Page 116 of Devil's Vows
“Are we done?” I’m still alive, and nobody has sent me out at the dead of night to go dig my own grave yet.
“For now. All of this still proves nothing, Gabriella. This case isn’t closed.” He circles the desk as I stand, itching to flee this room, the secrets I revealed, and these men’s intense scrutiny.
“What about—” I start, knowing the time isn’t right. For some things, there’s never a right time. “What about the marriage?”
“You meanourmarriage?”
“Yes.”
My voice is small, but I’m asking for clemency and protection from a man who would never have exchanged marriage vows if he knew I was just using him as a temporary hide-out. Nothing here is based on love—it’s all just business dealings, and I’m suddenly so sick of it, I could scream.
“You’re locked up now, Gabriella.” He gathers a few stray locks from my face and carefully hooks them behind my ear.His touch is so gentle, I could weep. “Don’t fight the cage,moya ptichka, you’ll only hurt yourself. Wait untilIdecide to forget to close it.”
There’s a promise of freedom in my future, but it’s going to be on his terms.
Or maybe it’s a trap he’s already setting, plotting a quiet, gentle death I wouldn’t see coming at all.
59
IVAN
Igor knocks on the door, and I nod at him. “Escort Mrs. Petrova to her room, and this time, for fuck’s sakes, make sure she doesn’t leave.”
“Yes, Pakhan.”
Gabriella shoots me a last glance, looking exhausted, and half of me wants to take her in my arms, carry her to bed, and hold her until she falls asleep—safe, with me.
The logical half tells me to watch my back.
Yuri and I wait until we can’t hear footsteps anymore, then he gets up and closes the door for good measure.
“What do you make of all that?” I reach for the vodka and pour us each another double shot. “To me, the way she talked…it all seems true.”
“Yes, she wasn’t lying. And if Milana guessed she speaks Russian, she isn’t made of spy material.” Yuri drags a hand over his face and shakes his head. “Which makes it a fucking fever dream, to be honest, what with clit piercings and all.”
Can’t surprise this old fucker. I bet he’s seen it all, too. “You’re telling me. Imagine having one wife with a piercing and then the second one, from a different world, has the exactsame…it’s a mind fuck. With Darya, I didn’t know…I thought it was just fun and games for her.” I was such a fucking idiot. “You have any idea which Bratva has this tradition?”
“Given that Darya had the same, and the tattoos” —he raises his glass to her discarded jewels, and in the light, the traces of his own removed tattoos almost glow— “it points in only one direction.”
“Chertnikov.”
The one man who was part of the same crime ring my father and Yuri belonged to in their youth. And my nemesis. Greedy for our network, our shipping operations, most probably plotting to kickstart and expand his fucking sex trafficking business on American soil.
Over my dead body.It’s a devil’s vow, because in many respects, I’m not a better man than him, but my vices have their limits. Clearly, Chertnikov has none, starting when his victims are young. Too fucking young.
I reach for the box with Darya’s things and stare at them, feeling in every part of me how I failed her. My whole being floods with regret. Darya never talked to me; she never opened up. Not like Gabriella had that night when she thought the girls had been kidnapped. Not like Gabriella did earlier when she spoke the truth about how she got pierced, or how she opened up to me while I was in the shower, giving herself pleasure, but baring her soul to me. No, Darya kept her trauma locked up, a monster inside scraping nails against the walls, driving her mad, silenced only by drugs.
I count the piercings in the box, and the total sends a chill down my spine. How many were her choice? How many were forced on her? I’ll never know. I’m only now seeing the bigger picture, thanks to Gabriella. Darya needed help, much more than I ever gave her, or had the simple human grace to try and understand. She never learned English, and we aren’t therapy people, but what if it would have helped her?
“I failed my wife. I failed Darya.” I close the lid, unable to look at the contents anymore. Each piece screams how weak I was, limited in myself by what I’ve been brought up to believe. “I didn’t help her, and the way I tried to help her get clean… Fuck. I should have done so much better.”
“Ivan. Don’t. It’s very hard to keep a person alive who only wants to die.” Yuri stands, comes around the desk, takes the box from me, and puts a hand on my shoulder. “We argued about this at length before you finally agreed Darya had to go. You did what you had to do to protect the girls. One of her pills would have killed little Katya. Damaged Irisha for life. Don’t regret you chose your girls’ safety over Darya’s inevitable death. And who knows what would have happened if Dimitri succeeded with the coup. For all we know, the instructions were for him to kill her, too.”
Fuck.Yuri is right.I wipe at my brow, the day suddenly too long. My first wife is dead, by my hand, but I have a new wife. For all I know, Gabriella is truly a lost innocent who has stumbled onto this battlefield, simply trying to find a way out of the madness. But this is war, and it only ends one way. Death.
But not ours…
I can’t lose Gabriella. If everything she told us is true, she’s suffered enough already. No woman—no girl—should go through any of that. I bite down on my jaw as images of Irisha and Katya flit through my mind. I’m struck again by Gabriella’s words, spoken with more passion than she probably registered:I’ve seen you with your girls and that’s why I stepped into this horrid bombed-out mausoleum, knowing you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t…She never completed her sentence, but I know what she wanted to say.I will never hurt her.
