Page 40 of Only for Him (Starkov Bratva #1)

ROMAN

This goddamn woman.

I never saw her coming, and now I’m paying the price.

Her fingers trace my chest. A match strike to scar tissue, straight through the armor I spent my life welding shut.

Her eyes are questions, endless fucking questions. If it were up to me, I’d stay locked up forever, take my stories to the grave. But she deserves to know the monster she's standing naked with under this scalding water.

She deserves to know why it was so easy for me to see past all her goody-goody cop bullshit to the weapon beneath.

"This one," she says, pressing her fingertip against the Orthodox church inked over my heart. "What does it mean?"

I stare down at her. Water sheens across her skin, slicks her lashes.

She’s glowing, blood-washed and wrecked, trembling and perfect.

And she’s still here. After everything.

I’m stronger than most things, but not this. Not her.

"It marks me as a vor ,” I say. “A thief."

The water will wash away the blood but not the memories: the first time I ever held a weapon, the expression on the face of the girl who walked in on me holding her father by his collar and slamming him against the wall, the first time I could keep the heat on all winter.

"I was fifteen when Timofey Starkov recruited me," I tell her. "A street rat with nothing to lose. He gave me a job, a purpose. A family.”

Her gaze snaps to mine. I see it in her eyes. She’s cataloging it, weighing it, not judging but storing it somewhere deep. That’s what she does. She keeps things .

“Or what passed for one," I say.

The steam rises around us, cocooning us. We will not come out of this bathroom the same people. Already, she’s transformed. The way she brutalized Skinner—it was beautiful. A work of art.

Like she was born for it, but she wasn’t.

No one was.

Someone made her this way.

Just like me.

Her hand doesn't leave my chest, and I don't want it to. I want her to plunge past the skin, crack through the ribs, and wrap her fingers around what’s left of my fucking heart.

“Timofey made me feel like I mattered,” I say. My voice is flat, but inside, it shreds. “I did whatever he asked. Shakedowns. Collections. Beatings. I was good at it. Fast, mean, and useful.”

I take a breath. It hurts, but she’s here, and that makes it hurt less.

“I never questioned a single order.”

"You were a child," she whispers. Her touch keeps me human while her eyes drag the confessions out of me.

I laugh, and it sounds like broken glass. “I stopped being a child the day I shattered a man’s hand over fifty rubles and watched him piss himself from the pain.”

She nods, and I see it in her eyes. Not pity but a quiet and brutal understanding that I’ve come to crave like oxygen.

She knows what it means to survive something that guts you from the inside out.

"What about this one?" Her fingers drift to my left bicep, to the sun with rays spreading across my skin.

"Prison." I flex unconsciously, the muscle tightening under her touch. Christ, the effort it’s taking not to fuck the story into her somehow, rather than having to speak it? Merciless. "Each ray represents a year of my sentence. Almost twenty in total."

"Jesus," she breathes. "What…?"

The question hangs between us, and I close my eyes, letting the water hammer my face.

"Russia went to war in Chechnya for the second time. And it created opportunities for men like Timofey. New territories. New markets. New merchandise."

"Girls," she says quietly.

I nod. "But not for me. I was still doing the work I knew: theft, protection, muscle. I was rising through the ranks, becoming someone Timofey trusted." I pause, the water running down my face like tears I'll never fucking allow. "And then I met Anastasia."

Her name still tastes like rust and regret.

It feels like a sin saying it in front of Giselle.

Like I’m betraying them both.

But my little viper doesn’t flinch. She waits, like a goddamn saint.

How can she be so perfect?

How can any woman be so much of what I need?

"She worked at a flower shop near one of our clubs. Brown hair. Green eyes.”

I don’t say: the kind of smile that made you believe in better things.

I know more now than I did then. She was beautiful, but that smile was wrong. There were no better things. Not for me.

And certainly not for her.

Some memories rot sweeter than they should.

"I'd never felt anything like it before. Like the world made sense when she looked at me."

I was young, with Anastasia. The feelings she brought out in me—they were real, but they weren’t true. What I felt for her was a prism of everything I wanted a girl to be, projected, bent and scattered until it looked like salvation.

Giselle's hand slides to my shoulder, grounding me.

She’s not an illusion. She’s real.

She doesn’t make the world brighter. She makes it burn.

What I felt for Anastasia was a boy’s delusion in a borrowed suit.

What I feel for Giselle is reality carved open and offered to me, bleeding.

"I courted her properly. Brought her chocolates. Took her to dinner. Never told her what I really did. She thought I worked security." I laugh again, hollow. "And for a while, it was good. The only good thing in my life."

"What happened?" Giselle asks, her voice gentle but insistent.

"Pavel Starkov happened," I say, and the name is acid on my tongue. "Timofey's oldest son. He saw her with me one night, and he wanted her.”

The rage still burns, even now, a light that never goes out.

“He wanted her because she was mine."

I expect Giselle to react negatively. I know she’s jealous of Rosa, so why wouldn’t she be jealous of Anastasia?

But she doesn’t.

Maybe because she already knows how the story ends.

Just like I’ve always known her story begins, even if I didn’t know the details.

It’s all one story. We’re one soul, split between two bodies, fated as constellations to chase each other until the sky collapses and we collide.

“Pavel was jealous,” I say, the words scraping out of me like gravel. “Of how his father looked at me. Like I was the son he wished he’d had. I earned that place. Pavel was born into it, but I earned it.”

I pause. The rage is there, same as always—a slow, patient fire at the center of my bones.

“He waited until I was settled. Until Anastasia and I had nearly a year together. Then he crawled to his father with a story about how I’d been skimming money. Stealing from the Bratva.”

Giselle's eyes narrow. "And Timofey believed him."

"Blood is blood. And Pavel was Timofey’s son." My jaw is so tight it hurts. The pain is an echo and I welcome it. "They beat me. Interrogated me for three days. Then Timofey sent me to a prison he owned in Chechnya."

Her fingers drift to my stomach, to the image of Madonna and Child etched into my skin. "And this?"

"Life sentence," I say. "No parole."

She pulls back slightly, and I see the calculation in her eyes. "But you got out."

"Eventually." I turn to face her again. "But not before the worst part."

She waits, ready to share the poison that made me.

"Anastasia stayed loyal to me. She wrote letters. Tried to visit. Told everyone who would listen that I was innocent."

I have to force the words out now, each one cutting my throat on the way.

"Pavel couldn't stand it. That she chose a prisoner, a nobody, over him."

Giselle's eyes darken. She knows what's coming.

"Three months after I was sent away, they dragged me from my cell. Took me to a concrete room. Anastasia was already there.”

I can still see it. The sickly yellow light. The stink of bleach and blood.

“Naked. Bound to a table.” I swallow. “Pavel was standing over her with a knife.”

“Roman,” she whispers, and the sound of my name in her voice nearly tears me in half.

I don’t let the emotion touch my face, because my face already has the story embedded in it, every moment of every day.

It doesn’t matter how deeply or truly I loved Anastasia, what hurts is what her love for me led to.

How, in some sense, it was all my fucking fault.

“He raped her,” I say. Flat. Cold. I won’t dress it up or make it poetic. “Made me watch. Then he cut her throat while I screamed.”

The water is still running, but all I hear is that scream.

"He said if he couldn't have her, neither could I."

Giselle's hand comes to my face, cups my jaw. Her touch is gentle, but her eyes are fierce. My blood pulses, coming alive again after the little death I suffer every time I remember.

Usually, only time and violence can bring me back.

But she does it with just a touch. I growl, low in my throat, wanting her even as my blood runs cold with guilt and hatred.

I turn because it’s too much. If I don’t move away, I’ll lunge against her and bury my pain between her legs. And I don’t want to. Not yet.

Turning exposes my back, where I know the cross tattoo is stark against my skin. Her fingers trace the edges, light as air. "What does this one mean?"

"Solitary confinement. I think they expected me to kill myself. But I didn't. I made a vow instead: I would kill them all. Every last one. I’d burn their whole Bratva to the ground."

I feel her breath on my spine as she leans closer, examining every mark, every scar, like they’re holy books.

"The other inmates knew I'd been Timofey's man. They hated me for it." I point to the word on my left shoulder. "This one they gave me. Predatl . Traitor."

Her gaze flicks to the paler spots on my arms, my ribs—patches where the skin is too shiny and new.

“They cut out the old tattoos,” I say. “The ones they said I didn’t deserve anymore.”

Her voice is steady when it comes. “How did you get out?”

"Prison riots. Three years later. I escaped with four other men. Made my way to Saratov first, then to New York."

Giselle's hand drops from my spine and I feel the loss like a piece carved out of me. I turn back around to her, grabbing her wrists before I can stop myself. She doesn’t shrink back as she meets my eyes.