Page 30 of Malevolent King

I swallowed thickly as conflicting thoughts warred in my head.

Nikolai waited, seeming to sense that I was wrestling with my darkness. If there was anyone who understood that, it was him.

“Enough,” he said after a long moment, his voice deeper than ever. “Give me your wrists.”

Just like that, he took the choice off my shoulders. It stung like a rejection. He wrapped the tie around my wrists gently, making it far too loose, and then bound the end around his wrist, pulling it together much tighter.

With my hands bound before me, pressed together in an obscene prayer gesture, he tugged me to my side, and I found myself lying on his shoulder, my hands clasped together on his broad chest. His scent and warmth made me feel things I never let myself feel. His other hand came around my back, and he tugged me closer.

I didn’t know what to say. It felt too intimate, too tender. It felt worse than if he’d forced himself anywhere else, strangely. It felt caring, and I couldn’t cope with that from this brutal, dangerous man. It was more dangerous than any other depraved thing I’d seen him do.

“Don’t overthink it, Sofia. Sleep now.”

“I can’t sleep in new places,” I muttered.

Despite my words, my eyes were growing heavier and heavier. I wasn’t lying. I had trouble sleeping at the best of times. I took sleeping tablets at home to manage a few hours. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept without them.

“Do you want to hear a bedtime story?” Nikolai said. There was something comforting about his voice.

The gently mocking question should have pissed me off, and it shouldn’t have worked, but it did. I was getting more and more sleepy. I should be too scared to sleep. I should work on getting away, but my body was sinking into a warm river, threatening to wash me downstream. I knew this feeling.

“You drugged me? Motherfucker,” I muttered.

“I couldn’t have you getting away again, prom queen.”

I snorted softly, my words unfiltered. “You don’t need me, Niko, and we both know it. I’m nothing to you.”

He took so long to answer. I jerked awake again when he murmured,“You’re wrong, Sofia. You’re still my prize, and you always will be.”

I felt myself drifting only moments later, my consciousness slipping away, but not before I felt Nikolai lightly press his face against the top of my head and inhale.

Then there was only darkness.

9

NIKOLAI

After Sofia fell asleep, I lay beside her, exhausted but tense. I needed to sleep. I needed to run. I needed to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.

Return to New York and challenge Kirill forpakhan? It wasn’t an enticing prospect. Support had already been split between us, and with the way things went down, I was fairly sure that my older brother would have won over any undecided bratva men.

Make peace with my only remaining family in the world and work together? I wasn’t sure we could manage it. Most of all, I felt no excitement about returning to New York or the bratva. Once again, I was a man without a place in this world, something that had dogged me since childhood.

For nearly a decade, killing Viktor had been my mission. My life’s work. Now that it was done, I felt adrift. Nothing tethered me to the world anymore. Without my revenge, I wasn’t sure who I was.

I reached for a cigarette. The light flared orange in the dying light from the shuttered window. I inhaled the nicotine and felt it hit my bloodstream with comforting predictability. My life had gone to fuck, and here I was, having an existential crisis at twenty-four years old.

Sofia moved, and I wondered for a second if the cigarette smoke had woken her before catching myself. Fucking hell. We weren’t a loving couple on vacation. She was my captive, and I’d drugged her water to get some peace from her constant attempts to run away.

You should let her go if it’s so annoying.

I pushed the voice of reason into a little corner of my mind. I should do a lot of things, and figuring out what the fuck I was going to do with my life was the first one.

Sofia moved again, and a groan left her. I stubbed out my cigarette and turned on my side, making sure the tie between us wasn’t waking her.

She was ungodly beautiful in the dim light. The kind of beauty that goddesses envied and wreaked havoc on the world to wipe out. All that fire and intelligence and rebellion, wrapped up in a devastating package, locked away from the world by her uncaring father.

What a waste.

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