Velvet Devil: A Russian Mafia Romance (81)

I suppress a sigh. “Why do I get the feeling that you’re about to defend him?”

“No, I’m not,” she says, surprising me. “He can defend himself if he feels the need. He certainly doesn’t need his mother to fight his battles for him.”

I risk a glance up at her. “How could you have let him do this?” I ask in a soft rasp. “How could a mother let her son…” My voice cracks and I trail off.

She raises her eyebrows, but as usual, she’s calm and unmoved. “I haven’t been able to make him do anything. Not since he was five years old and he was ripped from my arms. When he came back, he was beyond my reach.” She reaches out to touch the back of my hand. “He was raised to be a don, Camila. He wasn’t raised to listen or follow. He was always meant to lead.”

“A good leader listens to advice from the people closest to him,” I point out.

She nods and relinquishes her grasp on me to sink back into her seat. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been close to him for many decades now. Vitaly saw to that.”

I frown. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“It wasn’t. But I found ways to endure. I found ways to survive.”

“How?”

She smiles and her features turn soft. “I had the love of a good man,” she replies. “And I loved him in return.”

There it is again—that cryptic doublespeak. That say-one-thing-but-mean-another. No wonder she’s lasted so long in this world of harsh men and violent rules: she knows how to play their game.

But from everything she’s told me, I’m having a hard time believing that Vitaly was the “good man” in question. Goodness knows I wouldn’t call what they had “love.”

Am I misunderstanding her? Or is there more to the story than I’ve heard just yet?

I’m drowning in questions when Nikita speaks again. “… Which is how I know how you are in love with my son.”

I snap out of my thinking to look up at her. “Excuse me?” I’m suddenly filled with anger I can’t express, can’t explain.

“Camila, it’s okay, dear. I won’t out you if you haven’t already told him.” She tries to touch the back of my hand again, but I wrench it away from her.

“There’s nothing to tell, because I don’t love him.”

“Oh, dear. I see the way you look at him.”

No. She’s wrong. She’s a broken woman who’s spent too long in a nasty world of shadows. She wouldn’t know love if it smacked her in the face. And she doesn’t know me. She doesn’t know the first damn thing about me.

Clenching my jaw, I say, “I look at him like he’s the man who abducted me and trapped me here. It’s a beautiful prison, but it is still a prison.”

“There’s no need to get defensive.”

I leap to my feet. The iron chair goes clattering backwards behind me. “There’s every need! You can’t go around making accusations like that. You have no idea how I feel, about him or anyone else.”

“So is it Maxim you love then?”

She asks the question so mildly that it doesn’t immediately hit me how insulting it is. A slow burn of anger. It starts in my gut and creeps out to my extremities until I’m humming with it.

“What is this?” I snap. “An interrogation? Did Isaak put you up to this?”

“Of course not.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t believe you,” I seethe. I turn to whirl away and retreat to my room, but before I can go, Nikita reaches out and snares my wrist in her hand.

“I’m sorry if I offended you, Camila,” she says softly.

“And I’ll admit, when I made the statement I wasn’t completely sure how you felt about Isaak,” she says, forcing me to a standstill. “But now I do.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know that you wouldn’t have gotten so defensive if it wasn’t true.”

I try to brush off the words, but they hit hard. And no matter what I do, I can’t unhear them.

Before I can work up enough courage to tell her to leave me alone, I hear the sound of voices raised in alarm.

Nikita hears it, too. And it occurs to both of us at once what it must be: Isaak is returning home.

We both whisk down the stairs, around the house, and out onto the front drive. Nikita stays hot on my heels the whole time.

Half a dozen vehicles are parked haphazardly around the fountain. Men are scrambling in every direction.

“What’s happened?” I ask to no one in particular. My heart is pounding so fast it hurts.

“Clear a path!” someone booms. “Get him inside fast. Where’s the goddamn doctor? He’s lost a fuck ton of blood.”

My heart staggers. Isaak’s been hurt. It can only be him.

“Bogdan!” Nikita calls from next to me. “Where is he? Where’s Isaak?”

Bogdan looks over at this mother. His eyes are dark and hopeless.

No.

It can’t be.

Not Isaak.

The man is invincible. He has the kind of presence that makes you believe he’ll live forever. He has the audacity to make me believe that, and then die on me?

Then Bogdan steps aside and I see the gurney being pulled from the back of the truck.