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“I don’t give a damn.”
“You should!”
“Why the fuck should I care that—”
“Because I care! Because I need to know that you are more than just a calculating bastard. I need to see and feel that you can give a damn.” Her shoulders hunched as if she were tired. “You need to do this for me, please.”
Silence stretched between us. “It’s that important to you?”
“Yes.”
I pushed the raging demon inside of me back into a deep, dark, and most of all cold, hole. I needed to chain that part of me, or it would burst out and hurt my wife.
“I can give you this, but I can’t grant you what you really crave.” I reached out to stroke her hair. “I can never be a regular guy with normal hopes and dreams. I am not a good man, Katya. Sometimes, I don’t even feel human. There’s a demon inside of me that wants to level the world, and make people bleed, just so the images I live with will disappear.”
She grabbed my hand, as if she needed the connection. “I don’t believe you’re not a good man. At least not all the time. The world isn’t black and white, and neither are you. I know how much you love your Bratva, and the Bloody Ones.”
And you. Most of all, I love you, Ekaterina.
I could face an army if I needed to, but telling her how I felt scared the shit out of me. Also, those three words weren’t sufficient to describe how I felt about her. No words invented in the human language would.
With that feeling that bordered on madness with a tinge of obsession, came the need to protect her, even from herself.
“Just because I let you bring Evie into our home doesn’t mean we’re not going to talk about what you did. I don’t know what it is about you and heists, but that stops here and now, Ekaterina. No more breaking people out of secured facilities.” When she was about to argue, I added. “We have people for that.” Trained people who cost me a dime, but I didn’t give a crap as long as my queen was safe.
She looked skeptical. “Would you have one of those people help me, if I’d told you what I had planned?”
“Not even if Hell froze over.”
“Exactly my point. You know, I can take care of myself. I don’t need a Bratva breakout team at my disposal.”
“You will ask me for that team for any other situation in the future,” I stipulated, praying that it would never happen.
She studied her nails. “Why would I, when they will report everything back to you? Like I said, I can manage fine on my own.”
I boxed her against the wall. “Except you didn’t do this on your own, did you?”
Her eyes turned all innocent. “Whatever do you mean?”
Even though I was secretly proud of her for pulling it off, I would never admit that. It would do me no good to stoke the Bonnie half of those Bonnie-and-Clyde flames inside her.
“I mean, you had help from a certain cyber specialist.”
She bit her lip, clearly to keep herself from reacting.
I twirled one of her pink curls around my finger. “You do know her days are numbered, right? Any day now the twins will get a hold of Onyx and she will be dead to the world.” When her eyes looked up in concern, I added, “They won’t kill her, but if I know them even a little bit, they will take away what’s most precious to her.” It was what I would do.
She didn’t miss a beat when she said, “Her laptop.”
“And every other device that gives her Internet access. To her, it will feel like being dead. See, that’s the Bratva way when someone screws you over. You find out what your enemy covets the most, and then you take it away from them.”
“Onyx told me that she’s offered to pay the twins.”
“They don’t want her money.” They wanted what she had promised them for their help; her body for one night. Considering that Damon was an eye-for-an-eye guy, and Angelhandled calculating the interest rates of our business ventures, I figured that they wouldn’t settle for one night anymore.
Katya huffed. “Well, Onyx is a free spirit. She has managed to stay out of the twins’ clutches so far. My money’s on her.”
It hadn’t escaped my notice that my sweet Ekaterina had steered the conversation into a whole different direction. Worse was that I had let her. That was what she did to me. With her, I didn’t calculate every word, every move I was going to make. She believed that I needed to show empathy? That I needed to show her I wasn’t all about calculating moves? She only needed to look at herself.
