Page 9 of Tattooed Heart

Aleksandr paces, eyes sharp, every movement precise. The kind of quiet fury that makes men piss themselves. “You kill him?”

“Almost. Left him breathing—barely. The guards stepped in too early.” I pause, licking the cracked corner of my lip. “They put me in solitary under the guise of protection. But you and I both know what that is—it's containment. It makes it easier next time.”

He curses under his breath in Russian. His accent deepens when he does that, and his mask slips just enough to show the man beneath.

“Andrei won't stop,” I continue. “He's not here for negotiation. He's here to destroy us from the inside out.”

His face doesn’t change, not at first. But I see the shift, the crack behind his eyes, that hint of worry nopakhanis allowed to show.

“The guards came after me, too. Two of them. They're on Morozov's payroll. I took care of them, but they haven't tried to kill me again. Not yet, anyway.”

I haven’t told Sandy about that. About the night they'd come for me. “Special interrogation,” they called it. How I'd disabled them both, dragged their unconscious bodies into a supply closet, and made it back to my cell before anyone realized what had happened. She doesn’t need to know how close I'd cometo being another statistic, another body found hanging in a cell with a falsified report claiming suicide.

A long silence stretches between us. Aleksandr doesn’t speak or move. Then he sits on the bench against the opposite wall, his hands clasped in front of him, his elbows on his knees, mirroring my posture. It was the closest we've been to equals in a long time.

“I'm not worried about dying in here,” I state quietly. “That's the easy part.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I'm worried about Sandy. About what it will do to her if I don’t make it out. About the baby growing up with a father's name and no father to wear it.”

My throat tightens at the thought. I know what it is like to grow up fatherless. The hollow space where guidance should be, and the constant questions that had no answers. My own father had been buried before I was old enough to remember his face. I'd only known him through stories, faded photographs, and the rare occasions when Otets wasn’t listening, and my mother's guard dropped enough to share a memory.

I won’t let my child grow up that way. Not with the same emptiness and questions.

Aleksandr looks away, his jaw grinding tight. “You think I'd let anything happen to them?”

“No,” I reply. “I think you'd burn this place to the ground to protect them.”

“Damn right I would.”

“If Morozov wants to hurt me, he doesn't need to touch me. He just needs to touch her.”

The thought alone is enough to make my blood boil. Sandy has already been through too much because of me and the world I dragged her into. Every night since the arrest, I'd woken in a cold sweat, images of her broken body haunting me. It isn’t just paranoia. It’s an experience. I know what men like Morozov are capable of.

He stands abruptly, fists clenched. “We should've killed him when we had the chance.”

“I should've made sure I did,” I breathe.

The memory of that night played through my mind.Morozov fought with the strength of a desperate man. His elbow caught me in the jaw, sending stars across my vision. I responded with a knee to his injured leg, drawing a howl of pain. We rolled again, and suddenly, there was nothing beneath my back but air—we'd reached the roof's edge, teetering on the precipice.

For a suspended moment, we stared at each other, my hand gripping his coat collar, his fingers digging into my arm. Mutual destruction was one wrong move away. In his eyes, I saw naked fear for the first time.

Something shifted in his expression—calculation replacing fear. “Perhaps another day, Popov.”

With surprising strength, he ripped himself from my grasp, simultaneously shoving me back from the edge. As I scrambled to maintain balance, he grabbed his dropped rope, snapping the carabiner to his belt. Before I could reach him, he threw himself backward off the roof to his escape.

I lean back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. “If I don't make it out of here, promise me something.”

Aleksandr doesn’t turn around. “Don't say that.”

“I need you to hear it.”

I release a heavy sigh. “Promise me that she'll never feel alone. That our child will know who I was. Not the monster the media paints me to be, but the man who loves them more than his own breath.”

I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen Aleksandr truly shaken. This is one of them. We've lost too much in this life. Parents, siblings, Bratva brothers, and parts of ourselves we can never get back. But this is different. This isn’t about the Bratva, territory, or respect. This is about family.

Aleksandr turns slowly, and for once, thepakhanis gone. What I see in his eyes isn’t power. It’s pain. The same pain I’m carrying.

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