That, more than anything, shakes me.
For so long, every exchange between us has been power and pressure, his voice pushing, my voice pushing back. Now he leaves the choice sitting there, between us, silent as a fuse waiting to be lit.
I study him carefully, searching for the trick. His posture is straighter now, shoulders squared but not rigid. His hands rest at his sides, not clenched, not reaching for control. His expression is calm, guarded, but his eyes—
There’s something in his eyes I haven’t seen before. Not the cold detachment of a man used to blood, not the fury that burns when I push him too far. Something heavier. A weight that looks dangerously like guilt.
The silence stretches long, almost unbearable.
It isn’t the same silence we’ve shared before. Not lust, not violence, not the sharp anticipation of who will strike first. This silence is quieter, steadier. It coils around us with a different kind of danger: one that doesn’t bleed heat, but gravity.
I keep my eyes on him instead of the file. Suspicion is my armor, but beneath it something twists, because his tone was different, his posture different, his words different. He isn’t playing the same game.
He lingers near the door. Longer than he should. His eyes meet mine again, and for the briefest heartbeat, I almost believe what I saw: the crack in his armor, the heaviness in his stare, the faint edge of regret.
Then he turns the handle.
He leaves without another word.
The file stays between us, resting quiet on the table. Waiting.
I can’t shake the thought that opening it might change everything.
Chapter Fifteen - Vivienne
The file sits on the edge of the desk, and my eyes keep dragging back to it, no matter how many times I force myself to look away. Velvet drapes hang heavy across the windows, shutting out the world, but the air feels too bright, too sharp, as if the truth is humming inside that folder.
I don’t touch it. Not for hours. I pace the room, pour water, sip it without tasting a thing, lie down, sit up again. Anything to avoid peeling back those pages. It has to be a trick. Another one of his games—something designed to twist me in knots until I break.
Alexei Sharov doesn’t give without reason. He doesn’t yield. If he left that file with me, there’s a trap coiled inside it.
Still… his face when he laid it down keeps gnawing at me. Not hard, not commanding, not cruel. Quiet. When he walked out, he didn’t lock the door behind him. That, more than anything, unsettles me. His restraint frightens me worse than his rage.
Eventually, I can’t bear it anymore. My fingers hover over the folder, trembling despite the steel I’ve honed in myself. I snap it open, the sound loud in the hush of the room.
Dates. Signatures. The official seal. My throat tightens as I trace the neat lines of ink. The final order isn’t signed by him. Not his name. Not his handwriting. The world tilts under me.
I read it once, then again, then a third time. Each word is a blade slicing through years of certainty. It’s not him. My entire life has been pointed like an arrow at the man I believed killed my father. Here, in black and white, it says otherwise.
I search for flaws. A forged date. A fake seal. Something sloppy in the paper’s texture. My pulse hammers as I flipthrough page after page, hunting for the lie. He’s clever enough to forge this, I tell myself. He’d do it if it suited him.
It isn’t fake. The details are too meticulous, too consistent with the records I’ve studied before. The name at the bottom—his father’s—sits like a weight pressing down on my chest.
I slam the folder shut and shove it away, as if distance could make it less real.
It terrifies me more than if it were a lie. If Alexei had killed my father, it would make sense. It would fit the story I’ve told myself every night for seven years, the story that carried me through law school and into this blood-soaked masquerade.
His father? That changes everything.
It doesn’t erase Alexei’s crimes. It doesn’t cleanse his hands of blood, but it tears a hole in the vengeance I’ve built my life around, and I don’t know who I am without it.
I sit on the edge of the bed, palms pressed to my thighs, staring into the dark. The silence presses too close. My mind is a storm.
If it wasn’t him, then what have I been doing? What have I risked my life for? Every lie I told, every file I stole, every night I lay awake plotting how to gut his empire—it was aimed at the wrong man.
The thought twists my stomach, nausea rising hot in my throat. I push to my feet, pacing the carpet in uneven strides.
His father. The monster behind the curtain, now dead and buried. Untouchable. My father is in the ground because of a man I can’t strike, a man I can’t look in the eye and say you took him from me. That revenge was stolen before I ever began.
