Page 12 of Her Rustanov Husband (Ruthless Bullies #2)

Waiting Game

YOM

The next years were… not good.

Yom let Paul live. And he let Tasha guide the love of his life away.

And then, somehow, he was at the lake house again.

His Uncle Nikolai said something about how all of Lydia’s things were still there. Including the phone Yom had given her. “It is possible she will return for them, perhaps… Then maybe the two of you can talk. After everyone is calming down, nyet ?”

Yom didn’t answer.

Just stared at the item that somehow ended up pressed inside his hand. The wedding ring he’d proposed with. Custom designed as one piece, so she wouldn’t ever have to worry about losing both an engagement ring and a wedding band.

Nyet.

He was already beginning to suspect she would not be returning anytime soon. For any reason.

She was gone. Gone.

But he kept the ring—and both of their phones charged. If she called, he would be ready. And more than willing to propose again.

That was his only goal. To be there if she called or voice texted or returned any of his email messages. That was all he managed.

The days became a blur of baijiu and vodka—then the dark liquors he despised but endured.

Drinking was the only way to keep himself from chasing after her. If he drank enough, maybe he could muffle the echo of her voice in his head, calling him a monster. Telling him she wanted nothing to do with him. Possibly forever.

No. Not forever. He wouldn’t survive forever without her.

He couldn’t breathe if… No, not forever.

Yom stumbled to his feet. He had to go after her, convince her to forgive him, and take him back…

But he couldn’t find the keys to his truck…. Was it still at the barn?

The phone he kept in his robe pocket went off with an unknown number. His heart leapt. Was it her?

He couldn’t answer the phone fast enough. “Hello… hello, Lydia, zayka , is this you, baby?” he asked, unable to keep the slur out of his voice.

It was not her.

It was the team’s PR liaison, blabbering something about a quiet press release to announce the end of their engagement and the cancellation of the ceremony.

Yom refused to respond. Refused to sign anything. If he didn’t speak the words, then it wasn’t official. It wasn’t over.

Instead, he swigged more of the whiskey he hated and kept sending voice texts to her phone—the one she’d left behind.

He’d left his messages on her old phone at first. But that number had suddenly stopped working. Back when he still had vodka.

So now, he left her messages on the one he’d given her. Maybe she’d check them from her remote location, wherever she was living in Canada.

But maybe she wouldn’t. More days blurred by….

He called Rina again. “Does your girlfriend have her new contact details yet?”

They were both aware that Trish would never give him Lydia’s new number without her best friend’s explicit permission.

But this unwillingness to betray—or, as Trish insisted on calling it, “crossing valid boundaries”—was why Rina had planted spyware on her phone months ago as a condition of being allowed to date her.

“Nothing yet,” Rina answered. “She’s upset, too. Lydia sent her an email about wanting her to be happy with me but needing some space to figure out her next steps. And now she’s not answering any of her messages, either.”

Yom cursed. Then told Rina to bring him more alcohol. Then tried to call Merry again.

Merry refused to answer his calls. Even when he texted to offer her the farm Lydia had wanted her to have, she stayed silent. That farm had been what drew Lydia to the Hanson place, and Yom clung to it now, trying to bargain with ghosts. If Merry accepted, maybe it would bring Lydia back.

But she never answered. No more alcohol arrived, despite his order to Rina. And he had already fired Stepan for refusing to bring him his truck on his uncle’s orders.

Eventually, the whiskey ran out. And Yom couldn’t bring himself to call Rina again. Or eat the meals he always found waiting in a warming dish outside his bedroom door.

Instead, he lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying their last twelve hours together on an endless loop—like a game film where he had done everything wrong. Each time, he tried to imagine the move—the words—that might have saved them. Each time, he failed.

His phone erupted with buzzing texts and vibrating calls. A glance told him he’d already missed the first day of practice. The caller ID flashed aggressively: Nikolai Rustanov.

The uncle who had betrayed him.

Yom hurled the phone across the room to silence it, choosing the ceiling instead. That was his goal now: outstare the ceiling, outlast the days, until Lydia came back.

Later, he heard Pesya calling his name. The scrape of a door opening. A gasp.

And then: “Rina… it is Baba. I know you said not to bother him, but I do not think your meal prescription and removing all the alcohol is working. He will not respond to me. It is like he is in a coma, but with his eyes open. And his room is a mess. The smell is…”

Her voice lowered, though Yom could still hear. “I do not understand. He is such a strong boy. And the girl was only here with him for six months.”

Six months .

Had it really only been six months?

To Yom, it felt as if his entire life had been ripped apart.

“Can you ask your Black friend to—alright, alright, bubbeleh . I am aware she is Black girlfriend . Please, no more lectures. Baba cannot take it. But can you ask her to talk to Lydia? Maybe if she could get her to call him…”

His ears perked up. The dead thing in his chest stirred with hope.

But then Pesya sighed. “Oh, I see. She has blocked your girlfriend, too. That is unfortunate. Still, something must be done. He is not eating, and though he is breathing, he looks and smells like a rotting corpse….”

Her voice faded, and the room became dark—dark as his future without Lydia.

Until, suddenly, it was flooded with light.

“Enough of this,” his Uncle Nikolai declared in Russian.

That was all the warning Yom got before a bucket of cold water was dumped over his body.

And still, he didn’t move.

“You should not have left him alone here,” another voice chastised. Russian, but not nearly as heavily accented. “You knew how he felt about the girl.”

The voice belonged to his Uncle Alexei. And that, more than anything, told Yom what a bad state he was in. The most powerful Rustanov of them all had been called in to do the grunt work of attempting to drag him back from the dead.

Alexei peeled off his suit jacket and borrowed a pair of joggers and a T-shirt from Yom’s drawers, both comically tight on his muscular frame.

Then he and Nikolai proceeded to strip Yom out of his wet clothes and haul him into a bath, where they scrubbed him down and shampooed his hair with brutal efficiency.

“Get out, so we can talk about your next steps,” Alexei commanded after they were done.

Yom glassily eyed the bathwater, now dirty and cold. Considered slipping underneath it. What was the point of bathing… of living… if she would not ever be coming back?

“I understand you are not speaking to Nikolai.” Alexei threw the washcloth into the dirty bathwater with an aggrieved sigh. “But knowing that I left my family and came here all the way from D.C.—will you at least speak to me?”

Somewhere deep inside, Yom felt a flicker of something. A memory of gratitude. This was the uncle who had arranged and funded his easy placement into a D-1 American university. That meant he was owed Yom’s respect at all times.

But Yom couldn’t summon the energy.

“We will have to pull him out of the tub and dress him ourselves,” Nikolai groused. “Like hockey man baby. I do not understand why he is being so dramatic. It was only few months.”

“You do not understand because your Sam never left you,” Alexei bit out. “You have never known that pain, as Bair and I have. It is like having your heart ripped from your chest.”

Strangely, the mention of Uncle Bair—the one Yom’s temperament was most often compared to, like a warning of an incoming tornado—was what roused him from his catatonic state.

“How long?” he asked Alexei—not Nikolai. Alexei understood. Nikolai never would. “How long will it feel like this?”

Silence followed his question. Long. Fraught.

“The answer is not one you will like,” Alexei said finally.

“A first love is not something Rustanovs easily forget. For me, I shoved my Eva’s loss down with goals, with turning our empire from Bratva stronghold to legitimate business.

I kept a series of pets to distract my dick.

I preferred leggy redheads—best they did not look like her.

But eventually, I came across Eva again, and then you know the rest of my story… .”

Yom did. And it brought him no solace. He and Lydia did not have a secret baby waiting to instantly reunite them.

“Did drowning in women work for Uncle Bair, too?”

Another silence. Heavy.

Until Alexei answered with a simple, “No. Sirena’s leaving gave him…”

He switched to English for the words, as if Russian had no equivalent: “Erectile dysfunction.”

Then, back in Russian: “He searched for her while she hid from him. He also fought in many underground kickboxing matches—some ending with his opponent’s death.”

“But that will not work for you,” Nikolai warned with the censure of a man who had owned a team for longer than he’d played on it. “You need your hands for hockey. Perhaps, instead, you can drown your grief in the game.”

“Yes, drown yourself in hockey,” Alexei advised. “Make it your entire life while you wait for her to return.”

“Return?” Yom sat up in the cold bath, his dead heart sparking with hope. “Do you have a plan I have not thought of?”

“ Da ,” Alexei said solemnly. “The plan is called… waiting.”

Yom groaned, slumping back. “This is not plan. This is wishful thinking. I am already doing this. For weeks.”

“You speak angrily to your uncle, but he knows better than a hockey mal’chik half his age,” Nikolai growled.