Page 33 of Beautiful Ruin

Be careful where you plant your feet, Rowan. Your Pakhan has already stepped into waters that aren’t meant to be tread in. It would be a shame for you to also get caught up in the undercurrent.

It’s been nearly a week since he said it.

Instead of brushing off the warning as nothing more than a mad man’s paranoia, I’ve lain awake every night with those words curled around my throat like a noose I can’t cut. They wait in the dark behind my eyes when I close them, seeping in before consciousness fully settles when morning light wakes me. They follow me down every hallway and into Ivan’s study. They crawl into bed with me when I finally try to sleep.

Nikolai Malyshko has a talent for that, I think.

For leaving behind planted seeds buried so deep in a man’s psyche that digging them out is almost as dangerous as ignoring them.

I should dismiss whatever this has unintentionally stirred up in me, bury them the way I do every other threat that carries a blade or a loaded barrel and aims for me. Loyalty isn’t supposed to come with questions. It is supposed to be absolute. I’ve spent half my life proving that to Ivan with blood on my hands and bodies in the ground. He pulled me out of the gutter when I was seventeen and starving and turned rage into purpose.

I don’t ever question the hand that has forged me.

Except… now I’m starting to.

Every time Ivan dismisses the ambush as “outside work” and doubles down on pushing into those government seats, every time he changes the subject about Sofia’s file being found at the scene as nothing more than coincidence, something inside me twists tighter.

I know without thinking that it’s my intuition screaming at me that something is wrong. This is the exact preternatural sense that has kept me breathing through more fights than I can count. He is hiding something, that much I know for certain. But what, I am still not sure. Nor do I want to dig too deeply into it for fear that it will crumble the already very precariously built tower that is still managing to stay upright.

What I should be doing is exactly what I’ve been ordered to.

Ivan’s orders were simple, nearly fool-proof. Keep Sofia breathing under any and all circumstances, keep her contained when necessary and busy when bored, and do not let her leave the estate.

It should have been easy. A temporary detail, I told myself. A minor punishment dressed up as trust after I pushed too hard in his hospital room while Ivan rested and recovered. Nothing more. I have done far worse for far longer.

Only slowly, I’ve come to realize how wrong I was.

Sofia is not the fragile academic with soft hands and even softer instincts I originally thought her to be. She is far from the image of the sheltered little heiress too delicate to understand the darkness around her, the one I created in my head the moment Ivan gave me this order. I built that version of her because it was convenient, a porcelain problem that was expensive and breakable that I was forced to guard while resenting every second of it.

Yet the longer I spend time around her, the more Sofia begins to unsettle me because beneath all that softness and sun-warmed beauty and polished upbringing, there is a nerve of steel no one warned me about.

I don’t know when all of this started to become unbearable.

Maybe when she reached out to touch me. I should have stepped away immediately. I know that. A month, a week, a lifetime ago, I would have. I would have shut it down without hesitation with one cold command and put enough distance between us to make the boundary explicitly clear.

But I didn’t.

For one second, I stayed. I watched her hand rise and realized I wanted her to touch me. I wanted her palm against my chest to see if she could feel how hard my heart was beating beneath my skin. I wanted, fuck, to know if something in her would understand—would realize—I am not as unreachable as I pretend I am.

And that is the most dangerous truth of all.

She is a fuse waiting to be lit and I am the matchstick hovering too close, hoping her flame won’t catch when it finally does.

That thought keeps returning to me with a heaviness I don’t like, nor do I know how to deal with. It sits in the back of my skull while I stand beside Ivan in meetings. It presses between my ribs when I walk past her door at night and follows me into the surveillance room, into the armory, into the hollow hours before dawn when exhaustion strips away enough discipline for honesty to crawl in.

Ivan trusts me because I do not bend. I do not indulge weakness. I have made myself into something reliable. He did not pull me from the bowels of Moscow and make me his right hand just so I could become another man undone by a woman’s touch.

Sofia does not understand the full danger of herself yet. She thinks the threat is outside where the men who attacked Ivan are. She thinks the danger is in the questions she asks and the answers she will never receive, but she is wrong. The danger is what she makes men want.

Men like me.

It is not duty that coaxes me to keep circling her.

It is possession masquerading as protection.

Today is supposed to be quiet.

That is the first mistake I make.