“In my world? Yes. Love is a weakness. Love is vulnerability that gets exploited by enemies. Love is how good men make fatal mistakes.”
“Or love is how good men become better men.”
“You don’t understand. The things I’ve done, the choices I’ve made…I’m not a good man, Kasimira. I’m a killer who happens to follow certain rules.”
“And yet you saved me. Protected those women from Dante’s files. Built a business empire that provides for hundreds of families.”
“That doesn’t erase twenty-four years of blood.”
“No. But it doesn’t erase twenty-four years of choices either. Good and bad, all mixed together.” She leans forward, wine glass cradled in her hands. “You think loving me makes you weak?”
“I know it does.”
“Funny. Because watching you care for me these past ten days, seeing you put my needs before business obligations…that looked like strength to me.”
“My men think I’m compromised.”
“Are you?”
The question cuts to the heart of everything. Am I still capable of making ruthless decisions? Of sacrificing individual lives for the greater good? Of being the cold, calculating leader this organization needs?
“I don’t know,” I answer honestly.
“Then maybe it’s time to find out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Boris Petrov. He’s escalating because he thinks he can. Because he believes you’re distracted, weakened by caring about me.” She sets down her wine glass. “Prove him wrong.”
“How?”
“By being exactly who you’ve always been, just with something worth protecting now.”
The simplicity of it almost makes me laugh. She’s right, of course. The solution isn’t to stop loving her. It’s to let that love make me more dangerous, not less.
“You realize what you’re suggesting? That I use our relationship as motivation to be more ruthless?”
“I’m suggesting you stop seeing love as weakness and start seeing it as fuel.”
“And if that fuel burns everything down?”
“Then we rebuild from the ashes.”
I stare at her across the space between our chairs, this woman who should have been my daughter-in-law and instead became my salvation. Her shoulder is still bandaged, her arm still in a sling, but she sits there like a queen planning war.
“The men will never accept you if they think you make me weak.”
She smiles. “Then show them I make you strong.”
“How?”
“By letting me be your partner in everything. Not just the bedroom, not just business meetings, but the hard decisions. The dangerous ones. Show them that loving me doesn’t compromise your judgment—it sharpens it.”
“That’s asking you to get blood on your hands.”
“I already have blood on my hands. Dante’s victims, the women we’re trying to save…their blood is on all our hands until we fix this.”
She’s right. She’s been right about so many things since the day she walked into my world and turned it upside down.
