Page 128 of Only for Him
Like she was born for it, but she wasn’t.
No one was.
Someone made her this way.
Just like me.
Her hand doesn't leave my chest, and I don't want it to. I want her to plunge past the skin, crack through the ribs, and wrap her fingers around what’s left of my fucking heart.
“Timofey made me feel like I mattered,” I say. My voice is flat, but inside, it shreds. “I did whatever he asked. Shakedowns. Collections. Beatings. I was good at it. Fast, mean, and useful.”
I take a breath. It hurts, but she’s here, and that makes it hurt less.
“I never questioned a single order.”
"You were a child," she whispers. Her touch keeps me human while her eyes drag the confessions out of me.
I laugh, and it sounds like broken glass. “I stopped being a child the day I shattered a man’s hand over fifty rubles and watched him piss himself from the pain.”
She nods, and I see it in her eyes. Not pity but a quiet and brutal understanding that I’ve come to crave like oxygen.
She knows what it means to survive something that guts you from the inside out.
"What about this one?" Her fingers drift to my left bicep, to the sun with rays spreading across my skin.
"Prison." I flex unconsciously, the muscle tightening under her touch. Christ, the effort it’s taking not to fuck the story into her somehow, rather than having to speak it? Merciless. "Each ray represents a year of my sentence. Almost twenty in total."
"Jesus," she breathes. "What…?"
The question hangs between us, and I close my eyes, letting the water hammer my face.
"Russia went to war in Chechnya for the second time. And it created opportunities for men like Timofey. New territories. New markets. New merchandise."
"Girls," she says quietly.
I nod. "But not for me. I was still doing the work I knew: theft, protection, muscle. I was rising through the ranks, becoming someone Timofey trusted." I pause, the water running down my face like tears I'll never fucking allow. "And then I met Anastasia."
Her name still tastes like rust and regret.
It feels like a sin saying it in front of Giselle.
Like I’m betraying them both.
But my little viper doesn’t flinch. She waits, like a goddamn saint.
How can she be so perfect?
How can any woman be so much of what I need?
"She worked at a flower shop near one of our clubs. Brown hair. Green eyes.”
I don’t say: the kind of smile that made you believe in better things.
I know more now than I did then. She was beautiful, but that smile was wrong. There were no better things. Not for me.
And certainly not for her.
Some memories rot sweeter than they should.
