I caught her wrist and held her steady.Just enough to keep her upright.
“Let go!”she shrieked, pulling until her skin burned against my grip.
My jaw clenched.“No.”
She twisted, thrashing like she was willing to break her own bones if it got her free.
And I let her fight.I let her rage.I let her scream every accusation she’d held in since we first met.
Because she wasn’t wrong; she survived hell and she had every right to hate me.I was glad she wasn’t done fighting.
And because watching her choose war over surrender told me everything I needed to know about her: whatever she became in the time since I last saw her, I created part of it.
But what she still didn’t understand—and couldn’t possibly understand—was that I couldn’t let her walk out that door.
Not after what went down at that club.
She thought she survived something monumental.Viktor Sokolov, the kidnapping, the auction, the violence.She thought the danger died with him.But she was wrong.
Two dead Sokolov brothers didn’t tame the Russians.It provoked them.A wound like that made the Bratva bleed outward—rage, retribution, retaliation.
Now they wanted answers.They wanted vengeance.And they wanted to start with her.
Half the city was sniffing for her trail like rabid dogs.Brokers, smugglers, low-rank Bratva soldiers itching to prove themselves.Men who would traffick her, torture her, carve her into pieces just to make a point.Hell, there was even a bounty on her head.She wouldn’t survive a minute out there without my protection.
She stepped toward the door anyway.
“You’re staying here,” I informed her.
“The hell I am.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
She froze.The fury that rolled off her was almost enough to hide how fragile she was.
She stepped closer, trembling with anger and exhaustion.Every breath she dragged in was uneven, shaky.The doctor said her injuries were mostly superficial—cuts, bruises, swelling—but the injection he gave her kept her drifting in and out of delirium for nearly forty-eight hours.She was still wearing the fog of it now.
Her pupils were blown wide and her hands shook.Her legs wobbled when she stopped too fast, making her reaction time sluggish, her thoughts a half-step behind her mouth.
She shouldn’t even be standing.But the defiance… that was fully awake.
“Get out of my face,” she spat.“I don’t trust you.”
“Good.”I looked her dead in the eyes.“I’m not a man that can be trusted.”
Her throat tightened on a swallow.“Then let me go.”
“No.”
Her fingers curled into fists.“Why?!Why am I even here?!”
The room went silent.The air was thick and charged with tension.
She waited, like the answer might either save her or gut her.
And I could feel something inside me, buried for a generation, uncoiling.Dragging itself up my throat.Scraping the inside of my ribs.
Before I could stop it… before I could swallow it down… the truth started tearing its way out of me like it had a life of its own, spilling forth something I’d spent fifteen years denying.Salvation.Penance.But instead of telling her that, I told her what she needed to hear.