Page 106 of Imperfect Desires

“You were nothing but a rabid dog with a crew,” I say. “And I was a kid.”

He puts his hands up, but I see the trembling. “You’re with Viktor now, right? You’ve made something of yourself. You think you’ve won. But you will always be nothing but that boy who I pulled from the gutters.”

Wrong words.

I grab him by the collar and slam him into the wall.

He gasps, the wind knocked out of him. I pull my knife from its sheath—not for the kill, just for the statement. I drag the tip down his cheek. Slowly. Deliberately. His whimper makes the hairs on my neck rise in satisfaction.

“You used to beat me for fun,” I whisper. “I remember every time you made me bleed just to feel powerful. Every time you called me nothing. Every time you used me.”

“I—I gave you a job!” he wheezes.

I punch him once, hard. Right in the mouth. Blood sprays across the floor.

“You gave me trauma,” I say.

Another punch. A rib cracks. He screams.

“Please—Lev—”

“For ten thousand dollars,” I hiss, grabbing his hair and yanking his head back, “you were going to kill me. A kid. For twenty grand. But now?”

I press my blade into the meat of his shoulder. “Now, I’m going to kill you… Not for twenty grand, but for touching what’s mine.”

He chokes on his blood as he tries to speak. “I…I…did not know.”

“You tried to force yourself on her. You tried to terminate my child. You didn’t just cross a line, Mendes.”

I lean in, my voice a breath.

“You declared war.”

His eyes dart to Viktor. “You going to let him do this?”

Viktor’s arms are crossed. “I would have loved to do it myself.”

I stare into Mendes’s pleading eyes, and at that moment, I don’t see power. I don’t see the soulless drug peddler. I see a coward bleeding and cornered. The thought of what he almost took from me fills me with rage, and I raise my gun, pressing it right between his eyes.

He tries one last time. “Lev, please—”

Boom.

The shot echoes, sharp and final. Mendes’s body slumps to the floor in a heap of flesh and regret. The silence after the gunshot is heavier than the blast itself. Blood pools beneath his head, soaking into the carpet. I stand over him for a long time. And then, slowly, I sheath my blade, holster my gun, and turn to Viktor.

“It’s done.”

He gives me a curt nod. Zasha’s already checking the hallway. I stare down at Mendes one last time, and my voice comes quiet.

“That was for Alina.”

Mendes’s body lies slumped at my feet, blood seeping into the thick Persian rug. His eyes are still open, blank and glassy, as if even in death he doesn’t understand that the world no longer spins around him.

Viktor gives Zasha a single nod.

Zasha pulls out his phone with no expression on his face. Two taps. That’s all it takes. Our cleaners will be here in fifteen minutes—ghost crew. No names, no prints, no mess left behind. The brownstone will look untouched by morning, like Mendes never existed.

I stare down at the man I once feared. The man who had almost ended me before I’d even begun. He looks smaller now. Human. And nothing about him deserves a second thought.

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