When I developed an eating disorder later on, Dimitri was the one who noticed, the only one, and he busted his ass to make sure I didn’t let it consume me. Then he did it two more times over the years when it got too hard for me to handle certain things.
This man has never let me down, he’s never been unavailable to me. He’s supported everything I’ve ever talked about doing, even pushed me to do a lot of it. Dimitri taught me how to fight, how to defend myself if he wasn’t around to protect me. He showed me how to use every weapon I’ve ever picked up, and he’s had my back on the brink of death more times than I can count.
This man, this alpha in front of me, doesn’t seem like he could have thought up the words in the note on the mirror let alone actually left it for me.
Dimitri shifts the slightest fraction as we stare at each other, stealing his spine while he keeps his aim right between my eyes.
Why?
Why is he doing this? I don’t even know what the fuck it is he’s doing.
In more than two decades, I don’t think Dimitri has ever raised his voice to me let alone anything like this. He’d soonertake a bullet himself; he’s told me that on more than one occasion.
Proved it just as many. Hell, he wears the fucking proof of that on his goddamn face.
The huge burn scar around his left eye, the one that starts just below his eyebrow and spreads along the side of his nose and down over his cheekbone before it webs back into his hairline and toward his ear? That’s for me.
It’sbecause of me.
He almost lost his fucking eye and there’s still a possibility of that happening if the nerves are too scarred. But Dimitri told me none of that mattered because I was okay, because I was still with him, alive and breathing. It was that connection, that deep, vulnerable, unfiltered connection I felt that allowed for our relationship to become what it is now.
He knew we were scent matches before I did, knew it the moment I presented as an omega, and he waited for me to catch up before he said or did anything about it. There was no pressure, no expectations. Our relationship was the same but I thought we were getting closer and then one day it clicked. I should have known when I started jerking off to fantasies of him but even then I wasn’t sure, not until the magnitude of that realization hit. I’d never been sexually attracted to anyone before Dimitri, and I wasn’t even attracted to him until I went through puberty but it was bound to happen. I felt this man all the way to my bones and that’s when I knew.
We matched, and we’d always been in love with each other.
The alpha in front of me has been my best friend, my protector, my only lover, my entire fucking world since I was conscious enough to understand it, and that has never once wavered.
Until right now.
“D, please. Please, just tell me what’s going on. I don’t understand any of this.”
He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing painfully but that and his steady breathing is the only move he makes as he rips my heart right out of my chest and smashes it on the snow-covered ground between us. “You know what I am, Nikolai, and you know what I do. Put the fucking pieces together, you dumb fuck.”
Kaboom.
The pain explodes behind my ribs and if I wasn’t looking straight down the barrel of his gun, I’d have thought Dimitri shot me, but he didn’t. No, with a few simple words, my alpha breaks my heart, ruins our bond, and spoonfeeds me the bullshit I’m having a hard time digesting.
“A contract?” My eyes burn as I blink away my tears. “There’s a fucking hit on me?”
He doesn’t speak, doesn't nod, but he doesn’t need to.
Dimitri is a hitman, a hitman for the Volkov Bratva, and I know what he does because it’s what I do, too.
I shake my head and take a step backward. “Why? Why the hell would Boris put a hit out on me?”
“You’re a smart little omega, you tell me. Why would my father take out a contract on his own goddamn family?”
There could be a million reasons for that.
He had Dimitri’s mother murdered right in front of him when he was four, and even to this day, no one actually knows why. Rumors range from adultery to skimming his offshore accounts but it doesn’t really matter. They had a soul bond, they shared a son, and Boris had her killed.
I’m nothing to him, he doesn’t need a fucking reason, and neither does Dimitri because loyal doesn’t even come close to describing what he is to his father.
So, I guess that doesn’t fucking matter either.
Especially when I start thinking back to how all of this played out.
Planning a trip without bodyguards, isolated, and away from home. The way Dimitri made love to me after he got here, how he took care of me last night after my heat. That shit takes priority over whatever bullshit his father concocted because it hurts more than a bullet between my eyes ever will.
