She’s quiet as we make quick work of the stew, and I let her eat in peace, worried that even this meal might be too taxing for her. When we’re done, I clean up and make Yulia a cup of her favorite Earl Grey.
“How are you feeling?” I ask when I bring it to the table, and she smiles, patting her flat belly.
“Extremely full. The stew was amazing. Thank you for making it.”
“My pleasure.” I grin as she stifles a yawn before sipping her tea. “Sleepy?”
“Just food coma, I think,” she says with another almost-yawn. “I can’t possibly want to sleep. I’ve slept enough for a lifetime.”
“Your body needed it,” I say, my amusement fading as I recall her near-catatonic state after Kirill’s attack. “You’ve been through a lot.”
She looks down at her cup. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Yulia…” I sit down and reach across the table to cover her hand with mine. “What happened? How did you end up with Kirill?”
Her slender fingers twitch under my palm, but she doesn’t look up.
“Yulia.” I squeeze her hand lightly. “Look at me.”
She reluctantly meets my gaze.
“Do you have any other siblings you’re hiding from me?”
She shakes her head.
“Anyone else you’re trying to protect?”
She blinks. “No.”
“Then tell me what happened. Why were you in that cell? Did they think you double-crossed them?”
“They… it… It’s complicated, Lucas.” Her lips tremble for a second before she presses them together.
“I see.” I get up and walk around the table. Yulia gives me a startled look when I pull her to her feet, but I just pick her up and walk to the living room, carrying her cradled against my chest.
“What are you doing?” she asks when I sit down on the couch, holding her on my lap. She’s disturbingly light in my arms, as breakable as after her stint at the Russian prison.
“I’m getting comfortable so you can tell me your complicated story,” I say, settling her more securely on my lap. Even after her weight loss, her ass is soft and curvy, and her hair smells sweet, like peaches mixed with vanilla. My body reacts instantly, but I ignore the spike of lust. Keeping one arm around her back, I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear with my free hand and say softly, “Talk to me, sweetheart. I won’t hurt you or your brother, I promise.”
Yulia looks at me for a few moments, and I know she’s debating how much to trust me. I wait patiently, and finally, she murmurs, “Where do you want me to start?”
“How about at the beginning? Tell me about Michael. When did you both get recruited by the agency?”
Yulia takes a deep breath and launches into her story. I listen, my chest aching as she tells me about a ten-year-old girl whose parents left her to watch her two-year-old brother on an icy winter night and never returned, about the police visit the next morning and the horrors of the orphanage that followed.
“Nobody paid much attention to me—like I told you, I was skinny and awkward at that age, a real ugly duckling. But Misha was beautiful,” she says in a raw voice. “He could’ve starred in baby-product commercials. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. The headmistress kept bringing him to her office, and I’d see men, different men each time, go in. I don’t know what they did to him, but there would be bruises on him, and blood occasionally. And he wouldn’t stop crying for days afterwards. I tried to report it, but nobody would listen. The country was in disarray—it still is—and nobody cared about the orphans. We were out of the way, and that was all that mattered.” Her eyes glitter fiercely as she says, “I would’ve done anything to get Misha out of there. Anything.”
Fury is a pulsing beat in my skull, but I keep quiet and continue listening as Yulia tells me about a visit from a well-dressed man whose cold hazel eyes both scared her and gave her hope.
“Vasiliy Obenko offered me a deal, and I took it,” she says. “It was the only way I could save Misha. We’d been at the orphanage for less than a year, and he was already a mess: acting out, crying at random times, disobeying his teachers… Even if a good family had come along, they wouldn’t have wanted to adopt a child with those kinds of behavioral issues, no matter how beautiful he was. I was so desperate I considered taking Misha and running away, but we would’ve starved on the streets or worse. The world isn’t kind to homeless children.” She draws in a shuddering breath, and I stroke her back, trying to keep my own hands from trembling with rage.
I’m going to find the headmistress of that orphanage and make the child-pimping bitch pay.
“So yeah,” Yulia continues after a moment, “when Obenko came to recruit me in exchange for his sister and brother-in-law adopting Misha and providing him with a good home, I jumped at the opportunity. I knew there was a chance I was making a deal with the devil, but I didn’t care. I just wanted Misha to have a shot at a better life.”
Of course. That explains so fucking much: her bizarre loyalty to an organization that abused her, her willingness to carry out “assignments” after what happened with Kirill. It was never about patriotism; all along, she’d been doing it for her brother.
“And did Obenko uphold his part of the bargain?” My tone is relatively calm.
“Sort of—well, I don’t know.” She bites her lip. “I’m still trying to untangle the truth from the lies. Misha was supposed to have a normal life, and it seems like he did—at least until a couple of years ago. His adoptive parents have nothing to do with the agency; Obenko’s sister is a nurse, and her husband is an electrical engineer. Part of the bargain was that I stay away from Misha and his new family, so I only saw him in pictures. I didn’t realize my brother had been recruited by UUR until I followed Obenko to a warehouse on the outskirts of Kiev and saw Misha there, being trained by Kirill along with the other youths.”
“The Kirill you thought was dead?” My rage intensifies as I picture her reaction to this double blow—to a betrayal so cruel even I can’t fathom it.
Yulia nods, her gaze hardening as she tells me about her capture and subsequent interrogation at the hands of her own agency. “They thought I’d been turned, you see,” she says. “That I betrayed them.”
“I don’t understand something.” I slide my hand under her hair and rest it on her nape, managing to keep my fury under control. “What prompted you to follow Obenko to that warehouse? Did you suspect something?”
“No, not at all.” Her blue eyes are shadowed. “I started following Obenko in the hopes that he might eventually lead me to his sister’s family—to my brother. I wanted to see Misha just this once before—” She stops, her teeth sinking into her bottom lip.
“Before what?”
Yulia doesn’t respond.
“Before what, beautiful?”
“Before I left for another assignment,” she whispers, blinking rapidly.
Her words fill me with such violent jealousy that I almost miss it when she adds, almost inaudibly, “And disappeared for good.”
“What?” My hand tightens on the back of her neck. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”
She winces, and I gentle my grip, massaging the area I just abused. She still doesn’t say anything, however, and the seconds tick by, each one adding to my fury.
“Yulia…” Only the knowledge of what happened the last time I let jealousy blind me stops me from exploding on the spot. “What the fuck do you mean by that?”
“Nothing. I was just—” She closes her eyes for a second before opening them to meet my gaze. “I was going to walk away, okay?” Her voice shakes. “I couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t carry out another assignment for them. I was going to use the plane tickets and the identities they gave me to disappear and start over fresh.”
“You were?” I lower my hand to the small of her back, some of my anger cooling. “Why? Why after all these years?”
She gives a tiny shrug and looks down, avoiding my gaze. “I figured my brother was safe at this point—it’s not like his adoptive parents would put him back in the orphanage after eleven years.”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t have put him back after five years either.” I grip her chin to force her to look at me. I can feel her discomfort with the topic, and it makes me even more determined to unravel this mystery. “You didn’t know about Kirill and your brother yet. So why did you decide to run?”
She remains silent.
“Yulia…” I lean forward until our noses are almost touching. This close, her sweet scent is intoxicating. I breathe it in, feeling like I’m on the verge of losing control. My heart pounds heavily in my chest, and when I speak, the words come out rough and strained. “Why did you decide to run, beautiful? What changed?”
Her lips part as she stares at me, and the temptation to kiss her, to taste the pink, lush softness of her mouth is unbearable. I’m hyperaware of her, of everything about her. The shallow, uneven rhythm of her breathing, the warmth of her soft, smooth skin, the way her long brown lashes tangle with one another at the far corners of her eyes—it all lures me in, intensifying the hunger burning in my veins. Only the conviction that I must have this answer—that it’s something truly important—keeps me from giving in to my need.