Page 53 of Only for Him (Starkov Bratva #1)

GISELLE

ONE WEEK LATER

When I finally agreed to meet Ida for a drink, it wasn’t just because drinking sounded better than rotting in bed, and not just because I felt guilty for blowing her off for so long.

It’s because I needed to get away from the smell of blood.

I scrubbed the floors twice, bleached the couch legs, tossed every towel, but it’s still there.

And then, every once in a while, I swear I can smell him, that ghost of danger curling through the air as he fucked me.

My body doesn’t know it’s not real. Every time, I combust into shimmering, slick throbbing, and hear the symphony of being fucked the way only Roman can.

It’s not like before, when I’d come home and know he’d been there.

Now it’s just my own sickness and need trying to trick me.

A memory that turns me into a wanting machine, programmed only to ache and hate.

But, it turns out, the bar isn’t much better, because all I feel there is the absence of Roman’s surveillance. It’s rainy out, the crowd is sparse, and I don’t feel the familiar prickle of a rabbit stalked by a wolf. He’s not here, because he’s not watching me.

My chest aches so sharply I think my heart might fall out and splatter on the floor. Maybe it should. Because every beat is just another shard, stabbing me from the inside out.

He didn’t even say goodbye.

Just walked away with Russo’s body slung over his shoulder, like everything between us hadn’t just shattered.

And I shouldn’t fucking care.

Because I still hate him, right?

I haven’t felt pain like this since Serena. And God help me, this might be fucking worse.

That grief was clean, but this? I can’t make sense of what happened. I can’t make sense of anything anymore.

How do I look at Roman and not see the man who crossed a line I was too afraid to?

How do I not love him for it?

If I hate him as much as I tell myself I do, shouldn’t I be at the DA’s office right now laying out the case for arresting him?

Then again, maybe I don’t need to bother. Maybe Pavel will do it for me. I’m the one who gave Pavel the map to find Roman. If he dies, it’ll be my fault.

I’ll have killed him just as surely as if that bullet had hit an artery.

Great. Now we can add fear and guilt to the list of shit I’m feeling that I don’t fucking want to be feeling.

Fuck this.

Just as I’m about to give up and tell Ida I want to drink at her place instead, she strides into the bar in a pencil skirt and hair bouncing around her shoulders, shakes her umbrella dry before she locks eyes with me and breaking into one of her forgiving smiles.

“Oh, my God, Giselle,” she says, her tone light even as her gaze sharpens with worry. “I was starting to think your stalker had killed you and was texting me from your phone.”

Christ. She couldn’t have picked a worse way to start the conversation.

Oh, don’t worry about that, Ida. He’d never kill me! Only everyone else in the entire world.

“I’ve been busy,” I say, forcing a smile. It’s embarrassing, thinking I might be able to fool my best friend.

She narrows her eyes, slipping into the seat beside me. “Busy doing what? Cataloging cockroaches? Heard the whole precinct is going insane. First, bodies piling up. Now, Russo’s MIA.”

She picks up the gin and tonic I ordered her, taking a sip before her eyes widen. “Oh, shit, you do know all that, right? You’re on leave, not professional airplane mode. There’s no way you don’t know how fucked things are.”

“No, I know about all that.” In fact, I know more about all that than anyone in the NYPD. She apparently hasn’t even heard that Russo’s DOA, not MIA. I got the text earlier, from Teddy. He was vague about it, just said he wanted to tell me something in person.

But I knew what it meant.

Just like I know the body won’t have my name carved into it. I won’t receive a matchbook or a locket or some other memento. None of his new bodies have been stuffed with roses.

The game is over. The men he left behind used to be symbols of my anger, my grief, all wrapped up in his twisted affection.

I never asked for any of that fucking shit.

Fuck him for doing it anyway.

I want to scream at him. I want to hurt him.

No, no I don’t. I just want him back.

I don’t want to be a failed experiment. I don’t want to be the girl who couldn’t handle it.

But I could handle it! I could! Give me another chance and you’ll see!

He did give me another chance.

And I repaid him by fucking shooting him.

God, I want to tell her. I want to tell someone. “I’m sorry, Ida. I?—"

“Forget it, Giselle,” she cuts in, firm but kind. “Don’t even start with your excuses. You’ve been gone. I don’t mean from work, I mean gone . And I can’t lose you. Not to whatever this is. So you can tell me whatever you want to tell me, but don’t lie to me about everything else.”

The crack in my heart widens, a physical pull to give Ida everything. She doesn’t even know who she’s sitting across from right now. No idea what I’ve done, who I’ve become.

If she knew, she’d run screaming. And by not telling her, I’m lying in the worst way.

Worse than lying. You’re taking away her ability to say no.

I want to tell her about Roman and the schoolteacher and Russo, how it’s all tangled in blood and violence. How I thought I was clawing my way toward vindication, only to find myself sinking into chaos. How I’m afraid that I don’t hate Roman at all. Because if it’s not hate, it’s…

No, I can’t say that word.

Instead, I take another sip of my drink. It’s too sweet. It sticks to my teeth, clashes hard against the bitter taste of everything I won’t say.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” I finally manage.

This whole time, I fucking begged him to pull me out of the wreckage. To show me that I’m worth owning. But now, all I see is a warped reflection. A funhouse mirror version of who I used to be.

“What if you didn’t have to explain it?” Ida studies me. “What if you just had to tell me what happened, and we figured out what it means together?”

Fact-finding.

It’s very lawyer-y of her. Can I really live the rest of my life with this much blood in my throat? How long before it chokes me? Maybe I want to tell Ida because she knows me so well, more than anyone but Roman.

Maybe she can tell me how I’m supposed to feel, if all this pain is rage or heartbreak.

I don’t think it can be both, anymore.

My lips are trembling with the effort not to just throw every sick, sacred detail at Ida. It wouldn’t be fair to ask that of her. But it’s also not fair to give her nothing.

If the roles were reversed, I’d want her to trust me enough to hold a little of it. Even just a glimpse, to help make sense of why someone I love is falling apart.

“I fucked up,” I confess, the words cracking loose like something old and rotted. “Me and this guy, we were doing a…” I falter, finding the contours of the lie I have to tell so I can tell the truth. “A special investigation. We had to go to this black market event. It was an auction. For girls.”

Ida’s expression shifts—surprise, then something more potent.

“Giselle,” she breathes, “you’re not serious? I mean, I know, as a cop, you see a lot but…”

Something sharpens in her expression.

“Was it something to do with Serena? Did you find out what happened to her?”

I twist Serena’s earring, let the tiny stab of pain ground me. The studs have no home now. The ceramic swan is beyond repairing with superglue. So I just never take them out.

Back home, her picture is still facing the wall.

And the man who helped kill her used to buy me scallion pancakes when I was hungover.

And at some point, my sister must’ve looked up at him with hope, or pleading, and he—he?—

Fuck!

I nod, eyes stinging. “We saved a girl. It should have been done then, but I stayed. He wasn’t good for me, actually really bad for me, but I stayed anyway. I don’t know why.”

Lie.

I stayed because he caught me, showed me nirvana with a knife handle, brought me men to kill in my sister’s name, worshipped the parts of me that I’d spent so long hating.

Then, somewhere between grief and bloodlust, I forgot how to live without him. And now I don’t know if I even want to remember. All I can do, really, is let the pain take turns beating me senseless.

Ida waits, lips parted as she processes everything, dark eyes wide and watery. I don’t know what she thinks I mean when I say I stayed, but as long as she doesn’t ask for details I think we can let it lie.

“He gave me something I need,” I finally say. “Or needed. I don’t know. Everything’s gotten all fucked up and now I don’t know what’s left. I fucked up.”

Fucked up doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I’m just one betrayal after another, sewn into a uniform.

I should have hated Russo, should have taken the knife and used it, but I was too weak.

Roman said he wasn’t disappointed that I didn’t kill Russo, but he should have been.

I am.

This is all your fault, you know. You’re the one who fell for a psycho, and when you couldn’t match his freak, you flipped out.

The tears come fast and hot and this time I don’t stop them. I let myself fall into Ida’s arms, feeling her warmth seep into the parts of me I thought were permafrost.

“We’ll get through this together,” she whispers. A fragile promise, thin as thread, but strong enough to hold me upright for now.

“He’s in danger, Ida,” I sputter. “It’s my fault. He doesn’t want me anymore, and he’s going to die, and it’s all my fucking fault.”

What if he’s already bleeding out somewhere, Pavel standing over him, laughing?

“No,” she coos into my hair. We must be making quite the scene, but I don’t care. These onlookers don’t know the half of it. “No, Giselle. It’ll be okay. It’ll all be okay.”

She’s wrong but, God, it feels good to believe her. For a moment, I let myself.

Roman won’t die at Pavel’s hand. He’ll stay locked away, alive, in that cold, beautiful mansion.

I’ll go back to being a detective, and it’ll always hurt a little bit when I hear piano music and remember what it felt like to be touched and seen fully, even if only once in a lifetime, and I’ll never again feel like someone’s salvation, but I’ll live with it.

Just like I’ve lived with Serena’s murder.

But you haven’t lived with that at all, Giselle. What you were doing before Roman? That wasn’t living. And you won’t live after this, either. There is no life without him.

“Was it love, Giselle?” Ida asks, and I’m so surprised that I answer before thinking about it.

That’s not true —I’ve thought about it a lot. Too fucking much.

People don’t generally shoot people they love.

They also don’t waste away into nothing when they shoot people they hate.

Whatever I feel for Roman, it’s all-encompassing. A religion. Obsessive and toxic and delicious enough for me to eat myself alive when I’m starved of it.

“I don’t know,” I whisper. “I don’t even know if I hate him or not. And I don’t know if I want to know. Maybe knowing would only make it hurt more.”

For a moment, Ida just watches me, tears now streaming down her cheeks, too. And then something sparks in her eyes. She opens her mouth, and I choke out a laugh. I know what she’s about to say.

“I really don’t think that going to the animal shelter and looking at puppies will help,” I say through a fresh sob, wiping at my cheeks.

“It was worth a shot,” she says, shrugging through a watery smile.

And in that moment, with her beside me, I understand something I didn’t before: whatever future’s waiting out there is paved with the consequences of choices I’ve already made.

The dark feels closer than ever. But I’ve been living in the dark my whole life—and if this is where I belong, then I better learn how to see in it.