Page 62 of Savage Love

It’s telling that I’m already looking forward to the moment when I’m going to be on the return flight home.

It’s not until I’m there and at work that I’m able to push thoughts of her away. Nico greets me, filling me in on what he’s been doing in my absence and giving me the files of the six trainees that I’ll be overseeing. “You’ve given me some big shoes to fill,” he says with a chuckle as he follows me down to Viktor’s office. “I thought I had a lot to do before, but the list got twice as long when I took over.”

“Tell Viktor you need a new version of you to replace yourself,” I tell him wryly as we walk into the office. “Shouldn’t all be on your shoulders. And once the baby comes, I won’t be able to come up here but once every so often.”

“I heard. Congratulations,” Nico offers, and I give him a tight smile as we step inside, and he stands back a little, letting me talk to Viktor in semi-privacy.

Viktor fills me in on the trainees, his opinion of them, and what he wants me to look out for. When he’s finished, he pauses, as if considering something. “Get a drink with me tonight,” he says finally. “I’d like to hear how things have been going for you. Talk a little. If you don’t have anywhere else to be.”

My evening plans had involved drinking, although I’d intended to be alone. I have a feeling I know what questions Viktor might have for me, what he wants to talk about, and it’s not a topic I want to address. But I also know he’s been more than accommodating, letting me go to Boston instead of insisting that I move Elena here, as he’d have been well within his right to do. After so many years of working together, he’s more my friend than an employer, and I don’t have the heart to tell him no.

“Sure thing,” I tell him as I pick up the files. “I’ll meet you after.”

—

By the time I get there, Viktor is already at the bar, seated in a booth further back with a glass of vodka in front of him and a book open on the table. He looks up as I walk in, motioning to a passing waitress and nodding at his glass to imply she should get another.

“There’ll be a drink for you momentarily,” he says as I sit down in the leather-backed booth. The bar is one we’ve drank at in the past–high-end and polished, all leather and mahogany, the faint scent of tobacco creeping in from the smoking room at the back. “How are things?”

“As far as the trainees?” I accept the glass from the waitress, taking an immediate sip. It’s smooth, expensive vodka, and I can feel it starting to burn away a little of my tension almost immediately. “They’re all excellent choices, I think. They all passed their tests with flying colors, and I can’t see anything in their files to indicate that they might not be assets, either to you or to the Syndicate. Although,” I chuckle, taking another drink, “I think you ought to give one of them Nico’s job, before you run him into the ground.”

“I’m already looking for someone to fill his position, now that he’s doing more of your work,” Viktor says wryly, “I expect that once the baby comes, I might get you up here every four to six months for a while, at best. I know from experience how the time gets away from you with a newborn.”

“More than most, I’d expect,” I tell him with a laugh. Caterina had twins, and it’s surprising to no one that she hasn’t gotten pregnant again yet, with two stepdaughtersandtwins.

“You’re not wrong.” Viktor sips the last of his drink and motions for another. “But that’s not what I was asking about. I wanted to know how things are with Elena.”

“As well as can be expected.” My response is purposefully terse, hoping I can stop the conversation in its tracks. I don’t want to tug apart the threads of everything going on in my marriage and examine them more closely, but I have a feeling that Viktor might not be willing to give me a choice.

Viktor is quiet for a long moment, until his drink arrives, and then he sits there for a moment longer, pondering the clear liquid as he swirls it. “I know you better than most,” he says finally, his voice low and serious. “I’ve known you for years, since Vladimir reassigned you to my family. I know more about your past than anyone, except maybe your wife. And I understand what you’re struggling with.”

“Do you?” I ask the question baldly, both because I know we’re here as friends and I can speak plainly—and because I want Viktor to know just how little I want to have this conversation. If he’s going to press, then I want him to understand I’ll push back.

“I think so.” Viktor takes a sip of his drink. “I lost my first wife too, Levin. You know that. I found her dead, too.”

“Your marriage was in a bad place when she died.” I look at him. “I’m not trying to compare, Viktor. But you know it’s not the same. My marriage with Lidiya was just beginning. It was hopeful. It was the start of something. Vera—”

“Vera was different. I know that. She took her own life; it wasn’t taken from her. Our marriage was volatile by that point. But I loved her, Levin. I loved her even when I hated her.” Viktor’s expression is tight, old grief pressing at the edges of it as he remembers. “I found her in a bathtub full of blood. I found out that I’d lost a wife and a child in that moment. There are things that are different, yes, but also things that are very much the same. And I grieved her, Levin—deeply.”

He takes a breath and another deep drink of his vodka. “You know as well as I do that I intended to never make a marriage for love again. That I determined that any woman I married would be for heirs and the good of my Bratva, not because I’d fallen prey to my own emotions. I tried to make Sofia my wife, to gain territory from the Romanos, and when that failed, I took Caterina. It was never meant to be for love. I fought against it, hard. I fought against the changes that she wanted from me. I fought against the feelings I had for her. I fought and fought—her and myself, until it nearly destroyed us both. Until it nearlykilledher and my children that she was carrying.”

A heavy silence falls over the table between us. “Do you see what I’m saying, Levin? I need you to hear this, because I see you making many of the same mistakes, and no one else seems to be able to pierce that stubbornness that makes you so very good at your job. You are excellent at violence, both against others and against your own happiness, and you deserve some peace after all these years.”

“What happened to Vera wasn’t your fault.” My hand tightens around my glass. “You’re not to blame for it. Whereas I—”

Viktor snorts. “Levin, I have just as much blame as you. I neglected Vera when our marriage started to fall apart and pushed her away. I let our marriage fray in places when I could have patched it up. There were long stretches of time when I blamed myself for so much. And you—” He shakes his head. “I’ve watched you blame yourself for years for something you couldn’t have stopped.”

“I could have left her alone. I could have kept my desires to myself, not married her, not fallen in love with her—I could have made her hate me so she’d leave—”

Viktor lets out a long, heavy sigh. “Levin, you can’t make others’ choices for them, and you can’t blame yourself for their choices, either. You married her so that she’d be safe from the cartel boss who thought he might take her as payment for the losses he suffered—”

“I could have divorced her when we got back. Made it a marriage only to keep her safe. I could have ended it—Iaskedher to stay with me in Tokyo. I practically fuckingbeggedher. I wanted her, and that got her killed—”

“No.” Viktor’s voice hardens. “Levin, our lives are dangerous and hard. It’s easy to say that we should shun everyone to keep them safe. But that takes away the agency of those who find themselves in our lives. Lidiya made a choice to love you—and you can’t say she made that choice blindly, when she experienced firsthand from the day the two of you met how dangerous and fraught with violence this world that we live in is. She could have walked away, and from what I’ve heard you say in the past, she considered it. She made a choice to stay, and—” He shakes his head. “I haven’t said this before, Levin, because it’s your life, and I haven’t felt it was my place. But I see you destroying your only remaining chance at happiness, and I’ve known you far too long and consider you too much a friend to not do what I can to stop it.”

He sets his glass down, looking frankly at me. “By blaming yourself and only yourself all these years, you’re taking away Lidiya’s choice to love you. You’re imagining that you somehow forced her into a happy marriage with you, and you’re taking away her agency in all of it. It does her and her memory a disservice, Levin, to imagine that she would have been happier if you’d forced her away. If you’d broken her heart to keep her safe. She walked into your marriage with her eyes wide open, and she deserves to have that choice honored.”

Viktor pauses for a moment, draining the last of his vodka, and motioning with his hand for two more, one for each of us. “You told me what you did to the men who murdered Lidiya, once. Now I’m telling you, if you stay in this purgatory of a marriage with a woman you love and who loves you, if you push her away again and again, if you destroy what chance either of you have for a happy life—you will end up like that old man, the one who plotted to kill Lidiya. You will throw yourself into your work, only allowing yourself moments with the one you love when neither of you can bear the space any longer. You will end your life on the other end of someone else’s gun, regretting all the days between this one and that, all the wasted time when you could have been happy.”

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