“It is if you want me to keep working for you. I need to understand the endgame, Adrian. You keep talking about making her suffer, but you haven’t explained how.”
Silence stretches for a long moment. When Adrian speaks again, his voice is colder and more honest than I’ve ever heard him.
“She ruined my life. Took everything I’d built and burned it to the ground because she thought she was better than me. More moral. More righteous.” He spits the words like poison. “I want her to feel what I felt. I want her to trust someone completely and then discover that everything was a lie. I want to watch her world collapse the same way mine did.”
“And then?”
“And then I want her family to watch her break. I want Dmitri and Alexei to know that their precious little sister was destroyed by someone they invited into their organization.” Adrian’s breathing has gone heavy, almost excited. “I want them to feel helpless the same way I did when she destroyed me.”
The obsession in his voice is worse than I imagined. This is downright pathological. Adrian doesn’t just want to hurt Sasha.
He wants to annihilate her.
Over my dead body.
“I’ll get you what you need,” I say, “but you have to give me more time. If I push too hard, she’ll shut down, and we’ll lose our opening.”
“Two weeks. That’s all the time you have left on our contract.” Adrian’s tone returns to business, like he hasn’t just revealed the depths of his obsession. “After that, I expect a full report on everything you’ve learned. Every vulnerability. Every weakness. Everything I need to take her apart, piece by piece.”
The line goes dead as I stand in the middle of the bedroom, phone in hand, trying to remember how to breathe. My reflection stares back at me from the window. I barely recognize the man looking back. Years in special operations. Countlessmissions. Dozens of kills. All of it leading to this moment, where I have to decide what kind of man I am.
Two weeks. Fourteen days to figure out how to save Sasha from a man who’s been planning her destruction for months. Fourteen days to extricate myself from a contract I never should have signed. Fourteen days before Adrian expects me to hand him the weapons he needs to destroy the woman I’m falling in love with.
I shove the phone back into my pocket and open the bedroom door.
The couch is empty. Her scent lingers on the cushions, a ghost of what happened there minutes ago.
Sasha’s bedroom door is closed. I cross the living room and knock gently.
“Sasha?”
No response.
“Can we talk?”
“Not right now.” Her voice is muffled through the wood, thick with something that might be tears. “Please, just… not right now.”
I press my palm against the door like I can reach her through it. “I’m sorry. I know that call?—”
“I said not now, Tony.”
The finality in her tone stops me cold. She’s not angry; she’s hurt. And she has every right to be.
I slid out of her body and answered a phone call from the man who wants to destroy her. Left her lying there while I took ordersfrom her enemy. Prioritized Adrian’s demands over the woman who had just given herself to me.
What kind of man does that?
The answer is simple: The kind of man I’ve been for the past three years. The kind who takes contracts without asking questions, uses people for information, and disappears before the consequences catch up. The kind who tells himself that emotional detachment is strength, when really, it’s just cowardice dressed up in professionalism.
I slide down the wall next to her door and sit on the floor, pressing my back against the wallpaper. Then, I stretch my legs out across the hardwood and wait.
I don’t know what I’m waiting for. She told me to leave her alone. But I can’t bring myself to walk away. Can’t go back to that couch where her scent lingers and pretend like everything is fine.
Nothing is fine.
Minutes pass. Maybe twenty. Maybe forty. I lose track of time sitting here in the hallway like some kind of penitent outside a confessional.
I hear her moving around behind the door. The bedsprings creak, followed by a soft pad of footsteps. At one point, I think I hear something that might be crying, and the sound carves a hole in my chest. But I can’t be sure, and the uncertainty is worse than knowing.
