The thought lands ugly and true. She’s clean where I’m bruised. She moves toward softness, and I keep carving corners out of everything that looks like that. The idea that someone would choose to stay—really stay—here, in my life, in my mess… it should make me proud. Instead, it pins me with a kind of terror I can’t name.
We pile into the SUV. Leather creaks, doors slam. Boris takes the wheel and pulls us smoothly into traffic. The Strip blurs past; tourists stumbling, a bride in heels too high, guys in cheap suits waving down cabs. All noise, all distraction. Underneath, the city hums with something sharper. Timofey thinks he’s already won. I can feel it in the air, the way every move feels like it’s being watched.
No one speaks for a minute. Just the engine’s growl and the muffled echo of music through the glass.
Lev finally breaks it. “Holiday tomorrow.” He stretches out in the seat like he owns it. “City shuts down offices, even the bank. Means Mary gets the morning off. You know what that means?”
I don’t answer.
Boris grins into the rearview, teeth flashing. “Means breakfast. Real breakfast. Not takeout shit. She said she’s making it herself.” He looks almost boyish about it, which makes me want to snarl.
“Can’t remember the last time someone cooked for us,” Lev adds, smirking. “Feels…family, doesn’t it?”
Family.The word sits wrong in my gut. Heavy. Dangerous.
And then the other thing—what I’m actually afraid of—slides up like bile.
If she belongs here, she’s visible.
If she’s visible, she’s a target.
If she’s a target, she dies, or she lives with scars I won’t be able to fix.
My mother—how she used to hide the bruises with scarves and laughter—flickers through my skull. I never wanted anyone else to learn that language of survival.
I swallow it down. Say it out loud instead of letting it rot inside. “She doesn’t belong in this world.”
Lev turns, eyes suddenly serious, the joke gone from his face. He’s a fool half the time, but not about this.
“No. That’s exactly whywekeep her close, boss. If she’s in our world, we make it our problem. We don’t let the city chew her up.”
Dima watches me, quiet, then nods once. “She’s not as weak as you think.”
The words are simple. They land like a hand on my shoulder.
Dima doesn’t do pretty talk. He boxes. He irons men flat. The way he says it—steady, like checking a rifle—tells me he’s seen it up close. Seen her hands steady on a gun, seen her take orders without blinking. More than that: seen her stand when other people would fold.
There’s something else in the way he says it, too. A tone I’ve only ever heard when he talks about the one he lost. Quiet protection folded into the sentence, the way a man talks about a sister gone and the things he’d give the world to keep from happening to someone else. He’s not just observing. He’s invested. That should scare me more than it does. Instead, it does one thing: it makes whatever this is between us harder to call by the names I know—control, fear, ownership.
My jaw ticks. I don’t like that he’s right. I don’t like that Dima, of all people, looks at her and sees leverage and worth and then, in the same breath, a thing to guard.
Outside, The Strip slides by in streaks. My reflection blurs across the glass—hard, unreadable. They’re not wrong. That’s the part that gets me.
Friday is coming. One more training, one more day to sharpen her up, to keep her alive. Our real aim is ugly and simple: don’t let Timofey get what he’s grabbing for. Stop his mouth from running the Bratva into the ground. Fucking take him down before he burns the whole thing. That’s the task laid in front of us—practical, violent, inevitable.
After that… Who the fuck knows.
26
Mary
Punch his face. Punch his smug, gorgeous, green-eyed, I‘m-too-dangerous-for-domestics face.
“Faster,” Dima rumbles, holding the pads higher.
I plant my feet, pivot, throw another jab-cross like he drilled me. My knuckles sting through the wraps, sweat dripping into my eyes, and still it isn’t enough. Nothing is enough. Not when my chest is still raw from Monday night. Not when every time I blink, I see him walking away while I stood there crying like a pathetic idiot.
“Again,” Dima orders.
