Page 50 of Only for Him (Starkov Bratva #1)
“Of course,” Russo blubbers. “Of course I do! G, I care about you! I love you, like, like a daughter!”
“But you didn’t treat Serena like a daughter, did you?” Roman’s voice is a blade. “Because no real father would do what you did to her.”
Russo winces, and I see it happen: the moment he thinks about something . Something that’s been eating him alive.
My breath stops flowing.
Oh, my God.
Roman’s not lying. The evidence isn’t fake.
He did it. He fucking did something to her.
I’m not strong enough to think of what that something was, even though I know it deep in my fucking bones.
I must make a noise, because both men look at me.
And just like that, every good memory curdles.
It was all a fucking lie.
He wasn’t worried about me working this case because I was in danger. He was worried because he knew it would lead back to him. All this time, he was just keeping me on a leash.
I want to rip him apart, but I can’t move.
My heart actually feels like it’s cracking open, pouring acid through my veins.
Russo’s voice cracks: “G, I was trying to protect you. I swear, I didn’t want to work with them, I didn’t have a choice?—”
“Bullshit,” Roman cuts him off. “No one forced you to be on Pavel’s payroll. And no one forced you to rape Serena.”
The scream tears through my throat so fast I barely get my hands up to catch it.
Russo winces like it hurts him. Good .
He better get used to pain, because I foresee a lot of it in his fucking future. I want to bash him into pieces. I want to carve Serena’s name into his skull.
I want to fucking kill him.
“I didn’t know she was… and then, everything I did for you after, I did it to protect you,” Russo keeps gasping. “To make it up to you. It was just once, one time, and she—I—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Giselle.”
I saw this man as someone who loved me, cared about me, wanted me to be happy.
All along, he was just feeling guilty for raping my fucking sister.
He never saw anything special in me. He only saw me as the answer to his own fucking guilt.
And he thought he could make up for what he did to Serena by being nice to me? By handing me promotions and compliments and nicknames and taking me under his fucking wing?
Fuck. That.
“What else?” Roman seethes in Russo’s face, grabbing one hand and putting a pair of wire-cutters to the joint of his index finger. Russo writhes but can’t get away. “Speak, or the gag goes in and your fingers come off.”
“What else do you want me to say? I did it, okay? I’ve been working with Pavel for years. Whatever he needed. Scrubbed records, found girls, found buyers, fucking worked the events. Anything he said. You want names? Every girl I ever… ever…”
Russo looks at me, defeated.
“Why?” I ask, cold and empty. I see him asking himself the same question. By the time he reaches the answer, I’ve beat him to it.
“Because I’m weak,” he says. “Because I wanted to.”
My legs give out and I crumple to the floor, pulling my knees to my chest in the process.
I hear footsteps, and then feel Roman’s presence. First looming over me, then descending inch by inch. His heat wraps around me, like a weighted blanket that brings the world back into focus.
Except that’s not what I fucking want. I want to blur out the rest of my goddamn life.
I look up and see that he’s kneeling in front of me.
In his hand is a knife.
I stare at it. Nothing is really computing. All the stimuli coming in through my senses, none of it solving the equation in front of me.
“Finish it, little viper,” Roman coaxes. “This is what you wanted. This is what you’ve been fighting for. Close the circle.”
He wants me to kill Russo.
Russo. Captain fucking Russo. My fucking mentor, my goddamn friend, my sister’s fucking rapist.
I should. I fucking should. I should torture him, shove the knife up his fucking ass, tear his tongue out and feed it back to him. I should make him feel every ounce of pain I’ve had to live with.
But when I look at Russo, I can’t see whoever he was when he raped Serena, or orchestrated her kidnapping and murder.
I can only see the man I’ve grown to love, and the family he’s brought me into: I see his wife, who knows I love her maple-roasted carrots and makes them every time I come over for dinner. I see his son, pressing a sticky game controller into my hand and begging me to play with him.
I still remember the Russo I first met, the one who called me G and stayed late to help me with paperwork. The one who helped me move into this very fucking apartment. He carried my mattress upstairs, grumbling the whole way about his bad back.
My eyes land on the back of the picture frame that holds my photo of Serena. It’s still facing the wall.
Thank God for that. I don’t want her to have to look at her rapist. But even more, I don’t want her to see what I’ve become.
Maybe everything I’ve been doing hasn’t been to bring her peace. Maybe I’ve just been dragging her through my fucking hell.
For a second, something flickers behind Russo’s tears.
Hope.
“Please,” he whispers. “Don’t do this. It’s not right, G.”
He’s wrong. It is the right thing to do. But I still can’t kill him.
Not because of him. Not because of his pathetic little whimpers. But because he isn’t some faceless monster.
I don’t want Ida and Teddy to have to sit in the witness box at my trial.
I don’t want to watch Mrs. Russo sniffle into a wadded-up tissue.
I don’t want to have to crumple up and throw away the picture of the precinct his son drew because it reminds me that I couldn’t draw the line between justice and destruction.
I don’t want to kill someone in the same place I spend my sleepless nights, in the room where my sister’s picture and memory lives.
His blood on my hands? Unbearable.
Except… Couldn’t I have said the same about so many of those other men? Some of them did less than Russo. They just drove a van, or watched a door, or paid for a girl.
And I killed them anyway.
I was happy to make their wives widows and make their kids attend their funerals.
I did it all… and not even for Serena.
For fucking Roman .
“I’m so sorry, just please… Please tell me you forgive me,” Russo blubbers, but I can barely hear him. Or, I can’t bear to listen. Either way, he’s not going to get what he wants from me. Not now. Not ever again.
Roman must see how impossible this is for me. He’s finally brought me to the edge of everything, expecting me to leap off the abyss with him.
But I won’t. I can’t.
Will he be upset that I can’t do it? Disappointed, maybe? Maybe he’ll see this as a final betrayal.
I don’t care. Fuck this, and fuck him for asking it of me!
Fuck him for bringing Russo here, to my fucking home, so that I have to think of this every time I sit on the goddamn couch.
I let the knife fall from my hand, and Roman’s face hardens. He picks it back up and stands.
I watch through a haze of tears as he stalks towards Russo.
In the time it takes me to blink, I hear the wet, final sound of justice.
I taste copper, even though I’m yards away from the blood. My body is trembling enough that the world keeps jerking to the left, like an engine misfiring under the hood.
Roman’s hand returns to my shoulder. He squeezes once, then lets go. For a second, I wish he’d hold on tighter. I’m not sure I can stand on my own.
My teeth chatter as I push myself upright. Russo is slumped forward on the plastic sheet, chin pressed to the floor, a widening fan of red blooming out beneath him.
His face is still twisted in the last emotion he ever had: a perfect split between relief and shame. The last dead man I saw was a schoolteacher whose only crime was paying for sex from someone whose history he didn’t know.
I remember how dirty and ugly and awful I felt when that man said he was sorry, and I killed him anyway.
I look at Roman. He’s already turned away, as if the kill is just another item crossed off the to-do list. A ritual performed a thousand times, that almost became second nature for me, too.
Because of him.
My shadow.
My fucking nightmare.
Don’t just cower here. For once in this whole sad fucking saga, do the right thing. Be Detective Cantiano.
I get to my feet, finally ready to face him.