"Take whatever time you need."
"And you won't... pressure me?"
"No."
I believed him. Against all logic, against all experience, I believed him.
"Okay," I said. "I'll think about it."
I turned and walked back toward my room, feeling his eyes on me the whole way. At the doorway, I stopped.
"Rodion?"
"Yes?"
I looked back at him, silhouetted against the window, beautiful and dangerous and utterly unlike anyone I'd ever known.
"Thank you. For saving my life."
Something flickered in his expression. "You don't have to thank me for that."
"I know. But I wanted to."
I went back to my room and closed the door behind me. I didn't sleep—my mind was too full, my body too wired with adrenaline and something else I refused to name. But I lay in the darkness and thought about his offer, his promise, his eyes.
I was going to say yes. I knew it with a certainty that terrified me.
Not because I had no other choice—though that was true. Not because it was the smart play—though it probably was.
But because some part of me, some reckless, broken part that had survived my father's house and twelve years of running and the loneliness of a life built on lies, wanted to see what would happen if I stopped running.
If I let someone in.
Even someone like him.
Especially someone like him.
Chapter 9 - Rodion
I didn't sleep.
I stood at the window until the sky began to lighten, watching the city shift from darkness to gray dawn, thinking about the woman in my guest room and the mess I'd made of everything.
Keira O'Shea. The name still felt wrong in my mind, ill-fitted to the woman I'd come to know. She was Dr. Walsh to me—composed, professional, the only person who'd ever looked at me and seen something worth examining. Now she was a target, a pawn in a game she'd spent her whole life trying to escape, and I'd dragged her right back into it.
No. That wasn't fair. Cormac had dragged her back. The Petrovics had dragged her back. I was just the man who'd happened to be in the room when it all fell apart.
The man who'd proposed marriage like it was a reasonable solution.
I poured myself another vodka and drank it without tasting it. In a few hours, I'd need to make calls. Explain to my brothers what had happened. Convince them that marrying the daughter of the man Demyan had killed was somehow a good idea.
That conversation was going to be interesting.
My phone buzzed at 6 AM. Yegor, reporting in. The bodies at her office had been handled—moved, cleaned, disappeared. The official story would be a gas leak, an evacuation, a building closed for repairs. No witnesses. No questions. The NYPD officers on our payroll had already filed the appropriate paperwork.
"What about the receptionist?" I asked.
"She left before it happened. Didn't see anything."
