“I needed the Orlovs to believe the wedding was legitimate. I also needed it delayed. A precise dose of a neuromuscular paralytic in her morning espresso accomplished both tasks. She’ll wake in a few weeks with mild confusion and a very unfortunate ‘mystery illness.’ By then, the council’s deadline expires, and the marriage clause becomes irrelevant.”
My mouth fell open.
“You poisoned an innocent woman just to avoid marrying her?”
“Innocent?” His smirk was a blade. “Seraphina knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted the crown. She wanted the Volkov empire. I simply reminded her that thrones built on corpses weigh more than people admit.”
He crushed the cigarette into the ashtray with slow, surgical pressure.
“Besides, marrying her would’ve been the real betrayal.”
“Betrayal of whom?” The words escaped before I could swallow them. “Your late wife who isn’t here to care anymore?”
His eyes snapped to mine—dark, molten, dangerous enough to scorch.
Something feral flashed there. Something that remembered me too well.
“Enough,” he said.
He rose in one fluid, terrifying movement—like violence carved into a man’s shape—and stepped toward me.
“Sit.”
The command sliced straight through five years of distance.
My body obeyed before my mind even understood what was happening.
I sank into the leather armchair opposite him, hating the way my muscles responded to him—remembering him. Hating that he could still pull obedience from me like a thread.
Dmitri didn’t sit.
He remained standing over me, broad shoulders blocking the light, suit strained across the kind of strength that didn’t need to be proven.
A storm wearing a man’s shape.
A man who had loved me once.
A man who now wanted something far more dangerous.
“Five and a half years ago,” he said, voice clipped and surgical, “the Council of Families issued me an ultimatum. Marry within two months... or relinquish the Volkov seat to my foster brothers.”
He didn’t pace. Dmitri Volkov never needed to pace.
He simply stood there — a monolith in an Italian villa lit by dying sunlight — and the room bent around him like gravity.
“I challenged the ruling. Took it to the High Tribunal. Negotiated. Threatened. Paid. Won another five-year extension.”
He paused.
“Those five years end in exactly nine days.”
He lit another cigarette. The lighter’s flame sliced across the sharp lines of his face, illuminating cheekbones forged from some ancient Slavic war god.
Smoke curled around him like mist around a blade.
“I need a wife on paper. Immediately.”
I folded my arms, pretending I wasn’t squeezing my ribs to keep myself from shaking.
