“You did this for me,” she said softly. Not a question.
“I told you I would.”
“I know, but….” She turned to face me, and there were tears in her eyes. Happy tears, I hoped. “This is everything I imagined. Everything I dreamed about. You actually listened.”
“Always.” I stepped closer, pressing a kiss to her forehead. Soft and gentle and meaning more than words could say. “I’ll always listen, Barbara. Even when you’re not speaking, I’ll—”
Her phone buzzed.
We both froze, and I felt Barbara go rigid under my hands. That particular kind of tension that meant danger, that meant fear, that meant—
The phone buzzed again. Insistent. Demanding.
Barbara pulled it from her clutch with shaking hands, and I saw the screen light up her face in harsh white light.
FaceTime: Bass
Her gasp was small but audible. “He knows I’m alive.”
Of course he did. Sebastian would’ve been watching, waiting, making sure his sister actually died from the injuries he’d inflicted. And when she didn’t—when she survived and started planning an engagement party like nothing had happened—he would’ve seen it as a threat. As defiance.
As something that needed to be addressed.
I rested my hand over her shoulder, firm and steady. A silent shield. “Answer it.”
“Kirill—”
“Answer it.” I kept my voice calm, controlled, even though rage was already building in my chest. “He needs to see that you’re not alone anymore. That he doesn’t get to terrorize you.”
Her hand was shaking so badly she almost dropped the phone, but she managed to press accept.
The screen lit up as the call connected. For a moment, there was just pixels resolving, the video feed catching up to the audio. Then a face filled the screen, and my entire world stopped.
My heart dropped. Straight through the floor, through the earth, into some void where nothing made sense anymore.
It wasn’t possible.
It couldn’t be—
But it was.
The ghost from my past. The man I’d been hunting for four years. The one who’d stolen from the Bratva, who’d made me look like a fool, who’d destroyed my reputation and nearly gotten me killed. The one whose fake name I’d been cursing for years because I’d never learned his real one.
Douglas.
Except that wasn’t his name, was it? Had never been his name.
Sebastian Davis.
Bass.
Douglas.
The same person.
The man who’d befriended me in Moscow, who’d shared drinks and tech conversations and pizza at midnight, who I’d trusted completely, was the same man who’d been terrorizing Barbara for five years. The same man who’d tried to kill her. The same man who held some secret over her head that she wouldn’t share.
The same man.
