“No, you don’t.” His voice roughened. “You can’t. I’m sitting here breathing because you went into that place. I can’t make that right.”
“You can start by not making it worse.”
“I don’t know how to sit still with this.”
“You learn.”
“That’s easy for you to say?”
A laugh left me, sharp and tired. “No. It is not easy for me to say from a Bratva penthouse after a virgin auction.”
His breath hitched. He stayed with me anyway.
I swallowed. “I love you. I need you alive more than I need you brave.”
“I’m not brave.”
“You’re angry. That is cheaper and easier. Don’t confuse them.”
Petya muttered something in Russian.
Vadim looked toward the window. His shoulders eased by a fraction.
“Don’t run,” I said. “Don’t call Gennady. Don’t answer any number you don’t know. Don’t leave wherever Lev put you.”
Petya hesitated. “Lev is the bald one?”
“Probably.”
“He looks like he wants to bite people.”
“Then don’t make him want to bite you.”
Petya let out one rough breath. Not quite a laugh. Not peace either. Just enough air to keep him from breaking apart on the phone.
“Nadia,” he said. “This is bad.”
“I know.”
“I’m scared.”
That reached me harder than the crash, harder than the threat, harder than his first reckless promise to kill Vadim Sorin.
My brother, proud and furious and twenty years old, had finally said the cleanest truth in the room.
“I am too,” I said.
“Are you coming home?”
For a second, I couldn’t speak.
My gaze dropped to the silk robe on my thighs, the tray of untouched breakfast, the black glass of the windows beyond Vadim, and the man himself standing in morning light with blood healing across the knuckles he’d split on Gennady’s mouth.
Home.
The apartment with cold floors and bad locks wasn’t safe anymore. Maybe it hadn’t been safe for a long time. Maybe I had mistaken familiar for free because the alternative was admitting how few choices I had left.
“I don’t know when I can see you,” I said. “But I’m not walking back into Gennady’s reach to prove something.”
