“Shut up.”
“Brat.”
She smiles, small and sharp, and lies back down again. This time she comes closer, fitting herself against my side. Her hand drifts over my chest, tracing absent lines until her fingers find the scar of her name.
Everything in me stills.
The anger. The old humiliation. The urge to tear the past open with my bare hands.
Gone, just like that, under her touch.
“My grandparents visited,” I say after a while, voice quieter now. “They told me to survive it. Tell him what he wanted to hear. Promise I’d keep my mouth shut. Get out. Wait.”
Her thumb strokes once over her name.
“So I did.”
“And he believed you?”
“He believed he’d beaten enough of it out of me.” I pause. “Or maybe he thought locking me away did the rest.”
Ayla’s jaw tightens.
“When he finally let me out, I kept my head down. Prepared. Waited. Then I took what was mine.”
“The Bratva,” she breathes.
“The Bratva,” I confirm.
She’s quiet for a beat. “And now?”
I look at the trees again.
“NowI’mlying.”
She knows immediately. I feel her body shift with the understanding of it.
“About me.”
“Yes.”
I expect that to sit badly in my mouth. It doesn’t.
What sits badly is that for the first time in my life, I understand exactly why people lie when it’s about protecting the one person they can’t fucking lose.
Ayla exhales through her nose. “Any other family secrets I should know before I accidentally fuck my way into another one?”
That drags a real laugh out of me.
“Yes, actually.”
“Oh, good,” she mutters.
“You remember Vasilisa?”
She goes stiff against me. “Yes. And I don’t like her.”
“Wonderful.”
