Page 24 of Crystal Veil (Rostov Bratva #2)

RENAT

It takes me two days to get here. Two days of fighting sleep like it's an enemy stalking me through the shadows of my estate.

Two days of pacing marble floors until my footsteps echo like gunshots in the empty halls.

Two days of staring at my phone, thumb hovering over her contact, typing messages I delete before sending.

Two days of seeing her face every time I close my eyes.

Elena with blood on her temple, crimson against her golden skin.

Elena with her mouth open in a scream I couldn't reach, fighting for her life against an assassin.

Elena walking away from me like I never mattered, like everything we shared was smoke dissipating in the Miami heat.

The whiskey doesn't help. Neither does the gym where I beat my knuckles raw against the heavy bag until they bleed.

Nothing drowns out the sound of Bianca's final breath or the way Sergey's eyes went dead when he realized his gamble had failed.

Nothing silences the roar of concrete and metal crashing down, the taste of dust and betrayal coating my tongue.

I don't remember getting dressed this morning.

The motion feels foreign, mechanical, like watching someone else's hands move through the routine.

The beard crawling down my jaw itches with two days of neglect, but I leave it.

My reflection in the bathroom mirror shows a stranger with hollow eyes and sharp cheekbones that have grown more pronounced from not eating.

My shirt is wrinkled, pulled from the hamper rather than the closet where pressed clothes hang in perfect rows.

How did I get here? The drive to her neighborhood passes in a haze of traffic lights and palm trees swaying in the ocean breeze.

I can't remember stopping at red lights or turning corners.

My body moved on autopilot while my mind stayed trapped in that moment when the world came crashing down.

I stand outside her apartment door, fingers curled into a fist that trembles slightly, knuckles hovering inches from the painted wood.

One breath. Then another. My lungs don't fill properly, like there's still dust in my chest, concrete fragments lodged between my ribs.

Everything aches. My shoulders from carrying the toll of leadership.

My back from sleeping on the couch because the bed felt too large, and too empty.

My heart from a pain I don't have words for.

Like my bones were forged wrong, assembled by someone who forgot how to make a man who could love without destroying everything he touches.

When the door opens, I almost forget why I came.

She looks like a ghost. Not pale or frightened.

Just distant, like she exists in a different dimension now, one where I'm just a memory of violence and chaos.

Her hair falls loose around her shoulders, darker than I remember, and there are shadows under her eyes that tell me she hasn't been sleeping either.

She wears an oversized shirt that swallows her frame, and I want to ask if she's been eating, if she's taking care of herself, but the words stick in my throat.

Like I died under that steel beam, crushed beneath the weight of my own mistakes, and she's not sure I should be standing here breathing her air.

“Renat.”

My name is a whisper that slices something open inside me, something that's been trying to heal for forty-eight hours.

The way she breathes it carries everything we've been through.

The night we met, when she was just a journalist looking for a story.

The first time I kissed her while the rain drummed against the windows.

The morning she woke up in my bed and I realized I'd rather burn down my empire than let her walk away.

I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and it shudders out of me like a confession.

“I shouldn't have come.”

The words taste like ash. Like admitting defeat.

But I don't leave. My feet stay planted on her doormat.

Because even knowing I'm poison, even knowing I bring nothing but danger to her doorstep, I can't make myself turn around and walk back to the empty mansion that feels more like a mausoleum than a home.

She doesn't slam the door. The thought crosses my mind that she should, that any rational woman would look at me and see exactly what I am.

A killer. A criminal. A man whose touch turns everything to ruin.

But she doesn't invite me in, either. Just stands there in the doorway like a sentinel, searching my face like she's not sure what she's seeing.

Like I'm a puzzle with missing pieces, and she's trying to figure out if what's left is worth saving.

“You look like you haven't slept.”

Her voice carries no judgment, only observation. The same tone she used when she was still writing articles, gathering facts, and building stories from fragments of truth. But there's something softer underneath, a concern she can't quite hide behind professional distance.

“I haven't.”

The admission comes more easily than it should.

I've spent years perfecting the art of showing nothing, revealing no weakness that enemies could exploit.

But standing here, looking at her, the facade crumbles like a sculpture made of sand.

I drag a hand through my hair and feel the tremble in my fingers, the fine shake of exhaustion, and something deeper that feels like grief for the man I used to be before I learned that love and violence were often the same thing.

I haven't felt this unsteady since I watched them lower my father's coffin into the dirt.

And even then, I had more pride than this.

Even then, I didn't show up at anyone's door looking like a broken man begging for absolution.

“I see her,” I whisper, and the words scrape my throat raw.

“Bianca. Every time I blink, I see her smile as she bled out in Sergey's arms. Not afraid.

Not angry. Just smiling. Like she knew how it would end.

Like she'd made peace with being a pawn in someone else's game.

Like she knew I'd be the one to watch her die.”

The memory slams into me like a door swung open by a storm.

Bianca's honey-blonde hair fanned across the concrete, darkening with blood.

Her designer dress was torn and stained.

The way she looked at me in those final seconds, not with hatred but with something that might have been pity.

For her, for me, for all of us trapped in this cycle of violence that no one knows how to escape.

Elena's brows knit together, a small line appearing between them that I want to smooth away with my thumb.

I see her knuckles tighten against the doorframe, and I realize she's holding herself back from reaching for me.

The knowledge that she still wants to comfort me despite everything feels like a gift I don't deserve.

“She chose this,” she utters softly, but there's no cruelty in it. Just the hard truth that sometimes people make decisions that lead them to dark places, and we can't always save them from the consequences. “She aligned herself with monsters.”

Monsters. Is that what I am? I've never thought of myself that way, never seen my actions as anything other than necessary moves in a game where the rules were written in blood long before I was born.

But looking at Elena, seeing the way she's built walls between us, I wonder if that's exactly what I've become.

A monster wearing expensive suits and speaking in cultured tones, but a monster nonetheless.

“He looked up to me once. Sergey. We were like brothers. I stood beside him when he took his first oath to the Bratva. We shared meals, secrets, shared the cost of decisions that would have crushed lesser men.” My throat burns with the memory of trust betrayed, of friendship twisted into something ugly and sharp.

“And he still sold me out. Still looked me in the eye and lied through his teeth, knowing he conspired with the enemy to end my life.”

The betrayal cuts deeper than any wound I’ve ever had.

I've been shot, stabbed, beaten within an inch of my life, but nothing compares to the moment I realized Sergey had been feeding information to Bennato.

The moment I understood that every strategy session, every private conversation, every vulnerable moment had been carefully catalogued and passed along to my enemy.

Years of brotherhood, and it all meant nothing when compared to his jealousy and hopeless love for a woman who would never see him as more than a shadow.

“The steel. It came down so fast. The sound...” I pause, remembering the screech of metal against metal, the thunderous crash that seemed to go on forever. “I thought it was the last thing I'd ever hear. I thought I'd die listening to the sound of my own empire falling down around me.”

My voice breaks on the last word, and I hate myself for it.

For showing weakness. For standing here like a supplicant instead of the man who commands respect and fear equally.

But the fear is real, bone-deep and primal.

Not fear of death, exactly, but fear of dying alone, buried under rubble with no one to mourn me except the people who work for me because they have to.

Elena moves. Slowly and carefully, like I'm a wounded animal that might bolt at any sudden motion. Her brown eyes never leave my face, and I see a decision being made in the space between one breath and the next.

She opens the door wider. “Come inside.”