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For a breath, neither of us moved. Stas stood so close I could count the flecks of gold in his eyes. His hand still held my wrist gently. It would’ve been easier if he grabbed me, if he shoved me, if he yelled. I knew how to fight that.

I didn’t know how to fight this. His tenderness.

I tried anyway.

“Don’t—” My voice cracked. I swallowed and looked away. “Don’t do this. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“I know exactly what I’m getting into.” His voice softened, but the resolve didn’t budge. “You’ve hated me long enough to want me dead, and never hid that before. Now that we have something else going on, don’t shut me out now. Talk to me, Yuriy.”

I laughed again, but this time it sounded hollow. “Talk? What do you want me to say? That my brother looked at me like he hated me? That he said⁠—”

My throat snapped shut.

Stas brushed his thumb over my knuckles, almost absentmindedly. “Don’t hold back now. You’ve never been afraid to speak your mind.”

The dam broke.

“You heard him,” I choked, my throat constricted. “He didn’t even want to invite me. My own brother, whom I raised like a son, didn’t want to spend Christmas with me. He would rather invite you—a man who almost killed him—than his brother who raised him.”

My vision blurred. I blinked hard, but the tears came anyway, hot and humiliating. I pressed the heel of my palm to my eyes, but it didn’t stop anything. Stas gently pulled my hand away from my face.

“You didn’t deserve that,” he said quietly. “He was being ungrateful and unfair to you.”

“But he was right.” I shook my head, breath hitching. “I’m really everything he described. Maybe I do ruin everything I touch, including him. But I tried the best I could, dammit.”

Stas didn’t speak. He waited. That patience was worse than pressure. It stripped me open.

“Did you know,” I whispered, “I was really good at computers?”

He lifted his brows. Not mocking, but surprised, as if that was the last thing he expected from me.

“I wanted to be a software engineer. I used to stay up late writing stupid programs just to see if I could.” I inhaled a shaky breath. “My father didn’t like it, but my mom got him to reluctantly agree to let me go to college before I took on the family business. She convinced him it would be an asset to our family, so I had a whole plan. College. Internships. Maybe someday a job that didn’t involve a gun.”

“But then your parents died,” he said quietly.

I nodded frantically. “Exactly. And you know what I did? I dropped out of school. At sixteen. Sixteen, Stas. To raise him. To keep him safe. To fill in the gap for the parents he lost.”

He didn’t interrupt. His hand found my shoulders, slow, careful, like I might bolt. He kneaded my knots, but I wasn’t in the mood to release them just yet.

“For years I acted like an imbecile,” I whispered. “Do you know why?”

His thumb stroked once, gently. “Tell me.”

“So my uncle wouldn’t see me as a threat. So he’d overlook me. Because if he suspected I was capable of more, he would’ve killed us both, and Zasha was so young. I couldn’t let anything happen to him.”

A tear slipped down my cheek. Then another. Soon I couldn’t stop them. I brushed them away hard, but more came.

“I bided my time. Swallowed every insult, every slap, every humiliation. I waited until the moment he slipped. And then I killed him. The first life I took, and it was my uncle’s.”

The room went dead still. Stas didn’t move, didn’t flinch.

“I took over to protect my brother. And what did I get for it?” I laughed shakily. “Disdain. Because I’m bisexual. Because I wasn’t like the old guard. They had no respect for me, so the only way to keep us alive was to become this deranged, unhinged monster they feared.”

Stas pulled me into him, hand cupping the back of my head and pressing my forehead to his shoulder. My hands clutched his shirt without meaning to. My body shook in small, pathetic jerks I couldn’t hide.

Everything I’d shoved down for years poured out in those silent, shaking sobs. Stas’s hand slid up the back of my neck, his palm warm, fingers threading gently through my damp hair.

“You’re not a monster,” he murmured against my temple. “You never were.”