Chapter 339 339. Artemiy - Thanksgiving 4

Chapter 339 339. Artemiy - Thanksgiving 4
Vasiliy stops the car in front of the gate, and Olena gets out and goes to her son, her arms wrapping around him as she hugs him tightly. Ivan looks very pissed, especially when he gives me a death glare, as he embraces his mother and presses a kiss to the top of her head. Moments later, he takes a step back, his gaze sweeping over her as he makes sure she’s indeed alright.
He glances at the car one last time before wrapping his arm around Olena’s shoulders and guiding her toward the mansion.
My cousin looks in the rearview mirror and tells me, “He doesn’t look very happy with us.”
“He’s a little too overprotective,” I muse, while understanding why Ivan is the way he is with his mother.
He always calls Olena around 8 PM, and if for some reason she doesn’t pick up, he will call one more time before driving to wherever she is—they always share their locations because it helps with their anxiety. Once, he was on his way to my house, and Olena spent half an hour on the phone trying to convince him that she was fine and there was no reason for him to drive all the way there at such a late hour. Eventually, he turned back but told her that if she was late answering her phone again, he would get to my house and get to the bottom of whatever was going on there.
He might not realize it, but he’s stressing her out with all these demands. He’s acting like her parent and not her son, but it’s not my place to say anything, so I’m keeping my mouth shut.
“Maybe,” Vasiliy says, not agreeing or disagreeing with me, “but I’d be the same if I were him.”
“Yeah, but I’d also go to therapy.”
Vasiliy narrows his eyes at me. “Suggest that to Olena, and I’ll kick you in the balls. Suggest that to Ivan, and he will make you choke on your teeth.”
I put my palms in the air. “I am not sure why you are offended by the word therapy. It’s quite good for your mental health. You should try it sometime.”
He studies me for a bit. “Are you going to a therapist?”
“In my line of work, you see things you can’t unsee. Going to a therapist once a week is what has kept me sane all this time.”
He is silent for a bit before saying, “I never asked you about your work, but know that I always admired all you did for trafficking victims.”
I swallow hard at that. “I did nothing special.”
The front gate finally opens, and Vasiliy drives the car inside and parks it in the driveway.
“You got them out, gave them a chance at a new life.”
There were times when I did get there in time, and women still lost their lives. Those are the cases no one talks about. And it is the reason why I’m on leave from work—the last case I worked on almost broke me mentally. 
As we get out of the car, my cousin tells me, “For family, you are not a bad guy.”
I grin at that because I always knew that Vasiliy liked me. “You are a pretty decent guy as well,” I retort as we open the trunk to grab all the gift bags Olena prepared for everyone living in this house.
As I reach for the last bag, Vasiliy’s phone alerts him to a new message. After he reads it, he gives me the creepiest smile I’ve ever seen.
“What?” I dare to ask because the not-knowing is killing me.
“Anton has Yuily.”
I’m tempted to go to where that bastard is right now and beat him until he’s so unrecognizable that not even the police can figure out who he is, but Olena is very excited about Thanksgiving dinner with her family, and I’m not about to ruin this day for her. I already have an inkling that the guy who bothered her early this morning was Yuliy, but she didn’t tell us because she knew how we would react, which means that Vasiliy and I have to have a very important conversation with her about what can happen when she chooses to hide stuff from us.
Not to mention that secrets shouldn’t exist between bondeds. I already went through that shit, and it ended up with me getting a divorce—not that I regret getting separated from my ex, but Olena is forever, and if she starts lying to us, it will only make me paranoid about what else she might be hiding, and that’s a path I refuse to take.
“It seems that we have quite a lot of things to be thankful about today,” I say as we head inside—one of the staff members has the front door open for us.
The staff member, a woman called Terresa, leads us to the living room, where Olena is already catching up with her family, a soft smile on her lips as she talks—she mostly speaks in Russian, with her son translating for her, but she lets some English slip in as well.
I recognize most of her family members from the photos she showed me last night and even made sure I memorized their names, which I’m sure will come in handy when they start introducing themselves, because I can never remember people’s names in large settings, and there are quite a few people present today.
Olena turns her head in our direction, her smile turning brighter. “You all know Vasiliy,” she says, her voice all happy and bubbly, making everyone turn their attention to us. “And the one next to him is his cousin, Artemiy.”
Isla gets to her feet and goes right to Vasiliy, hugging him for a long time while telling him in Russian, “I missed you so much, and I am sorry I didn’t come to visit you or Olena as I promised, but I’ve been quite busy with school, and when I don’t have classes, Zana wants to play with me.”
“No need to explain, little swallow,” Vasiliy reassures her.
Little swallow. He’s been calling her that since he started working for her father—fucking son of a bitch. I hope he rots in the prison she put him in.
They eventually stop hugging, and he presses a fatherly kiss to her forehead before she turns to me and hugs me as well.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” she says.
“And I about you.”
When Vasiliy realized how her father was treating Isla—who was believed to be her sister, Anne, until not long ago—he was more than ready to kill him. I convinced him not to, but instead to start gathering evidence that would eventually put him in prison.
Vasiliy has even tried to report him several times, but the police never took him seriously, claiming parents need to discipline their children. The reason why the police didn’t do anything is because half of Veross City is controlled by the Lords, and the other half by the Dukes, and Vasiliy was neither at the time.