My vision blurred with tears. My chest burned. Every instinct in me screamed to run, to tear the world apart until my son was back in my arms.
“I can’t breathe without him,” I sobbed, my voice breaking completely now. “Do you hear me? I can’t— I can’t exist without my child!”
He tightened his hold just enough to keep me from collapsing.
“Listen to me,” he said fiercely, his mouth close to my ear, his breath hot with barely leashed rage. “No one touches what’s mine.”
That word—mine—should have made me recoil.
Instead, it was the only thing holding me upright.
“I will burn every Orlov asset to the ground,” he continued, each word a vow carved in blood. “I will peel this city apart until I find him. They will regret breathing the same air as your son.”
My strength finally gave out.
I sagged against him, sobbing, shaking, the fight draining out of me as terror hollowed me from the inside.
He held me through all of it.
Unmoving. Unyielding. Like a mountain that refused to break no matter how violently the storm raged against it.
He let me break against him.
And then, when there was nothing left—
When my lungs burned and my throat shredded and my sobs turned thin and empty—
I spun on him without warning.
My forehead pressed against his chest. My tears soaked straight through his shirt. My hands fell limp at my sides.
Only then did he release me.
Slowly. Carefully. Like I might shatter if he moved too fast.
I stumbled back a step, chest heaving, vision blurred. My cheeks were wet, my throat raw, my dignity in ruins.
“It’s my first day as your wife,” I said, a broken laugh ripping out of me, sharp and hysterical, “and you’ve already failed to protect us. How fitting.”
My voice cracked hard on the last word.
“Go,” I hissed, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “Go and find my son.”
Dmitri stepped back and sank into the armchair like a king reclaiming his throne, his calm slicing into me deeper than any insult.
“He isn’t lost,” he said evenly. “He’s with the Orlovs.”
That tone.
That infuriating composure.
Something inside me snapped.
“Fine.” I whirled toward the door. “Then I’ll go to the Orlovs myself and take my child back.”
“They’ll demand you divorce me.”
I froze at the threshold.
