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Stuff.

His face twists on the word, his whole body momentarily stiffening.

My hands falter. I don’t need him to spell out what he means bystuff.

His eyes half open, and I force my hands to resume their soothing. “Shh,” I whisper. “They can’t hurt you now.”

“Then Roman came.” He smiles. “Roman hit back. He was younger than them, but he got them stuff. Guns, knives... When he found them beating on me... he hit back. We ran,him and me. That’s how it’s always been.” His voice is fading. “Him and me. Miami... we knew every back street. Stayed away from Yakov... and from... sparrow tattoos...” He carries on for a while, but the words are no more than mumbling, and I can’t make it out.

He fades into sleep, and I lie in the gathering dusk, touching the scars on his chest, the marks of his past.

Then I climb out of bed and sketch him as he lies there, my charcoal lovingly tracing every line of his magnificent body.

Tears run down my face as I sketch.

Tears for the life Dimitry has led, a life that has clearly left far more scars than I will ever be able to see.

Tears for myself and the deception I just practiced, which I now bitterly regret.

And tears of hopelessness, because deep down, what I really know now is that Dimitry isn’t just bound to the bratva by blood, or family honor, or even by blind loyalty.

He’s bound to it by something far more potent: love.

The unbreakable bond of two boys alone on the streets in Miami, running from criminal elements who wanted to harm them, with nothing else but one another for survival.

Dimitry won’t ever leave Roman’s side.

The man he became through those years of hardship and pain is set in granite. He won’t change, and he won’t ever leave the man who stood by him when he needed someone the most. He won’t ever betray Roman. And if I’m honest, I couldn’t ask him to.

Which means that unless I want to spend the rest of my life in the middle of the bratva, I’m going to have to leave him.

SK Compound, Myanmar

Present Day

When I open my eyes,I’ve missed dinner, and the dormitory is dark and silent.

It’s too late now.

A silent tear tracks down my face.

Dimitry is never going to find me.

He doesn’t even know I’m missing. As far as Dimitry knows, I left him six months ago to get some space. Some perspective.

Why did you tell him not to follow you?

I clench my fist until my nails cut into my palm. Unfortunately, I know the answer to that question. And, boy, did I get it wrong.

No matter what I told Darya and Dimitry, no matter the lies I told myself, the uncomfortable truth is that some small, childish part of me actually thought that if I left all traces of criminal life behind, I could turn the clock back to a time before that life started at all.

But it wasn’t Dimitry, or the Stevanovsky bratva, who put me in a Colombian prison. And it certainly wasn’t Dimitry who brought Banderos to Leetham.

The truth is that from the moment I saidyesto Nico’s life all those years ago, nobody but me has created the mess that I’m in now.

The bratva world might be every bit as brutal as the one I was running from. But the truth, whether I like it or not, is that the time I spent in Dimitry’s world is the only time I’ve felt safe since that long-ago full moon party when I took a wrong turn. His world protected me. Gave me friends and family.

And yet I condemned him for being bratva from the first moment we were together.