Late nights weren’t out of the norm for me, but the on-edge feeling I had around Dahlia meant my nights were more restless than ever. Between Dahlia and Elena, it was a miracle I’d gotten to sleep at all. Elena’s disappearance hadn’t worried us as much as it should. She was resourceful and knew when to keep things to herself. Including leaving us out in the cold on her plans.

I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat at my table. A stack of envelopes sat in front of me. Collecting the mail hadn’t been high on my list of things to do. I hadn’t gone through them. Now I wished I had. A hand-addressed letter with familiar handwriting was tucked in among all the other crap.

Elena believed that Sergei had eyes and ears everywhere. She didn’t know the limits of his surveillance, so she was always extra careful when it came to that. Someone threatening your life and using you for leverage against the last of your family had a way of doing that to a person. My gut soured that I hadn’t been able to protect her. Hadn’t been able to get her here earlier, but doing things on the up-and-up had its disadvantages, namely time. She’d been visiting the embassy regularly to tutor embassy staff in Russian, so as not to raise his suspicions. It gave her the chance to covertly apply.

I scanned her letter. Written in her own version of a code that we’d all perfected through years of texting and e-mails, but for some reason she’d thought a letter would be best. The paperwork had finally cleared. It would only be a matter of weeks, if not days until she could get here. After so many years. The threats had hung over the heads of all three of us, and we were so close to finally being free of him.

What came after was something else we’d have to figure out. There were so many scenarios we’d run through. Do we leave the city? Can I hold everything together with Sergei gone after what will effectively be a coup? What about Dahlia? I couldn’t ask her to give up the life she’d made for herself to be by my side. But I couldn’t live away from her. The loyalty of the men we’d turned was even more important than ever before. Now the life of the woman I loved hung in the balance.

Sergei would have to be dealt with, and if I had to do it with my bare hands, I wouldn’t let him threaten the lives of any more of the people I loved. I grabbed my phone off the table and headed downstairs with Elena’s letter in hand. After ten minutes standing in front of his door banging on it, I finally called.

“Where the hell are you?”

“Out.” Low music pumped in the background.

“Where? You never go out.”

“I know. What do you want?”

This was so much more important than whatever the hell he was doing being secretive. Whatever it was, he’d tell me eventually.

“I just got a letter. She should be here soon,” I said, swallowing past the lump in my throat.

“Thank God. Finally!” Alexei said, his voice tight. “Are you going to tell Sergei she’s been located?”

“Fuck no. And let him know his leverage is gone? I’m not saying shit until her plane touches down here.”

“How do we get her to the airport without him knowing?”

“It seems she’s making the arrangements on her own. Erik will be bringing her over. She has the visa. That’s the most important thing.”

“I told you we should have just done it the dirty way.” Smuggling her in would have had a host of problems, not to mention that the idea of her being locked in a detention center made my blood boil.

Sergei would have found a way to make that happen if we tried to get her to the US illegally. Laughable, that the man at the head of one of the biggest Russian crime families on the East Coast would send his only niece to jail to get back at Alexei and me. To keep her in Russia meant keeping us under his thumb. Over there he could operate even more freely and in the open and he had many more connections than we could ever stop if he decided we weren’t being cooperative.

“And he’d have found a way to make us pay for it. To make her pay. Now, he won’t be able to.”

“We’re going to have to handle Sergei as soon as she lands.” Alexei’s voice was tight.

“I know.”

“Are you ready to take over as the head of the Volokov family once it’s time?”

He’d been the captain my uncle never believed he could be, except it was for me. Making sure when we made our move, we’d have the firepower and support we needed. Get Elena there. Alexei had no interest in the power the family wielded. He didn’t want anything to do with it, but he’d have my back. To ensure that there was always someone in the family I could trust.

So it fell to me to take over for Sergei, but not the way he’d always planned. Not in the way that would secure his legacy. That had died with his wife back in Russia and son a little over a decade ago. He’d turned to blackmail, to murder, and destroyed any loyalty we’d ever had to him. And payback was waiting just around the corner.

* * *

The trip to the shop always had me on edge. I varied my route every day. Sometimes I’d take a taxi. Other times I’d drive over and park in a nearby garage or walk. There was nothing suspicious, but I needed to make sure someone wasn’t following me to her. Any threat against her made me want to burn that mansion of horrors down, destroy my uncle and screw the consequences, but I had to be smarter about it.

My routine with Dahlia was torturous, as it made my addiction to her that much keener. Sitting beside her on a daily basis with her hands all over my body, but almost never being able to touch her. We worked her way across my back, moving on to a new section while the piece before it began to heal. She’d managed to keep her distance, always evading my touch whenever possible after that first massage. My back throbbed and ached, but it was a constant reminder of what she’d done to me. The mark she’d left on me and would forever leave on me.

Feeding her pelmeni was my surefire win. The dumplings meant I bought more time with her. A better chance to sit when she wasn’t jabbing her needles into me. Stretching our evenings from business into something more. I was an open book about most subjects, but I knew it was only a matter of time before this all came crashing down. She’d ask a question I couldn’t answer, or worse, a question where the answer would scare her. Answers that were on the tip of my tongue every time I was near her.

I stared at her pictures on the wall, my gaze scanning over the hundreds of frames I’d seen for weeks now. They seemed to go in chronological order. The ones at the top were more clinical, snapshots that showed the tattoo and nothing more. As the pictures progressed, winding their way down the wall, they became more artistic. They seemed to capture not just the tattoo, but also the person she’d done them on.

“Do you take pictures of all your work?”

She peered over my shoulder, and I turned my head to look at her. Our lips were within inches of each other.

“Not all. Some people don’t want their pictures taken. Especially the criminal cover-ups,” she said, turning her tattoo gun off.

“What about me?” The colors of so many of the tattoos jumped off the walls.

She slid the cool liquid across my upper back and covered my skin with plastic wrap like she did every day. My back was a motley patchwork of tattoos in various states of healing. “Do you want me to take a picture of them?”

“My shoulder should be fine. You can’t even tell they were cover-ups. What do you do with them?”

“With the pictures? Nothing. I put them up on the wall.”

“You should show some of these off. I mean, I don’t know anything about art, really, but I have been to a gallery opening or two. These are something people would like.”

She glanced up at the pictures covering her wall. “These? These are for me, and some are for my clients.”

“You’ve got an eye, Dahl. The same one that created this”—I gestured to the flaming bird sprawling across my shoulders—“is a talent no one could ever overlook.”

“Thanks.” She ducked her head and started to get up from her chair. I caught her wrist and stared up at her.

“I’m serious.” My thumb traced a small circle on the inside of her wrist. Her pulse raced under my fingertips. I lifted her hand slowly, not wanting to break the connection between us. Her breath caught as I pressed my lips to the inside of her wrist where my thumb had been.

“You should show them to people. Share them.” I placed another kiss there. She sucked in a sharp breath, but she didn’t pull away. “Let other people outside of the shop see your work.” I slid my hands along her forearm, keeping my eyes locked onto hers the entire way. She stared at me like she was a little drunk, her eyes slightly glazed. Like I always felt when I was around her. Off-balance and unsure, which was something I’d never experienced before or since her.

She was it for me. I just needed her to see that. Needed to work to convince her. I gently tugged her forward, and she took a step, then another, closer until I had her standing between my legs. Her bare skin was inches from me, with her cutoff sweatshirt showing just enough skin to make me want to see more.

I put my hand on her waist, my rough hands on her silky-smooth skin.

“I’ve missed you, Dahl.” I traced the small circles there too. “I never should have left you.” Her breath hitched, and then her eyes cleared. She jumped back like she’d been burned, breaking the contact between us. The loss of the heat of her skin made me want to reach out again, but everything in the way her back was ramrod-straight and tightness in her shoulders screamed No! Stay away!. She cleared off the tray, throwing out some things and sterilizing others without another word. I should have known better than to bring up the past, but we couldn’t ignore it forever.

I could wait. I could be patient. That was what my entire life was. A practice in waiting for what you wanted, because you knew when the time came and you got it all, it would be even sweeter than you would imagine.

I knew when I tasted her again, it would be even better than before. She was different and so was I. That early adulthood had been peeled away. Beaten out of us by life, and when we recaptured what we had, the taste couldn’t compare to anything I’d imagined.

She stood in front of the corner sink with both her hands gripping the edge.

“What are we doing, Ivan?” she asked with her back to me.

“We’re trying to remember who we were and figure out who we are now.”

“I can’t let you drag me down like you did last time.” Her head dropped, and her shoulders rounded. Screw giving her space. I crossed the distance between us in one step and put my hand on the spot where her shoulders met her neck. The tension there vibrated under my hand.

“I have no intentions of dragging you down. I have no intentions of hurting you. If anything, you have so much more of a hold on me than you can ever know.”

“I think maybe you should have someone else finish the work. Most of the identifying tattoos are covered at this point. No one else would know,” she said, barely above a whisper.

This was not going to end this way. I stepped closer, pressing my chest against her back and tugging her against me.

“Don’t do this,” I said into her hair. She smelled like strawberries and sunshine. I imagined eating them off her body, and my cock hardened in my jeans. Her body jerked, and I knew she felt it pressed against her. Remembered how good we’d been together. Our time together that replayed in my mind every early morning in bed to the point where it drove me to jerk myself off or risk going insane.

“I’ll be here tomorrow and every other night until we’re finished.” I dropped a light kiss on the crease of her neck. I felt the tremble run through her before I stepped away and left, before I pushed her so much further than she was ready to go. But I wouldn’t be able to hold back much longer.

Soon she’d know I had no intentions of leaving her behind once she was finished leaving her mark on me, because her mark went well beyond skin-deep.