súton
(n.) the end of something
MILA
The home sat as still as a grave while I stood beneath the staircase and stared at the elaborate woodwork that hid a door from sight—the one Albert and Viktor just vacated before leaving the house. I expected the entrance to be locked or require a special passcode like it would in any decent spy movie, but it opened right up to reveal cement stairs leading down to hell.
Nerves shook in my hands as I hesitated at the threshold and listened for the tortured screams of damned souls, only to be welcomed by silence and a cold draft. A sane person wouldn’t go down there, but it seemed I was losing my grasp on rationality with the rest of the house.
Closing the door behind me, I rubbed a hand over the goose bumps on my arm and headed down the stairs. When I reached the bottom, I pretended the room was any other unfinished basement with mortared stone walls and a dampness thickening the air, but the fallacy grew harder to accept each time I viewed a bloodstain on the floor as well as the barred cells lining the far wall.
I should have found it a reprieve the cells sat empty sans one and that I wasn’t soundly sleeping upstairs while people rotted below, but there was nothing relieving about seeing Ivan leaning against iron bars and giving me the look he always did when I did something he disapproved of.
“You should not be down here,” he censured.
It was bizarre seeing him existing in this dungeon so indifferently—this man I’d known for years, who was insanely picky about his Americanos and had an allergy to cheap cologne and traffic.
“Nobody told me I couldn’t be,” I returned, hiding my uncertainty of how Ronan would feel about it if he found out. Not for my own sake, but Ivan’s.
“I am telling you now. Go back upstairs.”
On my way to his cell, I ignored him and gingerly stepped around a bloody plastic tarp on the floor.
“Mila.” It was a frustrated growl. “There is blood everywhere. I do not want you to pass out and hit your head on the cement floor.”
As I reached him, a small smile appeared at the memories of him pushing my head between my knees after many altercations with O-negative while he murmured accented, encouraging words—especially one cheerleading pyramid fail where Ivan jumped over a fence to reach me, which aroused the entire team’s envy. I’d always taken his presence for granted. I refused to do the same with his life.
Reaching through the bars, I wiped some fresh blood from his busted lip. His hand lashed out and gripped my wrist, a sudden wave of discontent rising in his eyes.
“What the fuck has he done to you?”
I blinked. “Nothing, really.”
“Nothing, really?”
“Well . . .” I swallowed. “I saw him cut off a man’s finger, shoot someone in the head at the dinner table, and, apparently, he murdered another few in the driveway. But things have been going okay for me.”
For a heavy second, Ivan watched me as if I was crazy before he released my wrist. “Nothing about this is ‘okay.’ You should be home where you belong, not—” He glanced around with disgust. “Here.”
Here.
Stay here.
You belong here.
Ivan’s voice, past and present, flashed through my mind, and like a puzzle piece clicking into place, I finally understood why I never fit in at The Moorings. The neighborhood was a shiny cage masquerading as paradise, and Ivan was compliant in my confinement from the beginning.
“Is ‘home’ supposed to be Miami?” The pent-up frustration of living a lie bubbled out of me. “The place Papa left me for months on end so he could go murder people—boys—in Moscow?”
“You do not know what you speak of,” Ivan returned with heat.
“Maybe not. But I do know I have family here—family I desperately wanted. Was I ever meant to know the truth? Or were you and Papa planning on lying to me forever?”
He tried to mask his expression, but he couldn’t hide a flicker of the truth in his eyes. I was supposed to marry Carter and live the life of a quintessential housewife even though they both knew it would slowly kill me inside.
“Your papa was only trying to keep you safe.”
There was a difference between caring about someone’s well-being and just keeping them alive. My father had always maintained the latter, and while I knew he loved me, the former was never a concern of his. Weight settled heavily on my chest, the burden pulling all resentment down until I only felt an ache that split my heart in two.
“You shouldn’t have come for me,” I whispered.
“Do you think I would leave you here to die?”
The closest I came to dying was halted by D’yavol’s fingers down my throat.
“He isn’t going to kill me.” I suddenly knew it with conviction. “He wants Papa, not me.”
He watched me intensely for a long second. “He sure is taking his time then, is he not?” The tone of his voice settled so thick in the air, it strangled the oxygen and slowed the beat of my heart. The unstable energy refused to disperse even after he spoke again. “You are really unharmed?”
“I don’t want to talk about me,” I said quietly. At the moment, my psyche wasn’t a refined place. Half of it still lay upstairs, leaking out at Ronan’s feet across the marble floor.
“Well, I do. And I think you owe it to me.”
I flinched, understanding the innuendo in his voice. I was the one who got him into this mess. I may be the one to sign his death certificate. Tears burned the backs of my eyes.
He sighed. “I did not mean it like that. I should have assumed you would go to Moscow. I should not have been distracted by that waitress.”
A quiet laugh escaped me even as a tear ran down my cheek. He reached through the bars and wiped it away. His knuckles were busted to match his appearance: torn-open dress shirt stained with dirt and mud. He was even missing his shoes and socks. It was such an odd sight, a miserable sound between a laugh and a sob arose.
He glanced down at my source of amusement, then chuckled. “They did not want me to hang myself with my shoelaces. Took my belt too. Grebaniye ublyudki.” Fucking bastards. Grasping the bars, he slid his gaze down my body with narrowed eyes like he was trying to see into my soul. “I thought you would be . . . different.”
He assumed he’d find me a ghost of myself, not dressed in bright yellow without a physical wound in sight.
“I’ll admit, being locked in his guest room for days on end really sucked, but other than that, it hasn’t been the worst situation for me.”
His presence exuded frustration. “Why must you always make light of things?”
“I’m not. I really haven’t been treated that poorly.”
He released a caustic sound and pushed away from the bars to pace. “You have been degraded, drugged, held captive, poisoned, and God knows what else. I would hate to see what you consider poor treatment.”
“How do you know all that?”
He cast me a dark look. “I have my ways.” Continuing to walk the perimeter of his cell, he said, “The blood thing. How did that disappear, Mila?” His anger burned like fuel against my skin.
I chewed my lip nervously. “A walk in the underworld, I suppose.”
“Which you seem to be handling well.”
It felt like he was accusing me of something. “Don’t look at me like I’m happy about these circumstances just because it rid me of my phobia. I’d rather be fainting at a mud run again in Miami than have you locked up here and my papa’s life in jeopardy.”
“Interesting you have not said anything about your own situation.”
I grew flustered. “Of course I don’t want to be a prisoner anymore.”
“You seemed so . . . comfortable”—he almost sneered the word—“with your kidnapper in the dining room.”
My throat felt thick. “It was breakfast, Ivan, not a cozy heart-to-heart.”
He made a noncommittal noise. “You know they do not call him ‘D’yavol’ for nothing, do you not?”
“I’m aware.” This conversation couldn’t be more uncomfortable if bugs were crawling beneath my skin. I never said the right thing when I was unsettled. “He doesn’t like sugar in his tea.”
Ivan shot me an aggravated expression.
“I have no misconceptions of who he is, but don’t pretend you’re a saint. You work for my papa. If you want to discuss my fear of blood and where it began, you should talk to him.”
“Your papa has never mistreated you.”
“That doesn’t mean he hasn’t hurt others.”
A bitter breath passed his lips. “Are you taking D’yavol’s side?”
“I’m not taking sides. I find you all a bit despicable.” The dry humor was supposed to lighten the mood, but Ivan didn’t find it funny. Unable to handle the grave tension rolling off him, I announced, “Maybe I could find a key to your cell.” I wondered if Ronan had a doggy guard around here with the key in its mouth like in Pirates of the Caribbean.
“I would ask if he has touched you, but I already know the answer. Out of all the men in Moscow, you had to go and fuck him?”
His words chafed me raw. Had he watched the video? The thought made me sick, so in an effort to hold down the nausea, I ignored the statement. “Maybe with the right leverage, we can pop this door right off.” I glanced around in an attempt to find something useful.
“How could you not see through him, Mila? I thought you were smarter than that.”
A girl could only be called an idiot so many times. I halted my search as heat ran up my neck.
“You know what? Maybe I wouldn’t have been so stupid if you and Papa didn’t shelter me my entire life.” Sarcasm took over. “I’m sure college has a course called ‘How to Not Fuck Mobsters.’ If only I was allowed to attend . . .”
“This is not a joke.”
“I’m not laughing. I might have made a mistake, but so did you and my papa by not telling me the truth. If someone hadn’t killed that boy, none of this would be happening.”
“You are just going to believe everything D’yavol tells you?”
“My only other option is to believe someone who’s lied to me for years. The pickings are looking a little slim. Is there a third party nearby I can ask?”
“There is no need for a third party. You should stand with your papa. With me.” He practically seethed.
The thing was, I wanted to be loyal. I wanted an easy route to take; to believe my papa was the lesser of two evils. But now, all I could see when I thought of my father was a mutilated boy and a woman bleeding out on our library floor. When I closed my eyes and thought of the other evil . . . my stance was too conflicted to comprehend.
Ivan must have seen the uncertainty behind my eyes, and it angered him. His jaw tightened. He stepped toward me, flicking a glance behind me, to a high point in the room. When his gaze slid back to mine, something underhanded, almost devious, flickered within. It was the first time I’d seen that kind of darkness in him, and the sight raised the hair on the back of my neck.
“Be honest with me. He has not hurt you?”
I didn’t understand where this was going, but my stomach tilted with the feeling I wouldn’t like the end result.
Uneasily, I shook my head.
“And he will not?” He moved closer—as close as the bars would allow. My hands grew clammy; my heart beat fast. It felt like Ronan was standing behind me and that I was sandwiched between two men on a battlefield who had every intention of killing each other. I didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire, but I realized then, I already had.
“Ivan . . . I—”
“Answer the question.”
The indecision tore me in half. My gut told me Ronan wouldn’t hurt me physically, but it also braced for a flood that would wash me away. I didn’t want to leave Ivan to worry about me, so even though I didn’t wholly believe it, I whispered, “No.”
Ivan ran a thumb across my cheek. The suggestion in the touch expanded unease in my stomach, the caress not evoking a sliver of the heat certain inked fingers did. Why couldn’t this burn? Why couldn’t I want this?
“If I am going to die,” he said with a dark form of amusement, “I may as well go out with a bang.”
I didn’t have time to process the statement before he grabbed the back of my neck and pulled my lips to his between the bars. Shock kept my mouth uncompromising for a second, but beneath his encouraging pressure, my lips softened and complied.
His tongue slid into my mouth, and I met it with my own, praying for the heat, the ache, the desperation I should feel—needed to feel. Warmth spread in my stomach, convincing me to kiss him harder and skim my hands over his shoulders and into his hair. He groaned and grasped my waist, pulling me against the cool bars.
Ivan’s fingers exuded warmth as they traveled down my body to my ass, but the contact didn’t ignite. The embrace was an ember in a breeze, unable to go up in flames without gasoline.
He tilted my head with the other hand to deepen the kiss, and I tasted a familiar hint of cinnamon. They chewed the same type of gum. They had history. The animosity between them was personal. I wondered how well they knew each other; if they’d shared each other’s secrets on the streets of Moscow or in a cell much like this one.
When he pulled away, my breath was soft and stable, the pressure of his mouth fading to nothing but memory. Loyalty told me this was where I belonged—in the embrace of a man I’d shared so much with—but my soul begged for something else; for a fire that lit without fuel; for Versace, tanzanite, and hands that stole my breath. My body was underwhelmed, though inside, everything was crashing down.
If I could long for the devil, it meant I had some darkness in me too.
