Page 41 of Fractured Ties

“Flip your pancake before it burns, dushka.”

Maya hesitated.

“You shouldn’t call me that—dushka, I mean.”

Kolya arched a brow. “Do you not want me to?”

She hadn’t said that.

But she also knew what it meant.

His soul.

An endearment meant for a person’s soul.

She wasn’t that at all.

“I will call you what I like unless you ask for something different,” Kolya said.

“Didn’t I just do that—ask, I mean?”

Kolya chuckled. “No, you said shouldn’t. And that’s a huge step away from can’t. Finish your breakfast, and then we can go.”

Go?

He must have seen her silent question.

“Sumerki needs a vet visit and you need things.”

“Oh,” Maya said.

Kolya’s gaze drifted over her from head to toe—a lingering, heated stare that made the best kind of chill work its way up Maya’s spine.

She didn’t know what to do with this man.

With herself.

With them.

He looked hungry.

A little wild, too.

Jesus.

“I don’t like doing anything,” Kolya said, “but especially shopping.”

“I can be quick.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ll mind very much with you.”

5.

KOLYA FOUND over his lifetime that the world tended to treat him better when he didn’t engage society like most people did. Normal people enjoyed going out, being seen, and doing things. He was not that kind of person.

Hell, he could have everything and anything ordered in should he need something, and the only time he did go out was to work, to handle a problem, or if his tailor wanted an update on his fucking measurements for his suits. Even the clothes he wore right then—clean, as he’d gotten rid of the blood-stained shit from the day before—had been delivered to him by a soldier he’d relatively trusted to be inside his place.

But anything more and people were just asking too fucking much of Kolya.