Page 93 of Kadra: The Unfeeling

Vernon leans back against the door, looking as broken as I feel right now. Why the fuck didn’t she say anything? Until a week ago you were just a memory to her…

“She is now that you all are here.” Vernon sighs as if he too is tired. “But before…” he takes a long pause before he continues. “She wasn’t planning on coming out of her war with those cunts…alive,” he says harshly, heartbreak lacing his tone. Vernon lets out a slow exhale. “She will cut my tongue if she finds out I told you but it’s worth it if you help her save herself. She doesn’t have much time left.” With that, he exits the room leaving me alone with the painful bomb he just dropped on me. I can’t breathe. Fuck. Walking towards the window, I stop when I see Kadra sitting on a bench in her garden surrounded by pretty flowers and looking so lovely and so full of life. From here you can’t see there’s something wrong with her. I move closer to the window and put my hand on the glass leaning on it. I look for any signs of that fucking disease but I don’t see anything different.

Just her.

Just my girl.

I’m so tired, Vitali. So tired.

Her sweet voice sounds in my mind hurting me. Ripping my heart to shreds.

She wasn’t planning on coming out of her war alive.

There’s a familiar ache in my chest, a sense of agony so profound it paralyzed me at that moment.

As I look at her sitting so peacefully, every single image of her I saved in my memory through the years flash through my mind hurting me but also giving me strength, I need when I feel like wreaking havoc on the world, on fucking life for being so goddamn cruel to her.

But I have a choice to make.

I can let this break me or I can shove down this pain and help her carry hers. I can make the woman who brought me back to life fall in love with her life.

Cancer is a scary fucking disease. One that has taken more lives than I care to think about right now but I’m not afraid of it. Because there’s no way in fucking hell that it’ll beat her. Not my Kadra.

Not the woman who has gone through hell and has come back swinging every single time. A little bruised yes but with her life. She has to stay and fight.

She can’t leave me. Leave us.

Kadra spent her entire life being surrounded by so much pain and hatred that she didn’t get the chance to look at the world outside and see the people who love her. She’s loved more than she realizes.

Then like a fucking storm that formed out of thin air the truth, her truth hits me at once. She’s going after very powerful and dangerous people and she didn’t plan on making it out alive. She was not going to fight for her life yet she took Azariel in.

It dawns on me.

Why him out of every other kid who was caught up in Beauregard’s cruelty?

It’s no secret that Kadra despises her father who disappeared off the face of the planet years ago. There were whispers that his daughter was the one who threw him in the Detroit River and left him for dead but I know my kotyonok. She’s cleverer and more ruthless than that.

She’s not done with her father just yet.

She dismantled years of his work and connections with powerful people around Detroit and in the states. She got rid of every man who followed the former Parisi boss and then recruited men that have not one drop of Italian blood in them.

She handed her older sister to Sebastian Kenton and then stood back and did nothing when the boss of Philadelphia took her little sister. She loves her sisters, there’s no way she would ever let them go so easily unless she needed them gone and safe from the war she intended on starting with pretty fucked up people.

Then the image of her burning down her family’s hotels comes to mind and so do the words I whispered to her so long ago.

Ruined legacies…

Azariel.

After a long second, the realization that she chose him to take her place hits me at once.

There’s not a more perfect and poetic ’fuck you’ to her father and her legacy then to leave a non-Italian heir in her place.

Fuck.

It’s a perfect plan. One that only someone as brilliant and as fucking strong as her could have ever come up with but there’s one flaw in it.

Me.

---