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“Feels so good.” He moans softly. “Was after . . . juvie. Got . . . busted for drugs . . . Yakov . . . he told me I wouldn’t get caught, but I did . . .” His voice is fading, and I can tell I’m losing him.

“Yakov? Who’s Yakov?”

“Yakov... my father’s friend. But not my friend.” Dimitry shakes his head clumsily from side to side. He’s clearly losing it. “He wanted me back... after juvie. I said no. But I had no other... family. The other kids beat me and... stuff.”

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 by stuff .

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 Da y

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 said yes to 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.

I resented his world, and the violence it asked of him. I treated Roman like he was exactly the same as the people I had escaped, when the truth is that he never once gave me any reason to think he’s anything like Rodrigo Cardenas or Jacey—or the Chinese triad members who guard this place.

I know a little about the Mercura crypto platform at the center of Roman’s empire. Not much, but enough to know that he’s too busy running a multibillion-dollar digital money laundering operation to be smuggling people or drugs on the side.

But does that really change anything?

Criminal organizations are the same beast, whether they’re dealing crypto or cocaine. They still consist of violent men who operate outside the law and who go to war rather than to court to settle disputes.

Then again, I’m not going to lie: right about now, the thought of Dimitry bursting through the door with guns blazing is pretty fucking appealing.

No.

I chastise myself as soon as I have the thought.

Not even Roman Borovsky, and the entire Stevanovsky clan, could win against this place. And I don’t ever want them to try.

I roll over and stare at the springs on the base of Lucky’s bunk, swallowing a painful lump of despair.

Jacey’s face, blank and dead eyed, swims before my eyes. I push it away with the discipline of long practice.

That face is the real reason I had to leave Spain.

It’s why Dimitry and I will always be an impossible relationship.

No matter how powerful Roman and the Stevanovskys might be, they won’t ever be big enough to fight a man like Jacey.

The triads who run this place might scare the hell out of most people, but to Jacey, they are nothing more than hired help. They build these compounds and run them, but they aren’t the driving force behind them.

Jacey mixes in a different world. A world beyond even the touch of the bratva. He deals in the darkest forms of corruption man can conceive. He’s one of the faceless men with infinite wealth who hide behind multinational corporations and governments, hiring others to do their dirty work.

Except when someone gets too close—like I did.

Then they like to do the killing themselves. And not even the power of the bratva can stop them.

Which is exactly why Dimitry and I could never have worked.

Even if I manage by some miracle to escape this place, nothing will change that. He and I can never work.

Because no matter what hell I might have to face here, the one thing that keeps me sane is that, to my knowledge, Jacey doesn’t know anything about Dimitry or Roman or Darya. And so long as he doesn’t know about them, they’re safe.

I won’t ever do anything to change that.

Not even if it means I die in here.

I turn onto my side, my heart aching. No matter how much I ache for him, I know this is my cross to bear.

It’s time I faced the consequences of my own past, instead of wishing that Dimitry would save me from them.