Page 80 of Scarlet Thorns

“But how can you do this?” she half wails. “We had something special. Osip. Something that could be so much more.”

Chert voz’mi!

This woman is never going to take the hint.

She continues to argue, her voice rising with each accusation. My patience is wearing thinner with each word. The alcohol makes everything sharper, more volatile.

“That it! I’m done,” I say finally, my temper at breaking point.

“What the fuck do you mean, you’re done, Osip?”

“You heard me. I’m breaking up with you.”

Breaking up? What the fuck am I even saying? We never had a relationship to begin with.

She stares at me for a long moment, her face cycling through disbelief, hurt, and finally rage. “But why?”

Jesus Christ!

Is she seriously not getting it?

“Because this isn’t working. It never was.”

“I don’t believe you.” Tears stream down her cheeks, but underneath the hurt burns something harder. “Is there someone else? Some other whore sucking your dick already, is that it?”

The crudeness is meant to wound, to drag me down to her level. Instead, it just confirms what I already knew— this was never about love. It was about possession, control, the need to own something that couldn’t be owned.

I cross to the door, opening it with deliberate calm. “Goodbye, Anett.”

She stares at me for another moment, mascara running in dark rivers down her cheeks. Then her expression hardens into something I recognize— the look of someone who’s about to make everyone else pay for their pain.

“You’re going to regret this, Osip! This is not over!”

“Yes, it is. Out. Now.”

She storms past me into the night, flicking her hair over her shoulder as if marking the end of a performance. I close the door behind her and lean against it, suddenly feeling much older than my thirty-three years.

What a fuck up of an evening.

I’m drunk, exhausted, and surrounded by the wreckage of a relationship I never wanted in the first place. My brothers brought up Galina’s death, pushed me about children I’ll never have, and witnessed me break up with a woman I should have cut loose months ago.

I climb the stairs slowly, pausing outside Ilona’s door for just a moment. No sound from within— she’s probably asleep, dreaming whatever dreams innocent people have. Dreams thatdon’t feature parking lots and knives and the weight of necessary violence.

In my own room, I strip off my clothes and collapse onto sheets that still smell faintly of Anett’s perfume. Tomorrow I’ll have housekeeping wash everything, erase the last traces of a fling that should never have started.

But tonight, I lie in the darkness and think about cosmic jokes and impossible coincidences. About the woman from Room Five. About Igor Shiradze’s daughter who trusts me with her safety.

About the fact that those two women are the same person, and I’m the killer who connects them both.

The pull between us is still there— magnetic, undeniable, wrong in every possible way. I felt it when she looked at me across the kitchen island, the same electric current that crackled between us in that burgundy room.

But nothing can happen.

Nothing will happen.

She’s my housekeeper, and that’s all she can ever be.

Chapter Thirty-Two