He flips his knife. Slides it back into his boot.
“I’m guessing he has,” he says, voice back to that casual cruelty. “and yet he’s kept you. We can keep dancing. Or we can sit down and you can tell me what your plan is.”
I don’t lower my knife.
The room feels smaller now. The air thicker.
“My plan?”
He nods, taking his seat again. “Your plan now that you belong to the Pakhan.”
***
Vaska’s question follows me back here like a shadow.
Your plan now that you belong to the Pakhan?
I don’t have a plan. I have instincts.
Stay. Survive. Don’t give him a reason to let go.
Gabriel is breathing down my neck, and if Maksim is done with me, I need to know before I’m the one standing outside.
The townhouse is too quiet. Not peaceful quiet.
The kind that feels like he’s somewhere in it, breathing, and still choosing distance like it’s discipline.
He’s been doing it for days. He sleeps beside me every night like I’m something he has to guard—arm heavy across my waist, a hand at the back of my neck when he thinks I’ll drift off without him.
Possessive touches. Small ones. Enough to remind me that I’m his. But he won’ttouchme.
Not like that.
Not since the couch. No kiss. No hands under my clothes.
No heat. Just control.
I find the garage by sound. Metal on metal. A soft clink. The slow scrape of a tool.
The low rumble of a man busy enough to pretend he isn’t avoiding me.
The air changes the second I step inside—oil and rubber and cold concrete. Familiar in a way I don’t like admitting.
He’s in front of me, back turned, shirtless, leaning over a motorcycle balanced on its stand. My breath catches anyway. It’s not the body. It’s the work.
Maksim in meetings is a tyrant with a bored stare—reckless, dangerous, like he might start a war just to feel something.
He sprawls in his chair like a king who doesn’t need to prove he’s king.
Here, he’s the opposite. Focused. Quiet. Almost… careful. His shoulders flex as he tightens something near the chain, grease streaked across his hands and forearms.
And on his back—black ink and shadows—there it is. The skull. It stretches across him like a warning. Like a promise. Like the only softness in this man is the fact that he turned his pain into art and wore it like armor.
I stand there long enough that I should’ve been noticed.
He doesn’t turn. Of course he knows I’m here.
I clear my throat anyway, because I’m not about to announce myself like I’m asking permission to exist in his space.
