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“No,” June says, looking down at her feet. “No, of course not.”
“I’m sure she’ll be open to sharing her whole story with us when the time is right,” I continue. “But right now, she came here for refuge. Our job now is to make sure she’s protected. Ravil’s men will no doubt be searching for her.”
“Will they know where to look?” she asks tentatively.
“He knows I’m opposed to the prostitution trade, and he knows I don’t participate in it, but he has no reason to believe I would actively move against him this way. Still, he’ll probably have eyes on me regardless.”
“Because of me,” June infers softly.
“Yes. Because of you.”
She shakes her head and her shoulders hunch forward as she tries desperately to hold herself together.
I take her hand and coax her onto the sofa. Then I sit down beside her. I can’t scoop the nightmares out of her skull with my bare hands, though I would do it in a heartbeat if I could. She doesn’t deserve to be tortured by them.Give them to me,I want to tell her.I’ll take the torture on your behalf. I’m the one who deserves it.
“Kolya,” she says, looking up at me abruptly. “I need you to be honest with me, okay?”
I nod, bracing myself for her next question.
“What do you think?” she asks, her voice straddling the line between calm and hysteria. “Do you think he was… that Adrian was… involved in this? Do you think he was hurting innocent women?”
I have some evidence to support that theory, but even still, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around. My own brother, working against me, in the one industry I swore never to be a part of.
The worst of it was that he’d been there when I made the decision. He saw what led me to it. He’d looked Milana right in the eye and I was so certain that he noticed what I did—how deep some wounds really go.
Things happened after that, of course. Life happened, in all its ugliness and glory. Considering everything that we went through, I can understand his resentment—to a certain extent, at least. I can see where his respect for me had turned to bitterness, even hate.
But this?
This seems so far beyond that.
“I don’t know, June.”
She narrows her eyes. “You know something,” she insists. “You know something, and you’re not telling me.”
“I knew that he regretted leaving the Bratva,” I tell her. I’m giving her scraps when I should be serving her the whole damn meal. “He was angry with me for that.”
“Why would he be angry with you for that?” she asks. “If it was his choice?”
“It was his choice to leave,” I admit. “But he was young. Too young to realize everything else he would be giving up.”
“Like what?”
“Like… this,” I say, gesturing to everything around me. “The wealth, the luxury, the influence. He thought he wanted to be free of the life, but he just wanted out from underneath our father’s shadow. By the time he figured out that getting one would cost him the other, it was too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“You can’t just walk out on the Bratva and then walk back in again,” I explain. “He wasn’t just anyone, some rank-and-file nobody; he was the son of the don. He cut ties with our world, changed his name, and disappeared. It isn’t the kind of decision that can be unmade.”
Tears are beginning to form at the corners of June’s eyes. “He did always seem like he was… searching for something. Something he lost.”
“Life in the real world was a cruel awakening, once the novelty of his freedom had worn off.”
“Are you saying you wouldn’t let him rejoin the Bratva if he asked?”
I shake my head. “Like I said, it’s not as simple as walking back in when you’ve walked out. He had lost face with my men. They saw him as a coward. Many weren’t afraid to say so to his face.”
“What did you do?”
