Page 59 of Twilight Sins

“No.”

I wince. It’s not like I expected Yakov to open up and tell me everything, but I thought there would be a discussion. After last night—after what Hope said—I thought it was a possibility.

Disappointment claws up my throat and burns my eyes. But I refuse to let him see me cry. Yakov doesn’t let me in. Why should I let him see what’s going on in my head? Not that he’d care either way.

“Glad we talked about it,” I snark. “Now that I’ve had my rec time, I’ll just head back to my cell.”

I storm down the path and towards the house. There are no footsteps behind me this time.

23

YAKOV

“Ever heard of a little thing called ‘sunlight’?” Nikandr squints into my office from the doorway, trying to make me out in the dark. “This is bleak.”

“Headache,” I mutter.

It’s not a lie. Not exactly. Sitting in front of a bright computer screen in a dark room for three hours has my eyes burning.

“Another reason to get out of this room.” Nik walks to the window and separates two of the blinds to peek out. Blinding sunlight slices through my office for a moment before he lets them snap closed again.

They were open earlier. It’s how I saw Hope and Luna talking in the garden. Then I suddenly had the overwhelming urge to go stretch my legs. Weird.

“My work is here.”

“My work, actually," Nik corrects. “What’s the point of me looking into Akim’s dealings if you’re going to handle it all yourself?”

“He has suppliers and fronts all over the city. We need to know which of them will crumble under a little pressure in case the Budimir tip doesn’t pan out.”

“I know. That is all information I’m looking into. You have other, more important things going on.”

“What is more important than the Bratva?”

“Oh, nothing big. Just a curvy blonde you’re shacking up with.” He tries and fails to bite back a smile. “The first woman I’ve ever seen you with outside of the dark corners of a club, now that I think about it.”

“The only reason Luna is here is because of Akim. I solve the Akim problem, I get rid of Luna.”

I’ve repeated that line to myself so often that it’s lost all meaning. Saying it out loud hits different.

“Sounds like another reason to take our time with him if you ask me,” he mumbles.

“I didn’t ask you.” I slam my laptop closed. “If Akim is going to start assassinating every woman I go to dinner with, that’s a problem we need to solve immediately.”

“It would be a problem if you went to dinner with women more often. The reason Akim sent someone to take Luna out is because she is the first woman you’ve been on a date with… ever? Is that right?”

“It wasn’t a date. It was a misunderstanding.”

A misunderstanding I jumped into with both feet. Not that I’m going to offer up that information. Nik is reading too much into all of this as it is.

My brother drops his chin and stares at me, clearly unconvinced. It’s the same look our father used to give us when we were kids when he caught us doing something we shouldn’t have done. I always covered for him, but our father never bought it.

“You’re the one who called and told me we were in danger. Should I have left her to die?”

“No,” he says. “But we have safehouses. Plenty of them. You could have put her up in one of those.”

The thought never even crossed my mind. I wanted Luna close to me, so I kept her close. I’m not in the habit of second-guessing my intuition.

“It’s safer here.”

---