Page 137 of Mafia King's Broken Vow
“She’s not my vulnerability,” I continue, watching terror bloom in his expression. “She’s the one thing that was keeping me from becoming exactly what you’re about to meet.”
His reinforcements advance, but they’re seconds too late. I snap his forearm at the joint, bone cracking audibly. Pablo crumples, sliding down the wall in a broken heap.
“Should have put a bullet in my head when you had the chance,” I tell him, retrieving his blade, getting ready for the kill.
“Yakov.” Mila’s voice slices through my bloodlust. She’s somehow freed herself, kneeling beside Aleksander, her gaze locked on mine. “Don’t.”
For one moment, I teeter on the edge. Every instinct screams to end him. But Mila watches with unwavering faith, not in what I am, but what I will choose to be.
I drive the knife into the wall beside his head instead of through his throat.
“That mercy came from her, not me,” I tell his broken form.
Heavy footsteps announce Nikolai and Igor’s arrival, weapons drawn as they assess the wreckage. Pablo’s surviving men surrender immediately, recognizing certain death when they see it.
“Cutting it close,” I tell Nikolai, but my attention is already consumed by Mila. I reach her in two strides, pulling her against me with a desperate need to confirm she’s real, whole, mine.
She melts against me. I breathe her in—copper and terror, and underneath it all, that intoxicating essence that belongs to her alone. My palm cups her skull, fingers tangling in her hair as I catalog every injury with ruthless precision despite my hammering pulse.
“Tell me where else you’re hurt.” The command scrapes raw from my throat.
“I’m fine,” she breathes, fists twisted in my blood-soaked shirt. “You found me. I never doubted you would.”
“Never question it,” I vow, pressing our foreheads together while chaos swirls around us. “I’ll tear this world apart before I lose you.”
Nikolai’s team restrains Pablo and his broken crew while Igor tends to Aleksander. The room pulses with the aftershocks of brutal violence, but reality has compressed to this: her ragged breathing, her pulse syncing with mine, her body shaking with relief.
“You pulled back,” she whispers for my ears alone. “When killing him would have been easier.”
I trace the shallow cut marring her throat, fury reigniting at Pablo’s mark on her skin. “Not restraint,” I correct, tone granite. “Selection. I chose the man you see in me over the butcher that lives within.”
She looks at me, blazing with something that devastates me more completely than bullets ever could. “That’s exactly why I love you. Not in spite of your darkness, but because you fight it. For me. For us.”
I claim her mouth desperately, tasting salt and iron and her. The kiss brands us both, a savage declaration that death has failed again to tear us apart. She arches into me with instinctiverecognition, as if even here, drowning in violence, we can’t resist the gravity pulling us together.
When we break apart, I keep her close, memorizing every breath. “I love you beyond reason,” I admit, the words strength instead of weakness. “More than power, more than survival, more than everything I’ve ever wanted.”
Her smile cuts through pain and terror, igniting something in my chest I’d assumed was dead. Something the monster can’t comprehend, but the man would kill to protect.
Redemption.
41
AFTER THE STORM
MILA
The hospital room blazes with fluorescent hostility, too clean for the violence we’ve survived. I trace the bandage wrapping my arm where Pablo’s blade carved through flesh. Minor, the doctor said. A few stitches.
Nothing about the last twenty-four hours deserves that word.
I close my eyes, and the memories detonate—Pablo’s steel kissing my throat, Aleksander crumpled and bleeding, Yakov materializing from shadow to destroy everything in his path. The images blur together through adrenaline and terror—his fluid movement through darkness, bones snapping under his hands, the lethal certainty burning in his eyes when he found me.
My hands shake as I open my eyes. Not from fear, from something more dangerous. Relief and shock and crushing gratitude that we both walked away breathing.
This bed feels wrong, but I can’t leave yet. Aleksander lies in intensive care down the hall, shattered ribs, concussion, internal bleeding they barely controlled. He’ll survive. We all will because of Yakov.
My Yakov, who unleashed the beast to save me, then chose humanity when it mattered most.
