion.”
“You see more of me than I ever planned for you to,” Iosif admits, sounding none too happy about it.Tough shit.
“I thought you didn’t make plans.”
“Sometimes,” he says wryly, “you have to. Tonight was one of those nights. If I told you what the people I killed tonightwere up to, I don’t think you’d make a different choice in my position.” He slouches back in his seat, the muscles in his hard, ridged abdomen rippling with the movement.
I force my eyes to his face. “You never give me a choice,” I remind him. “And I take it. Because what other options are there? I go back to my dad and get prostituted. Or I stay here and feel cheap in a different way. Either way, I’m lonely.”
My eyes drop to my lap.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t say anything at all. Or I get another semi-patronizing speech about how the world isn’t black and white.
“There’s a mindblowing market for European girls between twelve and sixteen years old,” is what comes out of his mouth. I choke on air. It doesn’t deter Iosif at all. “If you want to debate selective morality until we’re blue in the face, Darya’s probably your best bet. But I don’t have complicated feelings about wiping evil off the earth. None of my brothers do, either. And I’m not sorry about not wanting to expose you to it. Any of it. That darkness takes up most of my life.”
I have to swallow the lump in my throat to get words out. “Then why did you pull me into it? Why won’t you let me go?”
I can’t look at him. I can tell he isn’t looking at me—not even when his hand, frigid from the icepack I hear him set aside, covers mine.
“I don’t make plans,” he repeats my words back to me. “You’re right about that. I didn’t plan this with you. But you are still the brightest thing that’s ever walked into my life. I’m selfish and arrogant and a hundred other monstrous things. And I will not let you go.”
It should disturb me, I think. The quiet ferocity of those words, and their innate possessiveness. But they cocoon me. They are a balm to a wound that has been stinging, screaming about the salt of his vanishing act.
“You have to let me in then. If you don’t sleep with the same woman twice, fine—don’t. We don’t have to do that. But stopavoidingme, Iosif. It’s fucking insulting.”
Now,I can tell, can feel my skin buzzing beneath his attention;he is looking at me.
“I miss you when I’m not around,” he confesses, so softly I’m almost sure I imagined it after all. “You’re an addictive pain in the ass.”
With the same sedate, inevitable way tectonic plates beneath the earth do, I can feel something between us begin to shift. To what, I’m unsure.
But I can meet his eye—and Iosif, mine—when I quip, “You say the sweetest things to me, Iosif Yuri.”
The words elicit another laugh from him. Discounting the subsequent grimace that crumples his face, it is a win. I reach for the discarded icepack. “Hold still,” I instruct.
Iosif rolls his eyes. He doesn’t argue, though. He relents, letting his head loll back, and his eyes fall shut. I’m under no illusion he’s close to sleep. I can almost hear his mind whirring.
“Does it hurt?”
“Ask me a better question.”
I wrack my head, inspired to rise to his challenges, maddening as they are. “Did you save someone else tonight?”
His brows knit together above eyes that don’t open.
Eventually, he nods.
