He's quiet for a long moment, swirling the vodka in his glass, watching the liquid catch the firelight. When he finally speaks, his voice is low and careful. "You need to be careful about Maya. She's not what she seems."
25
LENA
Ilie in the darkness, listening to the storm rage outside and the low rumble of male voices from the living room.
I roll onto my side, pulling the blanket tighter around myself. And then it hits me. Not gradually. Not a slow dawning of realization. It slams into me like a freight train, stealing my breath and making my heart stutter in my chest.
Aleksandr.
Danil keeps almost calling him Aleksandr. Catching himself, switching to Sasha, but that first half always tries to escape. Alek. Short for Aleksandr.
The dragon wings tattooed across his shoulder blades. I wondered why they seemed familiar when I'd first seen them. I'd heard how they were on Aleksandr Romanov's back, though I'd never seen a picture of them or the man.
Aleksandr Romanov.
The name sits in my mind like a stone, heavy and cold and undeniable.
The man sleeping in my bed, the man whose hands have touched every inch of my body, the man I've laughed with and cooked with and trusted with my life, is Aleksandr Romanov!
The Pakhan who ordered my execution.
My stomach lurches, and for a moment I think I might actually vomit. I press my hand over my mouth, breathing hard through my nose, trying to keep the panic at bay.
Of all the people in the world. Of all the men who could have stumbled bleeding into my yard during a blizzard. Of all the people I could have pulled from the snow and brought into my home.
It washim.
The universe has a sick sense of humor.
I saved the life of the man who tried to have me killed. I nursed him back to health. I fell into bed with him. I let him touch me, taste me, claim me in ways I've never let anyone else.
And God help me, I fell in love with him.
The realization crashes over me like a second wave, somehow worse than the first. Because it's true. Somewhere between the snowball fights and the quiet mornings and the way he looks at me like I'm the only thing in the world that matters, I fell completely and irrevocably in love with Aleksandr Romanov.
I'm in love with the man who put a price on my head.
A laugh bubbles up in my throat, hysterical and bitter. I clamp my hand tighter over my mouth to keep it from escaping. This is insane. This is beyond insane. This is the kind of twisted irony that only happens in bad movies and worse nightmares.
But it's real. He's real. The way my heart races when he walks into a room is real. The safety I feel in his arms is real. The future I've started imagining, the one where maybe I don't have to run anymore, where maybe I could actually be happy, that's real too.
And it's all built on a foundation of lies and blood and a hit order that's probably still active.
I sit up, my hands shaking as I push hair out of my face. I need to think. Need to figure out what to do.
Running is the obvious answer. Wait until morning, wait until the storm breaks, and disappear again. I've done it before. I can do it again.
Except the storm shows no signs of stopping. The wind howls like something alive and furious, and snow falls so thickly, I can barely see the tree line from my window. Even if I wanted to run, I couldn't. Not in this. I'd be dead within an hour.
And the truth, the part that terrifies me more than anything else, is that I don't want to run.
I don't want to leave him.
Even knowing who he is. Even knowing what he's done. Even knowing that if his memory returns fully, he might finish what he started three years ago.
I'm in love with him, and that love doesn't care about logic or self-preservation or the very reasonable fear that should be screaming at me to get as far away as possible.