She wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist, using the hand wrapped in that filthy, blood-soaked bandage. The gesture is so small, so devoid of the calculated elegance she used to carry, that it hits me harder than any of the punches I threw at Vasik. It’s real. She’s real. And she’s breaking.
“I need your help,” she says.
Her voice is wrecked. Actually wrecked, the voice of someone who has been running on empty for hours and has nothing left to filter themselves with.
“My son.” Her throat moves. Her eyes fill up again and she doesn’t look away, doesn’t try to blink it back, just stands there with all of it visible on her face. “Someone took my son. I need your help.”
I go completely still.
Her son.
11
LENA
His face.
The shock on it lasts exactly three seconds then it’s gone, replaced by something that hardens so fast and so completely that I watch it happen and my stomach drops straight through the floor.
What did I do? What did I just do?
I came here. I ran across a city with a bleeding hand and a screaming ankle and men behind me and I ran straight to Razvan Volkov because my brain said he was the answer, but my brain didn’t stop to ask a single intelligent question on the way.
Like whether the man who has wanted me dead for five years would help me. Like whether walking into his compound was any different from walking into a cell. Like whether?—
What if it was him?
The thought arrives and it’s ice cold, and I feel it move through me from the top of my skull downward.
What if it’s him? What if Razvan is the one who took Theo, what if this is how he found me, what if I have just walked my own stupid terrified self directly into the trap and handed him everything he needed by showing up at his gate and saying my real name out loud?
I take one small step back without meaning to. My heel catches on the rug.
His jaw tightens. The shock is completely gone now and what’s replaced it is anger, dark and rising, and he looks at me across the room. “Why would you ever come here?”
Not a question. An accusation.
“You are the daughter of the man who killed my father.” His voice is quiet and that’s worse than if he’d raised it, that specific quiet he has that means something is being held back by a very short leash. “I had you in a cell. I was going to kill you. You stole from me and you ran and you have been gone for five years and you walk back through my gate and ask me for help.” His head tilts. “Why would you think, for even one second, that I would?—”
“You talk like you are some sort of saint. You’re not, Razvan, you killed my father.” The words come out of me flat and final and I watch them land on him. “Whatever hatred you think you have for me? I have it multiplied by ten for you. Every single day for five years I have thought about finding you and putting a bullet through your skull and one day…one day, I will do exactly that.”
It stretches between us, thick and suffocating.
His brow goes up. Slowly.
Then he moves.
He crosses the room and he moves the way he has always moved, like something that has never once had to hurry because the outcome was never in question, and my body gets the message three seconds before my brain does because I’m already stepping back, one step and then another, and the backs of my knees find the wall then my shoulders find it and then I have nowhere left to go and he’s right there.
His hand comes up to my throat.
Not squeezing. Just…resting. His fingers are curved against my pulse, and I know he can feel my heart hammering against his palm like a trapped bird. I hate that he knows. I hate that I can’t hide it.
His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there. “A bullet through my skull,” he says, his voice a low, vibrating hum. His thumb traces a slow, agonizing line along my jaw. “Can you,zayka? Do you actually dare?”
Say no.My brain sends the command, but my mouth is a traitor. I stare up at him, paralyzed by the heat of him, the sheer gravity of being this close to the center of my own destruction. His thumb moves again, and my jaw clamps shut because the sound that wants to escape me, a soft, broken whimper, is not the sound of a woman who hates this.
But I do. I hate him. I hate the way my body has remembered every single thing about him in the span of thirty seconds—the smell of him, clean and sharp like winter air and expensive soap. I hate that I can feel the traitorous ache between my thighs, a heavy, pulsing heat that makes me want to scream.
