Then he smiled. It was weak, blood smearing at the corner of his mouth, but the defiance in it burned bright.
“Or what?” His voice was barely more than a rasp. “You’ll kill me? Go ahead and finish what I already started.”
I pressed harder.
The scream that tore from him this time was raw, unfiltered, echoing off the walls as his body arched as far as the restraints allowed. Blood soaked through the bandage morequickly now, warm beneath my hand, the pulse of it matching the steady, controlled rhythm of my own breathing.
“Sergei!”
Leo’s voice broke through, edged with panic. He stepped in front of me, his hands braced against my chest as he tried to push me back.
“You’re killing him!” he said, his voice tight, urgent. “You need him alive if you want answers. This isn’t how you do it.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job, Leo.”
He shoved at my chest again, but I didn’t budge, didn’t ease the pressure on Dmitry’s wound. Our eyes locked. There was anger in his coupled with disbelief. Like he didn’t recognize the man standing in front of him.
“This isn’t you,” he said, more quietly now. “Whatever Morozov said to you—whatever you think you have to prove—this isn’t you, Sergei. You’re sweet and considerate.”
In that moment, infatuation gave way to clarity. Leo didn’t know the real me. He only saw the man who was in love with him. The man who practically begged him shamelessly to sleep with him and made sure he was never hungry.
How could he truly care about me if he didn’t knowme?
“Move,” I told him, though it pained me to speak to him so roughly.
“No. If you’re going to kill him, you’ll have to go through me.”
I always knew he was stubborn, and I would have smiled and backed down if we were in bed, but this moment wasn’t about us. This was business—my job. He needed to accept that. If he couldn’t, there was no future for us.
I placed my hands on his shoulders and moved him aside. Not roughly. Not violently. I could never be those things with him, but it was with enough force that he stumbled back a step, his balance breaking, a reminder to him that he couldn’t stop me if I chose not to be stopped.
“Dezi,” I called, my voice carrying across the warehouse.
Footsteps approached almost immediately, until Dezi materialized in front of me. “Yeah? I heard screaming. I’ll be pissed if you killed him without me.”
I nodded toward Leo. “Get him out of here.”
“What?” Leo snapped, turning sharply toward Dezi. “No—absolutely not. I’m the doctor, and he’s my patient. I’m not leaving?—”
Dezi grabbed his arm before he could finish, already pulling him back.
“Come on, Doc,” he said, his tone almost amused, like this was just another day for him. “Trust me, if you want to keep the romance alive, you don’t want to see this part.”
“I’m not leaving!” Leo struggled against him, his voice rising, anger spilling through. “Sergei, stop this! You’re better than this! You don’t have to do whatever Morozov tells you. I know you can be a good person.”
I didn’t turn, neither did I respond, because if I did, I might hesitate, but hesitation wasn’t something I could afford right now. I’d been slacking off the job, distracted by romance, but there was more to my world than Leo. People were depending on me, and they were no less important because I loved—for the first time in my life Iloved.
Dezi paused at the door, glancing back over his shoulder with a grin. “Make him scream loud enough. I wanna hear it from outside.”
Silence settled in the room, though I could hear the muted sound of Leo still arguing.
I leaned in closer to Dmitry, my hand pressing firmly against his throat again, my voice dropping low.
“Now talk. You’ll spare Arkady a lot of trouble if you do.”
Dmitry’s chest rose and fell in uneven bursts, his breathing ragged, wet with blood. For a moment, all I saw was pain etched across his face, then he started laughingagain. The sound that came from him was broken and breathless, his body shaking against the restraints as something unhinged flickered behind his eyes.
“Fuck you. You’ll get nothing out of me, so go ahead and kill me already.”
