Page 52 of Scars He Gave Me (Bratva Crime Syndicate 2)

He is even faster than I expected, faster still than he was in the hotel room the night he burst out of that closet and saved me from Alvin and the Italians. His hand clamps down on my wrist and he yanks me into his embrace. I try to struggle free, but he’s got me shackled to him.

“You think you know everything, Corrie,” he breathes. He smells like the whiskey he just drank, like a warrior who just came home from a fight with battlefield adrenaline still running through his veins. “But you don’t know the half of it.”

I try to swallow back my fear as I stare him dead in the eyes—which is far harder and scarier than I might’ve guessed. “Then show me.”

Instead of responding with anything more than a Cro-Magnon grunt, he drags me down the hall, into his office, and pushes me into the chair behind his desk. I swear to God, if he tells me to stay put like I’m a little dog, I’m going to kick him in his special boy place.

But he doesn’t. Instead, he leans over me to open his laptop, then logs in and clicks a file on the desktop.

Crime scene photos—the kind that look like they were taken before the police arrived—flash onto the screen in thumbnail-size images.

Blood.

Guts.

Gore. It’s all hideous and nauseating.

He clicks through a few before my stomach turns and I close the screen on his fingers.

“Well if the point was to make me feel sick, let me be the first to congratulate you on a job well done.”

He pulls his hand free and spins the chair then leans a hand on each of the arms so we’re almost nose to nose. “Those mutilated bodies were my men and their families. Loyal Russian men killed by Roberto Totti and his crew.” He sighs. “He knows who you are, I guarantee it. And he won’t care if you love me or hate me. He will only care that you mean something to me.”

Oh.

That I mean something to him.That’s—well, that’s a lot. It’s as close as either of us have come since high school to admitting something like that. I want to ask for more—“What do I mean, exactly?”—but it’s not the time. And the bloody, decapitated bodies still swimming through my head do not set a romantic kind of mood.

It’s all too much. I need space. Time to sort out how being here with him makes me feel.

I need what I’ve always needed when the world gets overwhelming: to work. To be useful. Right now, that means I need to figure out how Sentinel is involved in this Flash Bomb fiasco that’s terrorizing the Russian businesses in town.

I take a deep breath. Most of all, I need Tomas to see why I need those things. He might not be my boss or my boyfriend. But I want him to understand. I want him to agree.

“If I mean something to you”—I’m calmer now, reaching out to tangle my trembling fingers in his hair—“you know how important my job is to me. How much I want to help you and the businesses. But I need you to trust that I can take care of myself.”

He’s wavering. “Don’t ask me to let you risk your life, Corrie.” But his eyelids flutter shut when I push my fingers through his hair.

“Please don’t ask me to give up something I love because you need to save me from monsters that haven’t even come for me yet.”

“What if I’m too late when they do come?” He pulls me to my feet and circles my waist with his arms. “I don’t want to save you when they get you. I want to protect you before they come for you.”

There’s a long, tense pause hanging in the air between us. I don’t know what he’s going to say next.

But when he leans his forehead against mine, I know I’ve won.

He sighs. “Okay. I’ll make a deal with you.”

* * *

And that’s how I end up with my own personal bodyguard the next day who stands at the elevator watching me, who follows me down the hall to the bathroom, who sits at a nearby table when Leila and I go to the coffee shop, and yet doesn’t speak. Not. A. Word.

He’s tall, because I think it must be a law in Russia that all male children grow to a certain height or else they get jettisoned into space or something. And he’s dark, like Tomas but without the designer stubble and artfully messy hair. He’s more buttoned down, more scarred. From temple to jaw, across his chin, and along the other side of his jaw, giving the impression of a second smile, which would be a stretch considering I don’t know if he’s ever tried a first smile. And his name is Evgeni. Not that he told me. Tomas did.

Also, he’s supposed to be watching me, as far as I understand, but when Leila walks into the bullpen, his gaze follows her. And when we went for coffee earlier, I’m almost certain he checked out her ass. Maybe Evgeni isn’t a robot after all.

Right now, Leila standing at my desk, leaning over, and if the Russian Terminator is watching, he’s probably getting a full-frontal view of her boobs down the front of her shirt. “So how long is he going to be with us?” she whispers.

I shrug. “Until I don’t need him anymore, I guess.”

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