Page 6 of Captured By the Masked BRATVA
“We’re wearing masks. We could be anyone.” The words sound weak because they are. Now they are out in the air it sounds ridiculous. Ludicrous. Pathetic.
“I can’t.” His voice drops and the words drop straight to the place I have been carrying all of this alone. There’s no triumph in them, no victory. There’s only a tired, dangerous kind of tenderness.
Something loosens inside me. It is not safety. It is more like a peal of alarm. I take a breath.
He closes the last inches between us. His hand comes up to cup the side of my face with surprising gentleness. The touch is an instruction and a confession, and the contact makes mybreath hitch. His thumb rests against my cheek, warm and steady.
He lifts his fingers to the ribbons tying my mask in place and pulls them apart, letting it drop to the floor between us.
Something older than reason takes over. It feels like grief finding a sudden, impossible space to rest in. Our mouths meet without ceremony. It is a slow, bewildering contact that is more question than answer. My first sensation is the sharpness of disbelief, the idea that this can’t be happening, layered over a deeper, stranger clarity that yes, this is happening and it matters.
When we part a moment later we’re both breathing too fast. The air between us tastes like metal and something sweeter, like the echo of the cello. He looks as shocked as I feel. His hand falls from my face and rests at his side, as if he’s surprised to discover it there.
“I didn’t mean to,” he says, voice raw and immediate. “I don’t know why I did that.”
Neither do I, not fully. I wanted to be punished. I practised the last lines of my life until they fit perfectly. Instead I’m standing in a hotel suite with Lev’s brother, my lips still tingling from his, my whole body suddenly alive in a way that frightens me more than any threat ever did.
The room is unbearably quiet. Outside the city hums on. I try to collect myself, to fold this new fact into the ledger of my life, but the pages won’t take it. For the first time since losing Lev, something else reaches toward me that isn’t grief or duty. That thing is terrifying and urgent and not at all tidy. I don’t know the name for it yet. I only know that it’s there, and that neither of us understands how the silence between us broke into that single, reckless kiss.
My fingers move before my brain can argue with them. I reach up and curve my hand toward the ribbon of his mask as if it is the most natural thing in the world to unmake the distance between us. For a second he stops me, not with force but with a question in the way his hands close over mine and hold them against his face. His palms are warm, the skin rough at the heel where he has gripped a weapon too many times. He inhales, shallow and fast, and I feel the tremor of it through my bones.
His hold is not a restraint so much as an invitation to be still. He presses my hands to his cheek and the heat from him spreads under my skin. There’s a care in that touch that I never expected from a man who trained himself on hate. The lamp light sketches the planes of his face, picks out the gold tones in his dark blond hair.
He doesn’t speak. His fingers flex lightly against the backs of my hands as if checking I’m really there. Then he shifts, slow and careful, and the ribbons untie. For a heartbeat the world holds its breath with me. My palms rest against his cheek while the last of the fabric lifts away and I see him properly, not through the shape of a story I have been telling myself for months but as he is right now, raw, unadorned and very much alive.
There is Lev in the tilt of his mouth and in the slope of his cheekbones and there is no Lev at all in the hard line around his jaw. The resemblance is a cruel mirror. Seeing it up close is like reopening a wound I have covered for months. At the same time, the sight of him is absurdly ordinary; he’s not a legend or a figure made of fury. He’s a man, a man with a thin scar along his top lip. A man who looks as astonished as I feel.
I rest my forehead against his for the barest second, and the contact is a confession that I can’t shape into words. Something shifts in the quiet between us, a small, irrevocable loosening.The pull I felt earlier when we kissed deepens into a question that tastes like fear and hope.
Then I lift onto my tiptoes and kiss him again.
Artem
Her mouth is still against mine when the world stops making sense. Every thought I’ve ever had about vengeance, about control, disintegrates under the soft press of her lips. I taste salt and something sweet, and I realise it’s her tears.
For a heartbeat I don’t move. I’m terrified that if I breathe she’ll vanish, and I’ll be left again with nothing but ghosts. But she doesn’t. She’s right here, warm, trembling, alive. My hands find her waist without permission. The soft satin of her dress a thin barrier between us that sends fire up my spine.
The heat between us changes everything. It burns through months of anger and replaces it with something quieter, something that feels like peace, and that scares me more than the hatred ever did. I haven’t known silence inside my head since Lev died. Yet now, with her body pressed against mine, the noise fades.
I pull back just enough to look at her. The masks are gone, the lies I told myself with them. She’s all flushed skin and glass-bright eyes, breathing hard. I should push her away, remind myself who she is and what she represents. Instead I trace the edge of her jaw with my thumb, the simple human contact undoing me in ways violence never could.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I whisper. “I can’t—” The words die. There’s nothing I can’t do; there’s only what I shouldn’t do.
She tilts her face into my hand, eyes closing like she’s already chosen her side. That small act of trust snaps what’s left of my control. I drag her against me and kiss her again, deeper this time, desperate, the kind of kiss that feels like breaking open a wound to let the poison out. She gasps into my mouth, her hands clutching my shoulders, and I know I’m lost.
I tear my lips from hers long enough to breathe against her skin. “This doesn’t change anything…” My voice is rough, almost unrecognisable. “I’ll ruin you. You won’t survive the night.”
She doesn’t flinch. Her lips tremble into something like a smile. She looks at me like the threat is a promise she’s been waiting her whole life to hear. “I never expected to,” she whispers.
That’s the moment the restraint snaps. The need to destroy the world for what it took from me dissolves into the need to devastateher. The ache in my chest shifts into something alive and terrifyingly human. My hand slides up the curve of her spine, anchoring her to me as I exhale against her ear, “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“I do,” she says, voice trembling but certain. “I don’t care if it destroys me. If this is the last thing I feel so be it.”
Everything inside me twists. Months of rage and hollow nights collapse into something reckless and alive. The air between us hums. I can taste the change, metal, champagne, her breath. My self-control is a fraying wire; one more touch and it will snap.
I reach for her throat, not to hurt her but to feel her pulse hammer against my palm. It’s the first real thing I’ve felt since Lev died. Her skin warms under my hand, and the anger that’s driven me for so long quiets into a single, terrifying truth: right now I want her more than I want vengeance.
The next heartbeat breaks me. I crush my mouth to hers, and she answers like she’s been waiting for this insane madness all her life. Her fingers twist in my shirt, dragging me closer until there’s no space left. The kiss is rough, desperate, an exorcism of everything we’ve both buried. When I pull her into me, she comes willingly, her body arching into mine, soft where I am nothing but hard lines of ruin.
