Page 50 of Crimson Sin
The guilt gnaws at me with razor teeth. I was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to be in that car. The bomb had my name on it, not hers. But she took my keys that morning, laughing as she kissed my cheek and promised to surprise me with lunch from our favorite restaurant. I can still hear her voice, light and teasing, as she called over her shoulder that she would be back within the hour. That hour stretched into eternity.
Naomi will never understand what it means to lose someone that way. The phone call that shatters your world into fragments too small to piece back together. The moment when you realize that all your power, control, and carefully built empire mean nothing against the randomness of death. And yet I fear she will understand. Because if Viktor cannot reach me through force, he will get me through her. He already knows she has become my weakness that he can exploit.
I swore I would never give anyone that power over me again after Sasha died. I built walls higher than any fortress, surrounded myself with men who would die for me without question, and created a reputation so fearsome that my enemies thought twice before breathing my name. And yet here Naomi is, walking through the halls of my house, tearing down the walls I built brick by brick with nothing more than her presence. Herlaugh echoes through rooms that have known only silence. Her questions pierce through defenses I thought were impenetrable.
She has no idea what she has done to me, how she has unraveled years of careful control with her stubborn curiosity and unwavering integrity. The way she looks at me as if she sees something worth saving beneath all the blood on my hands. I want to believe her eyes, but I know what I am. I know what I have done. The bodies I have buried, the lives I have destroyed, and the choices I have made in the name of power and survival.
I pour myself a drink, the whiskey burning its way down my throat, but the fire does nothing to silence the storm inside me. I cannot sit still. My thoughts circle back to Viktor, the snake hiding underground, plotting from the shadows. He will not stop. He will strike again. And this time, he will not come for me directly. He will come for her.
Viktor is many things, but he is not stupid. He knows that taking Naomi would destroy me more completely than any bullet to the head. It would be Sasha all over again, but worse. Because this time, I would know it was coming. This time, I would have to live with the knowledge that my love is a death sentence.
The whiskey glass trembles in my hand before I set it down with care. I cannot afford to fall apart. Not when she needs my protection. Not when Viktor is circling like a vulture. But the walls of this house feel like they are suffocating me with memories and regret. The air is saturated with everything I have never confessed, and everything I have kept locked away.
I slam the glass onto the desk hard enough to crack it. The sound echoes through the office like a gunshot. I cannot breathe in this house tonight, not with Sasha's ghost and Naomi's questions closing in from every corner. The need to escape overwhelmsevery rational thought. I grab my keys and walk out, the heavy door closing behind me.
The Aston Martin purrs to life beneath my hands, the engine's growl a welcome distraction from the chaos in my head. Chicago streets stretch before me, slick with rain and reflecting the neon glow of late-night establishments. The city sleeps restlessly, unaware that its most dangerous son is driving through its veins with nowhere to go but toward the dead.
The drive is long, the road slick with rain that patters against the windshield in a rhythm that matches my heartbeat. Chicago at night is a graveyard of broken promises and ambition, but I know where I'm going. The cemetery calls to me like a siren song, offering the only conversation partners who will never judge, never question, or demand more than I can give.
The wrought iron gates stand open, as if expecting my arrival. I have been here so many times that the security guard no longer bothers to check my identification. He nods from his booth, recognizing the man who visits graves at ungodly hours and leaves flowers that wilt in the wind. The cemetery is empty at this hour, nothing but rows of stones glistening beneath the streetlamps like teeth in a skull's grin.
My boots sink into the wet earth as I make my way toward the two graves side by side: my mother and my fiancée. My legacy and my loss, bound together in silence. The groundskeeper keeps the area immaculate, the marble polished to mirror brightness, the flower beds weeded and maintained. Money ensures that even in death, the women who shaped me are treated with the respect they demanded in life.
Galina Zorin. Even carved into stone, her name feels like a command. I stare at the elaborate headstone, its surface adornedwith roses and Russian text that translates to “Matriarch Eternal.” She would have approved of the grandiosity, the way her name dominates the space around it. I can almost hear her voice in the wind, reminding me that weakness is a risk the Zorin bloodline cannot afford.
She raised me to be her successor, but she never taught me how to love without destroying. Her lessons were about power, control, and the systematic elimination of anyone who posed a threat to our empire. Emotion was a liability to be exploited in others and eradicated in ourselves. She would spit at what I've become, and the way I have allowed a museum intern to penetrate defenses she spent decades teaching me to build. She would call Naomi a mistake that would burn everything I built. Maybe she is right. But for the first time in my life, I do not care what Galina Zorin would think.
Beside her lies Sasha. The difference between their headstones tells the story of my heart. Where my mother's grave speaks of power and dominance, Sasha's whispers of love and loss. Simple white marble engraved with her name and dates that bracket a life cut impossibly short. No grand declarations, no family crests or intimidating inscriptions. Just “Beloved” at the bottom, the single word that encompasses everything she was to me.
I kneel in the mud before her grave, not caring that the damp earth stains my trousers. My fingers trace her name carved into the stone, each letter as familiar as my own. Sasha Sokolova. Twenty-two years carved down into dates that cannot contain the magnitude of what was lost. Her smile lives only in my memory now, but it burns there with the intensity of a star.
She believed I could be more than my mother's son. She saw something in me that no one else had ever bothered to look for, some spark of humanity that had survived Galina's relentlessconditioning. Sasha would sit with me after particularly brutal days, her fingers combing through my hair as she murmured about art and hope and the possibility of redemption. She painted portraits of me that showed a man I didn't recognize, softer around the edges, capable of gentleness.
She was wrong, of course. I buried her with that illusion. The man she believed in died the moment the car exploded in a parking lot six blocks from our favorite restaurant. What emerged from the ashes was exactly what Galina had always intended: a creature of vengeance and calculated brutality who could order executions over breakfast and sleep soundly afterward.
But Naomi makes me remember that other version of myself, the one Sasha had faith in. When she looks at me, I see echoes of that same belief, that same stubborn insistence that I am more than the sum of my sins. It terrifies me because I know how this story ends. I know what happens to women who love me. They become targets, collateral damage in wars they never chose to fight.
The rain starts again, soft at first, then harder, soaking through my coat until I feel like the ground is trying to drag me under. I let it. The cold water runs down my face, mixing salt with sky, and for once, I do not try to maintain the mask of invincibility. I kneel in the storm and let the ghosts speak their truth. Galina demanding obedience, reminding me that sentiment is a luxury that will destroy everything we built. Sasha whispering forgiveness I will never deserve, her voice as gentle as it was the last time I heard it.
And threading through both their voices, Naomi's words from earlier, alive and insistent, pulling me back from the grave even when I do not want to return. She refuses to let me disappearinto the darkness that has claimed so much of my life. Her questions force me to confront truths I have buried beneath years of carefully forged numbness.
Hours pass before I leave. The storm moves on, leaving the cemetery washed clean and gleaming under the streetlights. The drive back is silent, the city still dripping from the rain like tears on a mourner's face. My clothes are soaked through, my hair plastered to my skull, but I feel lighter as if the buried secrets are arranged differently across my shoulders.
By the time I step into the mansion, dawn is brushing faint light against the windows. The house feels different now, less like a mausoleum and more like a place where the living might actually exist. I find Naomi in the library, curled on the sofa. A book lies in her lap, thick and scholarly, probably one she brought from the museum.
She is not asleep, though her eyes are glazed with exhaustion. She lifts them to me as I enter, and for a moment, I cannot breathe. There is no judgment in her gaze, no fear or condemnation. Only concern and something that looks dangerously close to love. She takes in my rain-soaked appearance and the mud on my shoes.
I take the chair across from her, but the distance feels unbearable. Every instinct screams at me to maintain space, to keep her at arm's length where she cannot see too deeply into the wreckage of my soul. But the night has stripped away too many defenses. I am raw, exposed, and bleeding from wounds I thought had healed years ago.
Her voice is quiet when she asks, “Where did you go?”
“To the cemetery.” My words are rough, dragged from my throat with unsaid things. “I needed to think.”
Her eyes soften, though she doesn't speak at first. She only closes the book and sets it aside.
“My mother is buried there,” I continue, the words coming easier now. “And Sasha.”
Her lips part as if she recognizes the name, though I have never given it to her before this moment. “The locked room,” she whispers. It’s not a question.
