Chapter 402: Broken, Sick & Twisted Beyond The Shadows

[FROLO]

The first time Katya had really interacted properly with Anya was five years ago, when she dragged him to Moskowsky Holdings to be the chairman.

Katya had been so traumatized and terrified of the woman that he kept looking over his shoulder for a whole year. He was convinced Anya Kavinsky was the spawn of the devil.

Sure, over the years he had gotten to learn that Anya was someone who cared the most about Sergei, but still the fear of being in the same space as the woman had never really disappeared. She was still the terrifying woman who could terrify even Sergei Moskowsky.

And for years Katya did everything to not be trapped in the same room as the woman. Because he knew she would kill him for Sergei’s sanity. She would strangle the fuck out of him if she thought he was a nuisance.

Even now, in the penthouse, Katya was convinced this woman saw him as an inconvenience to Sergei. That he was just something that Sergei could not be rid of and that he had to be tolerated for the sake of Sergei’s sanity.

And Katya...

He waited for the second shoe to drop.

For Anya to start talking shit to him and warning him against anything or everything.

It was what he knew this woman for. The woman who was fiercely protective of Sergei Moskowsky and who would not hesitate to remove people from Sergei’s life if she deemed them a nuisance.

They had been sitting there in occasional silence. Which was weird because Katya had expected a thousand and one questions.

He had not expected that Anya would make him coffee and ask him if he was alright every ten minutes. He did not expect the concern on the woman’s face that was so genuine it caught him more off guard than the sniper bullets downstairs. He had expected that she would threaten him.

Instead, she kept reassuring him that things would be okay.

Who the fuck was this woman, or had Katya really misunderstood Anya Kavinsky from the few interactions he had had with her?

As he’d already learned from the footage Sergei showed him before, Anya was just as lethal as Sergei. If anything, he learned that Anya and Rastenkin had been the parental figures of Sergei Moskowsky, the people he listened to the most and who cared far too much about the alpha than anyone else.

Which was unnerving for Katya even now.

Because slowly he was understanding how Sergei must have felt, being in the same space as his disapproving father.

Did Anya disapprove of him too, or was this just a new phase he didn’t know how to understand yet?

"It’s not your fault," Anya said at the second hour of waiting.

"What?" Katya asked, unsure of how he was supposed to respond to that. He knew it was his fault that Sergei had gone out there. That it was his fault his friends were once again in the line of fire.

Granted, he had been considering walking to them and walking away, but then that was just a show for them.

He was scared he would lose them.

Terrified that the stakes were far too high than he had thought.

"It’s not your fault that the people around you are a little messed up in the head and have crazier ways to protect you," Anya said, and Katya looked at her desperately, like he was trying to gauge whether she was just telling him because she felt bad for him.

"They’re getting hurt because of me," Katya breathed.

"Welcome to the family, love," Anya laughed sincerely, and Katya just stared.

Was he supposed to be relieved?

"He’s loved you for longer than he ever knew the word love. Freaked out over you more times than he signed contracts with people. He even fell into a ditch a few hundred times over the years because he couldn’t see where he was going because of you.

"Trust me, if he’s stupid, it’s his own fault," Anya said amusedly, like she couldn’t help it this time.

"Because of me?"

"Don’t worry, he didn’t even know it was love until three years ago. He thought he was just being protective," Anya snorted casually.

"All those brains and power, and he is still stupid as fuck... What is happening out there isn’t because of you, Katya. It’s just that Little Sergio never really knew love for a long time. He learned to protect himself and everything he had from a young age.

"When we were assigned to keep him safe, we didn’t expect a soft boy under the rebellious, explosive orphaned kid," Anya said, and Katya listened.

He didn’t even know Sergei was an orphan.

Hell, what did he know about Sergei other than the fact that the man was the devil of Frolo and the man who scared the entire realm into submission by just simply existing?

"Sergio?" Katya asked quietly.

"Yeah. He was our little Sergio when we found him. That was the only name he gave himself when we picked him up from the orphanage. The name he told everyone who interacted with him years after his parents had been murdered.

"Sergio was born under a different name, to high-ranking government officials. Two very powerful former military generals whose existence was a threat to the government they served. And the government betrayed them, throwing the boy into foster care at age four.

"For five years he was moved across the system before he decided to be someone else. Even in foster care he called himself Sergio or Sergei, dropped his name.

"Said it was something his father had taught him about survival," Anya said quietly, the memories of the boy she had found with Rastenkin something that still was etched into her brain.

Katya didn’t question.

He just listened.

"The first time he really got flagged was when he was nine years old. He’d run from the foster system, claiming those people were too annoying and reminded him a lot of the family he would never have again. They deemed him insane and too dangerous to live alone.

"I was working as the defense chief at the time when I saw his file. And his parents were friends of mine. So, I called Rastenkin and shared the file with him. Rastenkin worked as the president’s chief of staff, but only because he refused to come back to the army after Sergio’s parents were murdered.

"But then he read Sergio’s file, and we decided to take him. It was just an assignment. He was supposed to be the job, but the longer we interacted with little Sergio, the more we realized just how ruined the boy was. A child forced to carry the weight of the world on his own with no one to protect him.

"A boy who had lost his young sister in the ambush when his parents were killed. He watched them bleed because his father had insisted he hide. It broke him, watching his sister be m— anyway. That night changed a lot of things for little Sergio.

"We tried to suppress his memory of that night, to make him live a normal life, but the boy had his father’s alpha abilities. He could not be suppressed by any therapists. The government asked us to give the boy to them for experimentation, but Rastenkin and I resigned to protect him.

"We both had enough leverage to fuck up the government. So, they let us be. And thus, our very functional dysfunctional family began," Anya said, catching a breath.

And Katya...

He was crying.

For little Sergio.

For the boy who had to relearn life.

And he understood where the paranoia stemmed from.

Fuck.