Page 213 of Cashmere Ruin
“Now, now,” Grisha tries to placate her. “It all turned out fine in the end, didn’t it?”
“No thanks tohim,” she hisses in Yuri’s direction. “I swear, it’s like he was trying to make me into a single mother.”
“Is her bedside manner always like this?” April whispers to me.
“I wouldn’t know,” I mutter back. “Never had the misfortune.”
“I’ll clear my calendar if you get shot,” Petra offers.
My lips twitch. Truth is, Ididget shot, but it didn’t matter. Because I had someone looking out for me.
I glance down at my jacket. I haven’t had time to change—we all came straight here. The bullet hole is still there, blinking backat me from the special fabric April’s team created. An invisible, everyday armor.
Well, everydayfor me. I doubt shop clerks out there are spending their days in three-piece suits, especially ones with this price tag. But I understand April’s been thinking of expanding the scope. Already, her mind is on the next big thing. So who knows what the future might hold?
“Matvey.” Yuri’s voice snaps me out of my thoughts. “Can we talk?”
“You shouldn’t be exerting yourself right now. Rest. We’ll talk later.”
“No, I…” he shakes his head. “I need to say this. I feel like I won’t be able to sleep until I do.”
I look at him. Once, he wouldn’t have dared to contradict a direct order from me. But this isn’t the same Yuri I met two days ago, a week ago, or even a year ago. This is someone else—someone new. And this someone isn’t going to take no for an answer.
“Alright. Speak.”
He gives a small, grateful nod. “When I found out we weren’t…” He trails off. He doesn’t need to finish that sentence—we all know what lies at the end. “I was scared. I thought that would be the end of us. That if it came out, we would… that you would…”
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
“But in the end, I just turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. My fears, my guilt—it all got away from me so fast. I wanted to dig myself out and didn’t know how to do it. So I just kept digging myself deeper down.”
“You thought it was necessary.”
“No. Itoldmyself it was.” He looks at me then, eyes bright and open. For a second, he’s the scrawny kid I found in the snow. “But I should’ve talked to you. I should’ve risked it. If I had, then maybe…”
The worst part is, I can’t fill in the rest of that sentence, because I just don’t know. If he’d told me, what would I have done?
I know I wouldn’t have had him killed. I know I probably would’ve kept him in the higher-ups of my Bratva on his practical value alone. What I don’t know is everything else.
Would I have kept thinking of him as a brother? Asfamily?
Would I have trusted him again?
I don’t know. Because the truth is, Yuri isn’t the only one who walked out of that warehouse a different man. And if I’m being honest, I was already someone else when I walked in.
Because the woman I love deserved better than that man.
She deserved the world.
And she deserves it still.
“Can you ever forgive me?” Yuri asks in the end. “Can we ever go back to the way things were?”
I sit on the edge of the bed. “You lied to me, Yura.”
“I know.”
“For months.”