Page 137 of Violent Pawn

When I lift my head, her striking eyes meet mine, and they’re all I see. Not the bruised swelling, nor the patched-up nose. Not the pain reflecting in her expression that makes me wish I could bring them all back to life and murder them again, slower, over the course of days.

She might not be mine to hold and kiss yet, but my hands itch to touch her. My soul needs her warmth to become whole again. I lift off the chair and, meeting her eyes so she knows I’m done harming her, I slowly and gently cup her face, cautious of the bruising.

Instead of pushing me away, she rests her hands over the top of mine. She studies me the way I am her, taking in what’s probably missed bloodstains because my shower was rushed to get here.

After a moment, after everything this week, all she whispers is, “You’re a mess.”

“I’m a man who nearly lost his heart. I’d say I’m looking pretty good, all things considered.”

Her lips, cracked and dehydrated, part. “What does that mean?”

“You know what it means.” You’re still avoiding.

A hint of a smirk touches the corner of her mouth, her bruises pulling taut with her. Unable to stop myself, I trace the crease with my thumb, so fucking pleased to find her able to smile again. She catches my hand, inspecting the dried blood in my fingernails.

“Did you get them all?”

“Every last one, Vasilyev included. He tried to escape, but we found him. He took a bullet to the back of the head.”

“Good,” she breathes, her eyes fluttering shut. “If only I learned why me. Was it convenience that I was the first of Vanessa’s people to go outside? Then again, they hid the weapons in my brothel out of all our businesses, so it almost feels personal.”

“He was trying to hit Vanessa where it hurt the most.” That we got out of him during his capture. “Going after Zeno was too obvious, but he knows what you mean to her.”

“Asshole. I tried to get to him, but he ran, and my energy was done.”

“Hey,” I say soothingly, tugging her face back to me. “You did amazing. Besides, I’m glad he ran, that he didn’t fight you. He put up a half-decent fight against Elio, which means against you when you were already injured and done for…” I finger the ends of her hair, gaze diving away so she finishes the rest for herself.

It would have been a bigger fight, and I could have found her in a lot more dire condition.

Dead.

My throat fills with bile—or is that emotion? Fear in its basic form.

This time, she’s the one who moves. Brushing a thumb below my eye and drawing the single tear away. A tear that’s filled with every truth I’m ready to lay out for her here and now, to bare my soul and see what comes next.

“You scared me like nothing else, Anastasia. I died a million times when finding you in that warehouse. Getting Z’s call only to learn you’d come after me but didn’t check in. For Lev to track you there. The drive was the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced. Speeding only to be unsure what I was speeding to, praying to everything in the universe you’d be alive and okay.” The bruises on her forehead and the bandage on her nose are now a blessing, that her injuries weren’t worse. “Arriving, finding you lying beside them. Every step to you was one more I wasn’t certain I’d make, afraid my legs would give out. Then I did, to be faced with needing a plan if you didn’t make it. I would have hunted every last one of them if you were the one I had to bury in the ground. I’d have dragged their torment out for fuckin’ years in hopes it’d bring you back to me. Eleven years ago, I was sickened by the concept of you dying, but now…the concept is inconceivable. There is no life if you were to die.”

After all that, after a speech I didn’t know was inside me, water mists her eyes. She licks her cracked lips and whispers, “I didn’t die.”

“No,” I agree, but the reminder has yet to ease me. “You survived because that’s who you are. You’re a survivor, and I’m so fucking proud of you. No, actually, I’m grateful. Grateful you kept yourself alive. Grateful you made it so when I rolled you over, your pulse still beat. Grateful you saved me months ago and ensured this time I didn’t return to being that person. Because had you died, life wouldn’t be worth living. I’d give up and let the darkness consume me because maybe then, I’d find you on the other side.”

The admittance—the rough fact—the truth I hadn’t even put into words myself before today scrapes at my throat, but fuck, if that’s how it’d go. If my ballerina were to never dance again, if her sparkling eyes would never regard me with either disdain, lust, or affection, I’d bury her myself, hunt the bastards and make them pay for as long as my rage would allow them to cling to life, and then I’d drink. And drink, and never stop drowning the pain, the remorse, until finding her again in a place where the darkness wouldn’t touch either of us. Where I was truly and undoubtedly deserving of her.

“Thank you for finding me.”

Her nails scrape into my hair, and I catch her hand with my own to bring it to my mouth and kiss her cut-up, bruised knuckles. “Always. No matter what, I’ll come for you. No matter if you send me away right now, that you’re still pissed at me, I’ll accept it. I’ll get out of your life for good, but it doesn’t mean I won’t watch over you. Even if you can take care of yourself, I’ll need the reassurance that you’re alive.”

“I was coming after you.”

Five words. So simple, so meaningless, but they’re not at all. They’re packed with a second message—that she isn’t pushing me away. A final message that she cares for me in return.

“After you left me on the balcony,” she continues, shattering me bit by bit, “it hit me. How I wasn’t really angry with you any longer. What happened didn’t matter. I was following you, trying to cut across the yard to reach you.” Water lines her eyes at a brief pause, her next words choked out in a whisper so cutting, it slices at my knees. “I didn’t even see them in the hedges.”

I bring her hand to my mouth again, this time kissing her palm. “I’ll have to live with the fact that I didn’t hear you, that I never glanced behind me. If I had, you wouldn’t have been taken. You wouldn’t be here.” The beeps of the machines, the wires connected to her hands, the bandages all over her body have me biting down on the emotions.

“I don’t blame you. I blame myself for not telling you sooner. If I had stopped being so angry⁠—”

“I broke your trust.” I cut her off, my tone not welcoming further argument. “You begged me not to when we slept together. I promised, yet I did it, so the fault is entirely mine. Your reaction was justified. Trauma altered your perception of men, and though I did everything to make you trust me, I became another one of them. Losing your trust after earning it—something you certainly didn’t have to give me—is a mistake I’ll live with forever, and what I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to win back. If you ever let me have it again, I make a vow here and now”—I press her hand onto my rapidly beating heart, shuffling to the edge of the chair so her limb doesn’t stretch—“that if I break your trust again, you will kill me. I mean it, Petrov. I’m holding this vow in the highest regard, even above the ones I once spoke to Zeno.”