Roarke
I’ve been stunned before, with a taser and a gun, but neither had caused me to jolt the way her words do now.
Marry me, Roarke.
A part of me wants to believe that this is some kind of a prank, but the way she’s staring up at me, all wide eyes and tears, tugs at a heart I thought I lost long ago on the battlefield. But with her, it seems to come alive, beating frantically in my chest.
The thought of being married to Elena doesn’t leave a cold sweat running down my back. Instead, it fills me with something dangerous—hope. For a moment, I allow myself to imagine being tied to the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Spending every waking moment with her, touching and loving her, but…
Fuck, I have too many demons in my life, and it would be cruel to subject her to them.
Marry me, Roarke.
One of us has to think rationally here. “Tell me what happened back at your parents’ house,” I say as the elevator doors open on my floor. I step out and urge her to follow. There are only two doors on this entire floor, and one of them belongsto my younger brother, Conor, who spends even less time in his place than I do in mine. The O’Shea family has always been focused on work, and we’re the best for a reason.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard about Yuri Balshov—”
“I know who and what he is,” I tell Elena as I reach the sleek, obsidian door of my penthouse. I raise my hand, already anticipating the smooth, cool metal of the biometric scanner. My fingers brush against it, and the subtle click of the mechanism confirms the recognition, disengaging the lock. I push the door open, holding it in place for Elena to enter. “He is not a pleasant man.” And that’s putting it lightly.
Elena steps across the threshold, and I follow, the scent of polished wood greeting us. There are more windows than walls in the living room, a conscious choice on my part. Spending ten years in the darkest places will have one craving natural sunlight and fresh air.
“If you know Yuri, then you must know how terrible of a husband he’d make.”
I don’t believe the man would be her husband for long anyway. He’d kill Elena once he got bored with her. “Why do your parents want to marry you off so desperately?”
“Power,” she says, walking to a cream-colored couch and lowering herself down with a sigh. “They were hoping to get that by marrying Sofia off, but they underestimated Matteo. I don’t believe he’s a man they can use as easily as they’d thought. So now, they’ve shifted to Yuri. They threatened to switch to Bella or Gia as the bride if I didn’t agree, but Bella is still in high school, so they cannot legally marry her off now. And Gia should be traveling abroad with her ballet company for the next two weeks or so.”
“Matteo Rossi would never let them marry off any of his sisters-in-law to that man.”
“That’s why they wanted to do it today, while Matteo and Sofia are still on the island.”
That stops me in my tracks. My jaw clenches, and the muscles in my neck tighten as a wave of anger washes over me. I ball my hands into fists, the nails biting into my palms as I fight to contain the rage bubbling inside. “What?”
“My father already had the marriage license ready when I got there, and Yuri was set to arrive soon after me. They had an officiant ready and everything.”
They ambushed her!
How the fuck could parents do that to their own child? My brother and I would kill Yuri before sending off our little sister Fiona to a man like him. Hell, my parents would first ship my sister off to our family in Ireland before they let a man like Yuri breathe anywhere near her, but Elena’s parents were just going to send her off with a murderer?
“I need to call Matteo,” I say, reaching into my pocket for my phone, but Elena jumps up and grabs my hand before I can dial his number.
“No, don’t call him. I don’t want to ruin their honeymoon.”
“This is more important than any vacation, Elena.”
“No, it’s not,” she counters. “After everything that happened, they deserve this time together uninterrupted. My sister almost died, Roarke. She needs this honeymoon without worrying about anything or anyone else.”
Fuck. “Then I’ll call his second-in-command, Antonio, or even Nico, his step-brother and consigliere.”
“They don’t have the same authority as Matteo to stand up against a powerful bratvapakhan,” she says, pleadingly. “Besides, they’ll only call Matteo and report it to him. He’s their don. I just need some time. It will take my father at least a day to get a new marriage license, and by then, Gia will be on tour, and Bella will be back at boarding school. I need to warn them to stay away from our parents’ house in the meantime. Then I just have to stall until Matteo and Sofia get home. If you marry me, there won’t be anything my father can do about it before Matteo returns. I don’t think Yuri will care enough to come after me once I’m legally married to someone else.”
She doesn’t have to say out loud what she is most afraid of. There has been tension between the Balshovs and the Rossis, which is now at an all-time high, and this would likely spark a war between the families. The city would bear the brunt of it, with many innocent people losing their lives in the crossfire. It would kill Elena to know she indirectly caused it, so I lower my hand as I realize that she is right about contacting Matteo. It has to do with more than just ruining her sister’s honeymoon.
Lives could be lost here.
“Alright,” I tell her, touching her cheek to soothe her, and so I have something to do with my hands. “Okay, I’m not going to contact them.”
“Okay,” she says with a relieved sigh. “Something is going on in the Rossi household, and they don’t need to deal with this. Nico has been distracted after what happened to Sofia, and Antonio, well... I noticed him acting strangely on the island. Dante is too close to Gia, and if he finds out about this, he could do something rash and cause a war anyway.”
