Page 49 of Crowned

Kirill pokes his head through the door. “Your what?”

I explain to him about the restaurant and how I’m supposed to be working today. How am I supposed to carry plates around a restaurant for hours if I also need to rest? Perhaps another waitress can take my shifts for a week.

“I will take care of it,” Kirill says, and disappears, closing the door behind him.

With an uneasy feeling, I lay back down.

When I wake, the sun has shifted in the sky and hours must have passed. Someone is standing over me, and I realize it’s Elyah, holding a bowl. He crouches down next to my bed, and I realize he’s offering soup. It smells wonderful, and my stomach growls.

I want to tell him to get out and that I can look after myself, but once he settles the bowl in my lap and hands me the spoon, my willpower vanishes. Just one meal. I need strength if I’m going to tell them to leave.

To my surprise, it tastes wonderful. I didn’t think Elyah was the cooking type. “You made this?”

He clears his throat. “I bought it. I am not good cook. But I will get better,” he adds quickly.

I don’t know what to say to that.Don’t bothersounds churlish, seeing as I’m eating what he’s given me.

When I finish, Elyah takes the bowl from me. “Please do not collapse again. I cannot bear it.”

It’s on the tip of my tongue to snap back that I didn’t enjoy my trip in the ambulance either, but he looks so crushed already. He must have been terrified and reliving the day I miscarried. “You looked as scared as I felt at the hospital.”

“I was,solnyshko,” he says, cupping my face. “No one is going to hurt you. Not your father. Not that man’s family. You do not have to worry.”

I presume he means Maxim’s family, and I remember all over again that I killed a man last night. Then these three showed up. No wonder I fainted.

“I found out who betrayed Ivan to the feds,” Elyah says, and his expression is suddenly stormy.

“You did? Who?”

“Vasily,” he says through clenched teeth. “The police caught him with drugs, and instead of holding his hands up to what he did, he started informing on all of us.”

Vasily? The name doesn’t mean anything to me. “Who?”

Elyah stares at me. Then he laughs, but it’s a tired, sad laugh. “It is not funny, but somehow it is. Our lives were ruined by someone who was so far beneath your notice.”

I don’t like it when Elyah talks about me like I’m some lofty princess. I’m just me, pregnant and terrified. “He wasn’t beneath me. I just don’t remember anyone called Vasily ever coming to the house. As far as I’ve known all this time, Vasily didn’t do anything to hurt me. You did.”

Elyah’s expression flickers with pain and he reaches for me.

I put a hand on Elyah’s chest to fend him off. “Where is Vasily now?”

He drops his hands with a sigh, but his eyes are burning with hatred and defiance. “I killed him.”

Another man dead. I realize that Vasily probably died months ago, but the body count around us is really stacking up. One of Ivan’s own men betrayed him, and for such a stupid, careless reason. I wait to feel shocked, or even surprised, but the first word out of my mouth is, “Good.”

A smile spreads over his face. “Really? It is not the sort of thing that usually pleases a woman.”

Vasily tore Elyah and I apart over some drugs that he might not have even gone to prison over. He was the reason the police came into my home and I lost my baby. Laying here in this bed worrying over this new pregnancy seems to have given me a taste for blood and vengeance. “How did he die?”

Elyah flicks a dark look at me. “With a broken bottle in his guts while I screamed in his face that I was avenging you.” He stares at my stomach, covered by the blanket, and reaches out tentatively to touch me. “But you are right. It was not him who hurt you. It was me. I am sorry, Lilia.Prosti menya.”

Forgive me.

I stare at his hand on my belly. Elyah leans closer, reaching up to cup my jaw as his lips brush over mine. A soft question.

Do you still want me, solnyshko?

My eyes close and I just breathe, my lips parted. Elyah presses his mouth over mine with a soft groan and gathers me closer. His fingers skim my throat, and though it’s long healed, I feel the burn of the rope.

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