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I brace myself for the ugly, public fall.
An arm bands around my waist and catches me clean off my feet. Cedar folds over me, warm and familiar and utterly impossible.
“Are you all right, solnyshko?”
That deep, filthy voice pours down over me from above, and my breath stops entirely. I know exactly who is holding me upright before I even lift my head.
What in the world is he still doing here?
6
LEV
Hours earlier…
I wake reaching for her warm body, and my hand finds cold, empty sheets instead.
Her side of the bed has gone cool under my palm. She left while I slept, quiet as a thief in her own escape, and I didn’t so much as stir. That fact alone should trouble me more than it does.
Her lemon scent still hangs faint and clean in the room, but her purse is gone from the chair, and her shoes are gone from the floor. The sheets still smell of sex and lemon soap. She was careful on her way out. She thought it through. The woman who moaned filth into my ear last night and begged for my cock by name has slipped off as though she was never here at all.
Her name sits heavy in my chest, and I don’t have a word for the feeling. I came to one of my own bars to look over a room, and I left it hours later with a stranger’s emergency call still glowing on my phone, placed by a woman named Delaney Cox. A wrong digit, a bleeding girl on a floor, and now this hollow, gnawing ache behind my ribs.
No woman has ever crept out of my bed before. They stay, they cling, they wake me with greedy hands and softer promises, hoping to trade one night for a favor, a debt erased, a word dropped in the right ear.
Only Yelena ever ran from me before this. Even our two names nearly rhyme, which feels like the universe telling a private joke at my expense.
Her face rises uninvited, the way it always does when I’m too tired to bar the door on it. Pale skin, fine and careful features, those fragile cornflower-blue eyes that could make a hard man forget his own name and go soft as a boy. We were the couple everyone envied, once upon a time. She walked out of my heart as lightly as she once walked into it, and left me nothing but the hole.
That old ache is back now, dull and familiar, and I despise that a girl half my age set it loose again in a single night. I hate the loss of my grip far more than I hate the loss itself.
She should have been afraid of me. Any sane person is. Instead, she kissed me like a dare and dropped to her knees in my car and took my cock in her mouth like a challenge she meant to win. I forgot her age. I forgot that she had spent five months as my little brother’s girl. I already knew she was a virgin—she had confessed it herself, drunk, to a wrong number, long before she ever put a face to me—and I took her anyway, slow and careful, gentler than I ever knew I could be.
Every rational part of me files the night under mistake. The rest of me is simply enraged that she crept off my cock and out my door before I decided she was allowed to.
No cold shower is going to fix what she started. I stand under the spray until my skin goes numb and my temper doesn’t, and then I put my fist through the tile beside the showerhead. The pain in my knuckles clears my head for exactly one second.
She should have woken inside my arms. She should have asked me to let her stay. She should have stayed on my cock until morning and asked for more. Fuck, I want to hunt her down and make her regret the empty half of that mattress, to fuck her again and again until leaving simply stops occurring to her.
If she wants this finished, she can earn the right to finish it. Ending a thing with me was never hers alone to decide.
I step out toweling my hair and find a message from Yuri on the counter screen.
Yuri
Fyodor still will not talk. A car is already waiting downstairs.
Fyodor is one of my father’s oldest guards, a man who stood at my shoulder when half the bratva wanted me dead in a ditch. For more than a year he quietly gathered proof of our laundering to hand over to the police, folder by careful folder, and I caught it with only days left to spare. I want two things from this morning. I want to understand why he did it, and I want Delaney found.
Neither one is getting left open.
The car carries me out to a dead stretch of docks, to a warehouse gone to rust and vine, its paint peeling off in long gray curls. I tell Yuri to hold the door. Fyodor performs his martyrdom better with an audience, and I refuse to hand him one.
“I have people out for the girl,” Yuri says as I pass him. “The medic dialed you off her own phone last night. Her number sat in your log for hours. Her address took me twenty minutes.”
I give him a single nod. Yuri could find a ghost in this city. Even so, Fyodor comes first.
Twenty years Fyodor gave my father, through the bloody times, through the shootout years. He watched a doubted boy claw his way up to pakhan. My ruined right pinky throbs as I walk, the way it always does just before blood. The doctors saved the finger and could not give back its bend. I paid for this chair in doubt and in blood, and Fyodor stood there watching me pay. That is why some part of me still cannot believe he sold us out for a thing as small as profit. The motive doesn’t fit the man I knew.
