Page 29 of Merciless Bratva Soldier

“Rye toast,” I say. “Coffee. He asked whether I made the bread.” I open my eyes. “I said yes, it was my grandmother’s recipe. I was proud of it.” I’m trembling, and I don’t like losing control. “Who sent it?”

“The number belongs to the man I’m investigating.” He meets my eyes. “He wanted me to see that his people can walk into your shop in daylight and sit down.”

“Who do you work for?”

He doesn’t look away. “The Volkovs.”

“And what do you do for them?”

“I enforce their orders. Sometimes I kill for them.” He says this the way a canvasser would say that they knock on doors for a living.

My hands have gone cold, and I put them under the quilt and between my knees to warm them, the way I used to after a bad night in the ER. I knelt on my staff room floor with both hands in his blood and never asked what the knife was for. I told Tessa his work wasn’t the kind you put on a business card, pretending that was all it was.

I look at the photograph again. I look like someone having a good morning, someone who sleeps at night without worrying about men with knives and cars driving past because the driver is interested in the man in my bed.

“Okay,” I say. “Tell me about your apartment.”

“It’s on Fulton Street.”

“Is it yours?”

“No. It’s owned by Maxim Volkov.” His expression doesn’t falter but something dims in his eyes, and that dimming gives me the courage to keep on asking.

“Do you feel safe there?”

“Yes. Nobody walks in off the street and sits down at my table,” he says.

I appreciate that he doesn’t pretend otherwise.

I get out of bed slowly. My legs are still trembling, but a voice in my head whispers in my ear that I would be foolish not to be afraid. I listen, but I still put my faith in the man lying next to me. Because the alternative, handling this without him, would be unthinkable.

“I’ll stay at yours,” I say, wishing that there was another way. “But I’m still coming to work.”

I pack a bag with my work clothes, my good sweater, and Galina’s notebook wrapped in a dish towel. I stand in my kitchen for a long time looking at her teapot, and then I leave it behind because it lives here, and I’m coming back.

Nikolai’s apartment is on the fourth floor. It’s clean, warm, and quiet. There’s a couch, a table with two chairs, and in the bedroom, a closet and a bed. In the kitchen, one pot, one pan, and four of everything else.

I open the hall closet, hang my coat on the same hook as his, and close the door.

He watches from the kitchen doorway, and I’m torn between asking him to hold me, and grabbing my stuff and fleeing.

Before I can find any words to fill the silence, he crosses the hallway and folds his arms around me. “I’m so sorry, Vera. I’ve replayed the night I sat outside the bakery waiting for Yevgeny in my head so many times, questioning why I didn’t walk in the opposite direction, why I sat on the back step underneath the security light and chose to stay.”

I feel the vibrations of his voice through his chest and close my eyes. For the first time since he came back to the bakery with a stack of new towels and tried my honey cake, I don’t feel safe in his arms, and I don’t know what this means for us. I can still feel him inside me. My panties are rubbing against my clit, which is still swollen from the night before, and there are tiny red marks underneath them left behind by his lips.

But last night feels like an eternity ago, and everything has changed since then.

Including the man I fell in love with on the staff room floor of Rosa’s Bakery.

“And what answer did you give yourself?” I murmur against his shirt, surprised to find it damp from my tears.

“I stayed there because of you.” His voice is sandpaper-rough.

I stiffen in his arms. “You knew I was there?”

“No.” He rests his chin on my head, and more tears spill. “Fate knew you were there. Only I’m not sure which one of us it was trying to save.”

It hurts to swallow the lump in my throat. “You were the one with a hole in your side.”