Page 9 of Captured By the Masked BRATVA
Something in my chest twists. I know that kind of emptiness; it’s been my shadow for months. “Maybe that’s what this is,” I whisper. “Two people trying to remember how to feel.”
He studies me for a moment, then reaches for my hand. His fingers close around mine, rough and warm. “You shouldn’t have had to find it with me.”
“I don’t think I could have found it with anyone else.” The words leave before I can stop them. They hang there, solid and true.
He shakes his head, staring at our joined hands. “You don’t know what I am, Elena.”
“I know enough of our world to know what you are, Artem.”
We sit there in the dim light, breathing the same air, trying to find a place for what we’ve just done. The room swells with heat and guilt and something dangerously close to peace. For the first time in months, the ache in my chest isn’t only grief, it’s the ache of being alive and I don’t want to lose it.
The night stretches around us like a held breath. The city hums below, but up here everything is still. Artem lies on his back beside me, one arm draped across his chest, eyes fixed on the ceiling as if it might give him answers. The sheet has slipped low on his hips, and the sight of him, bare, quiet, and unguarded, does something strange to my heart.
I don’t know what to say, so I listen to the rhythm of his breathing, the steady rise and fall that feels almost fragile. I wonder if he’s counting each breath, the way I do when I’m afraid of waking the pain that sleeps inside me.
After a while I whisper, “You play piano, don’t you?”
His gaze cuts to me, surprised. “How would you know that?”
“Lev told me,” I say. “He said your hands were too precise for the kind of life you have to live. He said you could have been a musician.”
A muscle jumps in his jaw. “He said that?”
I nod. “He said you used to argue about it.”
The silence that follows is heavier than any confession. His eyes flicker away from mine, toward the window, where the skyline bleeds silver into the dark. “It wasn’t just an argument,” he says finally. “It was the last thing we talked about. I told him his place was with the family not running off to some fancy music school thousands of miles away. He told me I’d stopped hearing anything but orders.” He lets out a slow breath. “He was right.”
The words land heavy in my chest. “Artem…”
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he goes on, voice low. “But part of me was jealous too. Jealous that he could go and live his dream.” His hand curls into a fist on the sheet. “I didn’t know I was driving him toward the fight that would kill him.”
I sit up, pull the sheet around me, and touch his shoulder. The tension there feels like steel under my palm. “You couldn’t have known.”
He looks up at me then, eyes raw. “But I do now.”
There’s nothing to say to that. The truth sits between us, quiet and unbearable.
I swallow. “He loved the violin. He said it was like a conversation with himself. He wanted to teach, one day. He said people forget that music isn’t about perfection, it’s about emotion. Feeling things we can’t always put a name to.”
Artem’s mouth twists. “Sounds like him.”
“I used to want that too,” I admit. “To make something that mattered. To create beauty that could survive me. But after he died, I couldn’t touch the strings. It felt wrong, like I’d stolen his voice. Tonight was the first time I’ve played a cello since he died.”
He shifts closer, his fingers brushing my wrist, tracing the faint veins beneath my skin. “It was his favourite piece.”
The words undo something inside me. “I know.”
“Maybe you should start again,” he offers.
I smile weakly, “I don’t know if I can remember how to without the pain.”
His thumb strokes the inside of my wrist, slow and deliberate. “Then let me help you remember.”
It’s such a simple sentence, but it feels like a promise. He doesn’t mean just the music. He means breathing again. Feeling again.
We stay there, our bodies inches apart, the silence between us no longer hollow but full of something tentative and alive. The tension has changed; it’s softer now, edged with reverence instead of rage.
When he leans in, it isn’t the desperate hunger from before. It’s quieter, a slow, inevitable pull, like gravity remembering its purpose. The kiss is warm and soft and touches parts of me I didn’t know longed to be touched.
