Page 8 of Bratva's Mercy
Nik watched the taillights ahead of us for a moment before exhaling through his nose. “All right. I’m done,” he said finally.
I didn’t answer.
He shifted in his seat and rubbed a hand over his jaw. The joking tone he’d carried for the last ten minutes was gone. “Look. I’ll shut up if you really want me to. You know I will.”
I glanced at him briefly before returning my attention to the road.
“But all bullshit aside,” he said quietly, “what the hell is this, Sergei? What are you actually doing?”
For a long moment, the only sound in the truck was the low hum of the engine and the tires rolling over asphalt. I watched Leo’s car move through the next intersection.
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling somewhat ashamed for admitting it.
Nik blinked. “You don’t…what?”
“I have no fucking idea.”
The words hung in the air between us, and for the first time since he realized my intention tonight, he fell silent.
“I heard him crying.” The admission slipped out, and I immediately regretted saying it. The words felt wrong in my mouth, like I’d exposed something that should have stayed locked inside my skull.
“What?”
I exhaled slowly through my nose. “The day of the funeral, I went to his house.”
“To—”
“To search it,” I cut in because he had to know I hadn’t just decided to stalk the man for no good reason. “His computer. Files. Anything that might tell us if Bradley had been collecting information on Maxim and whether hishusband had it in his possession. I needed to know if there was something we missed.”
“Okay. That makes sense.”
“I was in his office when Leo returned home earlier than expected. I didn’t have time to leave, so I prepared myself to kill him if I had to.”
The memory came back to me with uncomfortable clarity. “I heard him moving through the house. He went into the bathroom, and then he started throwing up, and after that, he was crying. He sounded… broken. It was awful. I’ve been in this business for so long, and I’ve never heard another man cry like that. As if his world had ended.”
“I get that. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Jess or Darius.”
“But the worst part was, he was completely alone. Even as bad men, we have people around us when we lose someone, but there he was alone, grieving. Why wasn’t there anyone present for him?”
His sobs still haunted my dreams, made me wake up in the middle of the night, sweating. “I felt sorry for him. I’ve never felt sorry for anyone before. Not like that. I don’t know what the hell that was.”
Leo’s car turned onto a quieter residential road ahead of us, and I followed. Although I maintained my distance, there was no other car between us now. He probably saw the truck, so I didn’t bother to hang further back to disguise my presence. He might hate my guts, but at least he knew he wasn’t alone.
“Since then, I’ve been making sure he gets home safely.”
Nik said nothing.
I also bought him coffee because he stopped going to Ground Theory after our last confrontation there. Since it was all my fault, I delivered his coffee to the nurse at the station, but this morning, when I got there, the nurse told menot to bother because Dr. Cavanagh was abstaining from caffeine.
More like he’s abstaining from anything that has to do with me.
Nik rubbed a hand over his face and turned his head toward me. “You know it’s normal to feel sorry for someone, right?”
I didn’t answer because what did you say to that?
“You’re not a robot, Sergei. You’ve spent years with one job in your head. Keep Maxim safe. That’s it. That’s been your entire personality.”
“That’s my job.”
