Something darker than hate burned behind my ribs.
Whatever spell she had cast on him, I would break it.
Whatever lies she had fed him, I would tear them out one by one and scatter the pieces at her feet.
We were married now.
She was mine—legally, irrevocably. Bound to me by paper and witnesses and a ring she had slid onto my hand with shaking fingers.
I turned my gaze forward, jaw set, eyes hard.
Home was twenty minutes away.
Twenty minutes until the mask came off.
Twenty minutes until Elena Vasquez learned exactly what kind of husband she had chosen.
Chapter 4
ELENA
The name hit me like a blade between the ribs.
Ruslan Baranov.
I had frozen at the altar the moment the priest spoke it—legs locking, breath stalling halfway between lungs and throat, as if my body itself understood the danger before my mind could catch up.
Of course I knew the name.
Everyone in California’s underworld did.
The Greek legend. The shadow king who dismantled syndicates across Europe with surgical calm, who didn’t shout or posture or make threats he didn’t intend to fulfill.
The man the five powerful families here had been whispering about for weeks—half terrified, half furious—convinced he’d come to carve out a sixth throne in blood.
But the name carried more than fear.
It carried ghosts.
My stomach had dropped so hard I thought I might black out. Even now, sitting in the back of his car, the echo of it rang through me like a church bell tolling a death.
Ten years ago, my older sister—Elena Senior—had been deployed to Greece with a twenty-one–member CIA team. Off-the-books. Black-site clearance. The kind of operation that never officially existed and never officially failed. Among the names on the roster were two I hadn’t understood the significance of at the time.
Ruslan Baranov.
And his younger sister, Amy.
The last letter I ever received from my sister arrived three weeks before she vanished.
I could still see it when I closed my eyes—the thin paper, the familiar slant of her handwriting, rushed and uneven like her hand had been shaking when she wrote it. I’d read it once, then again, then memorized it out of terror, afraid it would somehow disappear if I didn’t.
Dear Elena, my little sister,
I don’t know if you will ever forgive me for writing this, or if you will even finish reading once you understand what I’ve done. But you deserve the truth—from me, not from whispers, not from bloodstained rumors.
I know life has not been kind to you since our parents died. I know how cruel it feels to be alone in a country that never truly became home, struggling just to survive while carrying a name that now feels like a curse. And I know how unjust it is that you cannot receive your inheritance unless you submit to the ridiculous clause Father never thought would destroy us—marrying the first son of the Thompson family.
It breaks my heart, Elena. It truly does. I wish I could be there with you. I wish we could talk the way we used to, laugh the way sisters are supposed to. I wish we could run barefoot through the garden behind Father’s house again, chasing each other until the sun went down and Mother called us inside.
