Chapter 388: Does That Moonlight Know You?

[FROLO]

While the bratva and the city governor were losing their minds over the impossible things that Yaroslav Moskowsky had managed to bring to light, a very tired Anya stared at the basement door and then at the construction crew she had brought in to break the door.

Sergei had locked himself up in this damn room for five hours now.

They had tried everything to get the man out, but he had insisted on staying in there. And while it was probably not so bad an idea to leave the man to his sorrows and antics until he was ready to come out himself, there was only one problem.

Tatiana Belyaeva.

There was no telling what Sergei would do to the doctor, especially if he stayed in that room with her longer than possible.

Sergei was still an angry man, and the trigger for that surveillance was also the reminder that he had managed to mess up everything. Nothing had gone right for him, and he was having a hard time even thinking of explaining shit to Katya still.

Doctor Belyaeva had been a part of the madness that had been in that damn investigation. So, this was almost more about saving Doctor Belyaeva from an irrational Sergei. Because it was only a matter of time before the doctor wound up dead.

Granted, she would die eventually, but Sergei wasn’t thinking clearly right now.

And frankly, Anya didn’t want to spend the rest of her life listening to the alpha whine about how he could have used better methods to kill Doctor Belyaeva if he wasn’t hiding for Katya Romanov.

"I am bringing this door down, Sergei. You can either open it, or you need to step back," Anya shouted, trying her very best over the blasting music in the damn room. How someone could be blasting music at such high levels for so long was beyond her.

She had considered calling Katya for help here, but she knew whatever it was that they had talked about, Sergei would have to deal with Katya on his own.

She was not going to help a grown man escape the same responsibilities she had tried to talk him out of in the past decade.

Suddenly, the music stopped inside the room when there was a shuffle outside the door.

"If any of you try to open this door, I know your scents. I will hunt you down worse than I am being hunted. You can either run and save yourselves.

"Or try breaking down this door, and you will have me to deal with for the rest of your life," Sergei warned the workers who turned to Anya, sighing defeatedly.

This was not what they had been called for, really, and Sergei Moskowsky hunting them was not a pleasing fate.

"Go," Anya groaned, and the workers stared at her apologetically before they began heading away.

"If you don’t want to get out, fine. We are leaving," Anya said to Sergei, clearly too tired to stay there and beg him to get out. It was a little past seven o’clock in the evening already anyway.

And with the way he was talking, she knew Belyaeva was safe. At least for today.

"You are?" Sergei asked sheepishly.

"Yes. The bunker entrance and exit are locked. The elevators won’t come down. The staircase doors were melted shut months ago. If you try to break them down, they won’t budge.

"I suppose you really don’t want to go home," Anya said, packing up too. She was too old for this sit and needed a break from all the madness in the city right now.

And Sergei...

Disheveled, messy hair, shaggy, tired, lost Sergei...

"She can’t leave. That’s unfair," he mumbled as he rushed to the door. Not opening it, but just listening for footsteps and breaths.

Being a higher-rank alpha, he could smell and track people.

And right now, he could smell the scents moving away.

Leaving.

Oh, the betrayal

"Mr. Moskowsky... you have to go home," Doctor Belyaeva reminded him, and Sergei stared at her defeatedly.

He knew she was right.

There was only so much he could keep trying to hide here before there were far more important things that needed his attention in the war he had started. Not to mention the fact that he would probably go nuts if he didn’t see or talk to Katya for another hour.

"He’s going to hate me, doctor. I can’t explain in any proper language why I have been stalking him for more than a decade," Sergei sighed exasperatedly.

The doctor sat, staring at the big bad alpha who was hopeless at the moment.

"You know your boyfriend. You know he overthinks easily. You have been here for almost six hours. Do you think he hasn’t thought about everything possible in that head of his?

"Probably coming up with scenarios about you caging him while pretending to care? Or perhaps thinking that this was all just for show and that you only wanted to own him?" Doctor Belyaeva said quietly.

That right there was something that even Sergei knew was probably true.

But what the hell was he supposed to say to Katya?

"But—" Sergei tried.

"He will pull away. Add things up on his own. Before he does that, or even before your enemies exploit the distance, go and fix it.

"... Unless you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with him anymore," Belyaeva said, urging him because, frankly, staying with Sergei and his metallic music was bound to kill her before the man did.

Sergei looked at her defeatedly.

He knew this wasn’t going to be easy, and the doctor was right: the longer he stayed away, the easier it would be for Katya to come up with his own conclusions, which wouldn’t make the situation any better.

"What if he never marks me? What if he never wants me again for this?... I could just stay with you here in uncertainty rather than facing that part of my truth, Belyaeva," Sergei explained, his reasoning making the doctor sigh at him.

"He is a Romanov omega, Sergei. You more than anyone know what that means. You can either go back to your boyfriend, or watch him be a Romanov omega. And you might never get him back again.

"Unless you intend to blackmail him into being yours," the doctor said casually, touching on the principles she had learned about Sergei whenever it came to Katya.

Sergei stiffened.

Those were far too many risks.

"If he hates me?"

"You face it. Besides, don’t you want that by the time you come to kill me; you will be on good terms with him? That should make it worth it, no?"

"He’s never going to forgive me."

"You’ll never know until you get home."

At that, Sergei... opened the door.

Anya and the workers had long gone, and he knew it was just a matter of time before he was stuck here for real, because Anya was not past locking him up if that was what he wanted badly.

Damn.

"Thanks for the tuna melt, doc."

"Go get your husband, Mr. Moskowsky," she breathed tiredly, turning off the TV.

When Sergei reached the ground floor... Katya was waiting for him, face blank.

Sergei looked between his cold boyfriend and where he had just come from. Honestly, he didn’t mind going back into the manhole with Belyaeva, save for the fact that there was one slight problem.

The elevator had gone back down.

As if that wasn’t bad enough... the basement elevator had the sign "out of order."

There was nowhere to run.

Worse, he had an omega he couldn’t even read, staring at him flatly, holding Sergei’s phones and pagers in his hands.