My glass pauses halfway to my lips. “What do you mean?”
“What is she? What are you doing with her Maks?” She’s studying me with that piercing look she gets when she thinks she’s seeing more than I want her to. “I’ve heard around the compound that you’re keeping her close. Stabbing your men. That’s not like you with women.”
“You don’t know shit.” The words come out harsher than I intend.
Kostya exchanges a look with Katya that makes me want to break something.
“What?” I snap.
Kostya shrugs. “Nothing. Just... you’ve never kept a woman this long before. Usually it’s fuck and forget. You won’t share her, are you bringing her in?”
Him and fucking sharing.
I snap. “What she is or isn’t to the Bratva is none of your fucking business.”
Katya sighs dramatically. “Everything about the Bratva is our concern, Maksim. If you’re making her something more than a distraction—”
“I’m not.”
Kostya rises, stretching like a lazy cat. “I think he’s telling the truth, he let Vaska touch her,” he says, grinning, all teeth. “I watched it on surveillance.”
My body goes cold.
“What?”
“Yeah, knives out and everything.”
For a second, I don’t breathe.
With Vaska, knives only ever mean two things—blood or pleasure, and I don’t know which picture makes me sicker.
Did he test her? Train her? Put a blade to her throat the way he does when he’s playing with someone he wants to break slow?
Or did he press steel to her skin when he fucked her?
Heat roars in my ears.
Either way, he’sdead.
Kostya saunters toward the door, Katya following with a last backward glance at me. “Don’t kill Vaska.”
The door clicks shut behind them.
I pour another glass of vodka and toss it back. It hits my stomach like ice instead of fire.
I set the glass down carefully, because if I don’t, I’ll shatter it. The room feels too small, walls pressing in with memories I don’t want. I roll my shoulders once, then head for the back door.
The night outside is cool, air biting at the sweat on my neck. The compound is quiet in that false way—guards on patrol, cameras humming, engines cooling somewhere in the distance. Vaska’s place is next door, close enough that if either of us calls out, the other will hear it.
I take the path between the houses, boots grinding gravel. Every step, my mind drags up another reason to turn around.
Vaska wouldn’t touch Ayla.
Not like that.
He’s my right hand. The first one who chose me when everything went to shit. When I slit his father’s throat in this very compound—steel deep, blood everywhere—he didn’t even scream.
He came to visit me in that ward. Eyes bright with something like relief.
