THE DEVIL’S ON CALL

The Distortion Of Focus

LEV’S POV

There was a select, refined list of things Lev Starkov absolutely despised.

He despised the weak. He despised pity, viewing it as a terminal disease of the mind that rotted a man’s survival instincts. He despised the greedy, sniveling rats who populated the city, always looking for a quick payday without the spine to bleed for it. He despised the delusional, the men who forgot their place in the food chain until a barrel was pressed against their teeth.

But most of all, with a cold, black hatred that lived deep in the marrow of his bones, Lev despised pretenders.

He had a special kind of malice reserved for people who wore masks. He had learned the anatomy of a lie long before he ever learned how to strip a firearm, and he had learned it from his mother. Their mother had been a master of the art. She had spent every waking hour of her miserable, gilded life pretending. She pretended to smile; she pretended to laugh; she pretended that everything was perfectly fine while the bruising on her body told a completely different story. She hid her battered, fractured flesh from the world behind heavy silks and expensive powders, but Lev had always been able to see right through the illusion.

He used to sit in the darkness of the upstairs corridor, a silent, unblinking ten year old, listening to her muffled, choked cries echoing through the vents at night. And when the pain grew too loud, when she couldn't drag the tears out of her chest anymore, she would drink. She would abuse pills, swallowing down tiny chemical miracles just so she could numb herself enough to wake up the next morning and pretend all over again.

Sometimes, she was so completely passed out, so hollowed out and high, that her vacant eyes would drift over the two boys standing at her bedside, unable to tell the difference between him and Ivan. She was weak. She was pitiable. And the memory of her fragile, disintegrating existence had hardened Lev into an unyielding block of granite. He had sworn he would never tolerate a mask in his presence.

Which was exactly why, standing here in the silver shadows of the midnight hour, looking down at the doctor as she slept, Lev felt a slow, volatile anger pulsing through his veins.

He knew she was pretending.

For the past two weeks, Dr. Zoya Rosvitch had been a model captive. She had swallowed her fiery rage, locked up her venomous tongue, and adopted a mask of quiet, professional compliance. She was pretending to be perfectly okay with their games, treating their wounded soldiers with mechanical efficiency and walking through the corridors without an ounce of friction.

He hated it. He absolutely despised it.

Her compliance was a lie, a beautifully constructed facade meant to put the wolves to sleep, and it had kept Lev on edge for fourteen straight days. The irritation was a constant, low frequency hum clawing at his sanity, disrupting the perfect, icy clockwork of his mind.

Dr. Zoya Rosvitch.

Unlike Ivan, Lev had never been a man to pick up random interests or indulge in passing whims. He didn't have hobbies. He didn't care for luxury cars, he didn't care for luxury yachts, and he didn't care for the mindless adrenaline of the underground. Apart from taking care of the syndicate's operational logistics and running the empire alongside his twin, Lev literally had interest in nothing. He was a creature of singular, functional design.

He and Ivan had always shared an absolute, telepathic bond. They split the territory down the middle. They kept their bank accounts joined. They even shared the women they brought into their beds, passing them back and forth without a single flicker of jealousy or possession because they believed nothing on earth could ever be distinct enough to come between them. They were one mind in two bodies. Outside of that shared bloodline and the throne they sat on, there was nothing else in the world that Lev claimed as his own.

Ivan was different. Ivan liked to gamble. He liked to box until his knuckles split to the white bone, and he liked to race cars down the coastal highways at terrifying speeds anything to keep his chaotic spirit right on the edge of destruction. But Lev had always believed he already possessed everything he could ever want from existence.

Well... until he met her.

His mind drifted back to two weeks ago, to the day she had stood in the center of the grand living area, the invisible glass doors framing her small, defiant silhouette. He remembered the exact way her damp, dark hair had curled against the cream colored knit of her sweater, outlining the sharp, elegant curves of her body. But most of all, he remembered her eyes. Those fierce, liquid fire eyes.

She had stood her ground against the two most feared men in the state, her jaw set into a hard, beautiful line as she laid down her terms for what she called a "corporation of three."

She had demanded three distinct things. First, she was to speak to her family as often as she wanted , and without restriction. Second, she was to be paid by the hour for every single day she spent within the perimeter of the estate, fiercely insisting that whatever previous payments they had made to her brother only covered the "barbaric methods" of her initial kidnapping. And lastly, she had demanded absolute, unconditional privacy.

Privacy that Lev was currently, systematically invading.

He stood bare inches from the side of her mattress, a towering, silent shadow dressed in his casual black T-shirt , his breath shallow as he watched the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest beneath the duvet.

Lev prided himself on his ability to read people. He could map a man’s cowardice by the stutter of his pulse; he could read a politician’s greed by the tilt of his head. He had spent his entire life studying the architecture of human deception, and usually, Zoya was a book he could read with total clarity. She was transparent in her hatred for them, yet at the same time, she was the most infuriatingly mysterious creature he had ever encountered.

He was absolutely certain she was playing a tactical game. He could feel the calculated weight behind her polite smiles, the deliberate care in the way she moved through his house. She had done absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for fourteen days. She woke at dawn, inspected the medical wing, and treated the occasional injured guards with a cold, flawless precision. And when she wasn't working, she spent her hours hanging out with Silvia in the kitchen, learning the old world recipes, or walking alongside Rowena through the gardens, listening to the blonde's chatter with an attentive, pleasant look on her face.

She was doing everything right. She was acting like a satisfied employee who had accepted her golden handcuffs. And it was literally pissing him off.

It was a distortion of his focus. When he was away from the estate, sitting in concrete warehouses or negotiating drug freights at the docks, his mind would suddenly drift. He would find himself wondering what she was doing, who she was talking to, what trap she was quietly laying behind those beautiful, fake smiles. And when he was home, it was even worse. He was either scanning the rooms, finding her with his eyes before his conscious mind could even stop him, or subtly pulling the security guards aside to question them about her daily movements.

He had never once failed to acknowledge her presence when she was in a room with him. Even when they first met in that filthy, blood stained basement clinic from the exact moment he had stepped through the door, he had been looking at her. He had been tracking the sharp line of her jaw, the fierce intensity of her small frame.

That was the only reason she had been able to abuse Ivan right in front of him, pressing that cold silver scalpel against his twin's throat before the guards could even draw their weapons. Lev had been distracted. For the first time in his adult life, a woman had made him lose his absolute, ironclad focus.

Lev was a man built on control and rigid discipline. He made sure nothing…no addiction, no rival, no weapon was ever positioned above him. But this girl... this doctor... she was an anomaly in his system. He couldn't properly describe the volatile cocktail she stirred up inside his chest. Was it anger? Was it curiosity? Or was it a deep, dark fascination?

He instantly denied that last word, his jaw hardening in the dark. Fascination sounded like Ivan. Fascination was a luxury for men who had time to play with fire.

In truth, Ivan’s open, unhinged fascination was the only reason they had brought her here in the first place. His brother had been completely obsessed from the moment he woke up from surgery. In fact, Ivan had deliberately ripped into his own fresh stitches, tearing the black thread open with his bare fingers just so he could force her back to fix it. Ivan had spent the last two weeks feeding his curiosity nonstop, cornering her in the library, touching her face, and making no secret of the dangerous hunger he felt for her. At least Ivan was honest about his depravity.

Lev, on the other hand, had been living in a state of absolute, silent denial since the day they met. Even if for the past two weeks all he thought about was her, he consistently lied to himself, hiding behind the clinical excuse that he was simply investigating why she was pretending to be okay with their arrangement. He told himself it was a security measure. A tactical evaluation.

Slowly, Lev shifted his weight, stepping out of the dark velvet shadows and into the pale, brilliant pool of moonlight streaming through the window. His massive, imposing silhouette was now fully visible, casting a long shadow across her bed.

He leaned down slightly, closing the distance between them until he could smell her. He had never in his life thought he would be drawn to the clean, sharp smell of antiseptic, but on her, it was intoxicating. When she wasn't working in the clinic, she smelled like sweet, rich vanilla. a soft, comforting scent that felt entirely too innocent for the house of Starkov.

His hand moved automatically, acting on an impulse he didn't give himself permission to analyze. His long, calloused fingers reached for her face, carefully, agonizingly slow, as he tucked a loose strand of dark hair away from her forehead.

Her full face came into view under the moonlight. Zoya wasn't pale or ghostly like most of the society women he knew in the city's high end clubs. Her skin was light, creamy, and flawless, radiating a natural warmth that seemed to call to the coldness inside his own chest. His hand slid down, his thumb lightly tracing the sharp, beautiful line of her jaw. Her skin was impossibly smooth beneath his touch, her breathing shallow and even as she remained caught in the deep waters of sleep.

His thumb trailed upward, tracing the soft curve of her cheek until his fingers hovered bare millimeters away from her peachy, parted lips. He wanted to feel the heat of her breath against his skin. He wanted to know if she would bite him, or if she would break beneath the weight of his hand.

He was just about to press his thumb against her lower lip when a sharp, rhythmic sound fractured the quiet.

Knock. Knock.

Lev froze, his fingers instantly curling back into his palm as his winter blue eyes snapped toward the heavy mahogany door.

"Zoya? Are you awake?"

It was Rowena’s voice, muffled through the thick wood, followed by another light, hesitant knock.

Lev pulled himself back into the shadows, his expression instantly locking back into a mask of cold, unreadable stone as the space between him and the sleeping doctor widened once again.