I lean in closer, my voice barely above a whisper. “Then what do you know?”
He swallows, chest rising too fast, but his lips stay locked.
My hand fists in the front of his shirt for half a heartbeat before I slide up and clamp it around his throat, my fingers digging into the sweaty skin under his jaw as I haul him upward in one brutal, unbroken motion that sends the chair scraping and shrieking across the concrete behind him, his feet kicking once before I slam him back against the wall so hard the sound cracks through the room like a gunshot.
His head snaps against the concrete with a dull, sickening thud, his breath leaving him in a strangled gasp that melts into a panicked wheeze as my grip tightens, my forearm trembling from the strain in my injured shoulder but my anger so sharp and clean it drowns out every thread of pain.
“You don’t touch her,” I say, my voice low and even, the kind of tone that makes men remember commandments. “You don’tbreathe in her direction. You don’t say her fucking name. Not ever.”
The words spill out slow, not rushed, not raised, each one pressed into the air like a weight meant to suffocate him, and his eyes go wide with the raw, involuntary panic of someone who realizes too late that bravado won’t save him here.
His chest heaves under my hand, the tendons in his neck straining as he tries to drag in air that I’m not letting him have, sweat already breaking along his hairline, rolling down into the ugly bruise forming on his temple from the impact.
I straighten slowly, jaw tight, breathing harder than before. I step back, flexing my injured shoulder once, ignoring the sharp flare of pain that radiates across my chest. I want to hit him again. I want to break him open until everything he knows spills out onto the floor.
It’s only when something shifts at the very edge of my vision—the faintest slice of light cutting across the floor in a place it shouldn’t—that I realize the door is open, cracked just enough that the cold air from the hallway leaks in, and when I turn my head, slow and instinctive, already knowing I’m not going to like what I see, she’s there.
Kira stands in the doorway, her hand curled so tightly around the frame that her knuckles have gone white, her body pulled back as if she’s caught between stepping in and running away, her mouth slightly parted like the breath she was taking just never made it all the way into her lungs.
Her eyes move over everything in the room—the blood on my knuckles smearing down to my wrist, the splatter on the floor from where I slammed the bastard’s head into the wall, the man slumped and shaking in the chair with the side of his face already swelling, and then finally me, standing over him with my hand still half-curled like I’m ready to hit him again, my chest heaving, my pulse climbing, my body angled in a way that makes it very clear what I was about to do.
“Kira,” I say, my voice low, rough, more human than I want it to be.
Her eyes flick up to mine, and the shock there slices deeper than anything else in this room, because she’s not looking at me like I’m a monster, and she’s not looking at me like I’m going to hurt her—she’s looking at me like she’s seeing the part of me I work the hardest to lock away, the part drenched in violence and instinct and a kind of coldness she wasn’t supposed to witness.
She takes a small, involuntary step back, barely a shift of her heel, but enough that the air between us changes, the distance widening in a way I feel straight through my ribs, and she grips the doorframe a little harder, her fingertips pressing into the wood like she needs something solid to hold on to before the rest of this breaks her open.
And the worst part is that I can’t even blame her, because if I walked into this room and saw myself like this—blood-stained, furious, shaking with the urge to end the man in front of me—I wouldn’t stay either.
Kira
I don’t know how long I stand there in the doorway, frozen, my fingers locked so tightly around the frame that the wood digs into my skin, because the moment stretches and twists in on itself the longer I stare at the scene in front of me. I had almost forgotten this side existed, almost convinced myself that the man who fell asleep on my chest last night was the only version of him left.
There is blood on the floor, smeared in a streak beneath the chair where the man is slumped, and there is blood on Artyom’s knuckles—dark and drying and cracked at the edges—and his shoulders are squared, his jaw locked, his gaze sharp and cold as he stands over the man, and for the first time I understand what this world demands of him, what it shaped him into long before I ever walked into it.
He turns toward me slowly, his eyes landing on mine with a heaviness that makes my breath stutter, because there’s no apology there and no anger either—only something raw and exposed, like he wishes I didn’t have to see him like this but refuses to pretend it isn’t who he is.
“Kira,” he says, my name almost soft, and it makes everything inside me twist because the softness doesn’t match the blood on his hands or the man bruised and shaking behind him, andI don’t know how to hold both versions of him at once without breaking something inside myself.
I take half a step back, barely anything, just a reflex more than a choice, my body reacting before my mind does, and the second I do, his expression changes, just the slightest tightening around his mouth, a flicker of something, and that hurts more than any of this, the way he looks at me like he’s bracing for me to run.
“Kira—” he starts again.
But before he can say anything else, before I can even decide what I’m feeling—fear or shock or the awful, confusing ache of knowing he did this because of me—another hand appears at the edge of the doorway, steady and warm, pulling me slightly to the side.
“Come on,” Mikhail murmurs quietly, his voice low enough that it barely breaks the tension in the room. “Not for you to see.”
I want to argue, want to say I don’t need to be protected, but the words don’t come because I can’t drag my eyes off Artyom, can’t ignore the way his shoulders lower just slightly when he realizes I’m leaving, like he’s relieved and disappointed at the same time.
Mikhail steps between us, and nods toward the hallway with that quiet, serious look he only uses when things are worse than he wants to say out loud.
“Let’s go,” he says again, softer.
I let him guide me out, my feet moving on autopilot as the cool air of the hallway hits my face like a slap, my pulse still thudding unevenly, my breath too shallow, my mind spinning with the impossible contradiction of what I just saw—Artyom brutal and cold and merciless, and Artyom warm and trembling in my arms a few hours ago, and I don’t know which version is real or if both are or if I’m supposed to choose between them.
Everything inside me is collapsing, not because I’m afraid of Artyom, but because I saw how far he will go, how easily he can fall into that cold place, how quickly mercy disappears when I’m involved, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to pull away from that kind of devotion or fall straight into it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
