Page 13 of The Russian's Innocent Prey
The fall from the second-floor window should have killed me, but I’d landed in the garden beds our mother had plantedthat spring—soft earth and mulch that cushioned my fall even as it tore the skin from my palms and knees. I’d tried to go back in, tried to run toward the front door that was now a mouth of fire, but the heat pushed me back like a physical force.
The roof collapsed with a sound like thunder, sending sparks into the night sky like dying stars. And with it, any chance that Trev had made it through. Any chance of reaching the woman who’d sung us lullabies and kissed our scraped knees and promised us that love was stronger than the violence that surrounded our family’s world.
Except now I knew they’d survived. Had escaped through some other exit while I watched my childhood turn to cinders. Had been whisked away to safety while I spent the next twenty-seven years believing I’d failed to save them.
I drained the vodka glass and reached for the bottle, my gloved hands steady despite the chaos in my head. These hands that had been burned trying to reach through flames that weren’t there. These hands that bore scars from injuries I’d never actually received, because the fire that had marked me had been emotional, not physical.
The physical scars were real enough, though. Third-degree burns across both palms and up my forearms, souvenirs from grabbing a door handle that had been superheated by the inferno on the other side. I’d been trying to get back inside, trying to find some way to reach my family, when the metal had seared through my skin like a brand.
The doctors had said I was lucky—that nerve damage could have been permanent, that I might never have full use of my hands again. But luck was a relative concept when you were ten years old and the only family you had left was a father who’d taught you that pain was just another kind of weakness.
The funeral had been a performance. Two closed coffins because there hadn’t been enough left to justify open caskets, myfather standing stone-faced beside graves that contained lies. I’d thrown dirt on empty boxes while my real family started new lives on the other side of the world.
“Grief makes us stronger,” my father had told me that night, his voice carrying the kind of certainty that brooked no argument. “Your mother and brother are gone, Lev. But their memory will make you harder than any man who hasn’t lost everything.”
He’d been right about the hardness. Wrong about everything else.
After the funerals, he’d brought me deeper into his world—introduced me to men who spoke in violence and measured loyalty in blood. That’s where I’d met Maxim, another boy who’d been shaped by loss and taught that sentiment was a luxury we couldn’t afford. We’d bonded over shared damage, over the understanding that softness was a liability in a world where showing weakness could get you killed.
Except Maxim had something I didn’t—a sister who reminded him that gentleness still existed, that not everything beautiful had to be destroyed by proximity to power. Anya had been twelve when I’d first met her, all wild hair and fierce eyes and the kind of stubborn courage that should have gotten her killed in our world.
Instead, it had gotten under my skin and stayed there for over a decade.
The doorbell cut through my thoughts like a blade, sharp and insistent in the silence of my apartment. I froze, vodka bottle halfway to my lips, and listened for the sound to repeat. It did, longer this time, more demanding.
Nobody visited me here. Nobody knew the address except for a handful of people who understood that showing up unannounced was a good way to get shot first and identified later. My hand moved automatically to the Glock tucked underthe coffee table, muscle memory taking over as I rose from the couch on silent feet.
The security monitor showed me everything I needed to know and nothing I was prepared for. Anya stood in the hallway outside my door, her dark hair catching the harsh fluorescent lights and her face set in that expression of determined stubbornness I remembered from a dozen arguments with her brother.
What the fuck was she doing here?
My chest tightened as I stared at the screen, confusion and want and something close to panic battling for control of my thoughts. She looked older than I remembered, more polished, but there was something fragile in the set of her shoulders that made me want to reach through the camera and pull her against me.
Which was exactly why I should pretend I wasn’t home. Should let her stand in that hallway until she gave up and went back to whatever safe, sanitized life she’d built away from men like me.
Instead, I found myself moving toward the door, the blade in one hand and twenty-seven years of carefully constructed walls crumbling with every step.
I opened the door just wide enough to see her face, to confirm that she was real and not some vodka-induced hallucination born from grief and want and too many years of pretending I didn’t care.
“Anya.” Her name tasted like salvation and damnation on my tongue. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
She didn’t flinch at the profanity or the edge in my voice. Just looked at me with those hazel eyes that had haunted more dreams than I cared to count and said, “I came to see you.”
Such simple words. Such a complicated truth buried underneath them.
“You need to leave.” I gripped the door frame hard enough to feel the wood bite into my gloves. “Now.”
“No.”
“Anya—”
“I heard about your father.” Her voice was soft, careful, like she was approaching a wounded animal. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry. The word hit me like a physical blow because it was the first genuine condolence I’d received all day. Everyone else had offered business platitudes or strategic sympathy, but she was sorry in a way that reached past my defenses and touched something raw.
“I don’t need your pity.”
“It’s not pity.” She stepped closer, close enough that I could smell her perfume—something light and floral that belonged to garden parties and innocence, not to the hallway outside a killer’s apartment. “It’s—”
