Page 61 of Tarnished Tyrant (Zhukova Bratva 1)

“I fucking know I’m not your mother, Elise!” I shout in her face. She’s so shocked she stumbles back a step. A sick part of me finds enjoyment in her surprise. “Because I take care of you. I make sure you’re fed and clothed. I care whether you get an education and grow up to be a decent human being. And our mom doesn’t do any of that shit. So if you’re so unhappy here, why don’t you go back and live with her?”

The unloading feels amazing. Like dropping a massive weight I’ve been carrying for eight weeks.

But the moment the weight is gone, I realize I haven’t just dropped it on the ground. I’ve hung it around the neck of my baby sister.

Elise sags. Her lower lip trembles, and just like that, my heart cracks.

I reach for her. “Shit, Elise. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

Just as a tear rolls down her cheek, Elise spins around and storms into her room. Before I can even consider following her, she bolts the door closed.

“Fuck,” I groan.

“She was being a brat.”

I glance at Nikolai. “Welcome to the teen years.”

“She can’t expect you to just take that shit,” he says. “At work, it’s Roger—”

“And you,” I add.

“That’s different and you know it,” he says. “Roger harasses you at work. Then you come home to her talking to you like that. You have to stand up for yourself, Belle.”

I sigh. “There’s a difference between standing up for myself and being cruel. I… I shouldn’t have said that stuff about our mom.”

“Was it true?”

I hesitate. Nikolai steps around me, catching my gaze. “Was everything you said true?”

“That doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to say it,” I answer. “Elise has gone through a lot with our mom. I shouldn’t have poked her wounds like that.”

The light that was coming out from under her door is already off. I want to knock and talk this out, but I have to work on Elise’s timeline. Which usually involves at least twenty-four hours to pout and then another twenty-four hours to be shitty to me before she’s ready to make amends.

Nikolai’s thumb brushes the soft skin behind my ear. “What about your wounds?”

“I’m fine,” I say, a bit too quickly to be convincing.

He arches a brow. “You’re a really shitty liar.”

His words are as rough as ever, but he’s touching me like I’m breakable. I should hate it. I’ve never wanted to be a victim. Yet another poor soul suffering in the cycle of toxic parenting and drug addiction.

But the way Nikolai is looking at me? It makes me want to fall into his arms and hide. I want him to hold me and tell me everything will be okay.

Which is absolutely, completelynotokay.

Not only because I’ll be back home in less than a week, hundreds of miles from Nikolai. But because if life has taught me anything, it’s that no one is going to cuddle me close and solve my problems.

I have to solve them myself.

So I do the impossible—I pull away from him and walk into the kitchenette for a drink of water. “Are you thirsty?”

He shakes his head, so I pour myself a glass and chug the entire thing. When I turn back, he is standing on the other side of the island with a cell phone in his hand.

“I grabbed this from Elise’s pocket as we were coming inside.”

“Her phone?” I ask, even though I can see the familiar hot pink sticker peeling off of the back.

“I can have some tracking software put in if you’re worried about her,” he offers. “She’d never know it was there. And that way, you’d know where she was. Here or back home.”

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