Twice in one fucking night, she had dared to defy me and disregard the protection I offered her to strike out on her own.
Asset?
I narrowed my eyes, furious with that insult. I wasn’t trying to mold her into an asset. I wasn’t trying to make her do anything she didn’t want to do. She desired me, just as I did her. Shewasa doctor, helping Anya here.
I hadn’t once forced her into anything, not like the assholes at that police station had. They’d coerced her into treating those wounded men, my enemies.
Not me. I hadn’t punished her with anything.
I let the note fall and turned to exit the room.
No one told me what to do. But she hadn’t. In her likely carefully chosen words, she wrote a plea to me. To let her go. To not follow her. To give up on my efforts to keep her safe.
I left the guest room and went straight to my office. Directing Andre, Sergei, and Roman kept me preoccupied for a while. But once I was far along in my plans of doing business as usual, ordering the Orlov forces to kill any Giovanni who dared to harass anyone under our protection, and commanding all spies to capture and torture any Popov who bothered anyone at our businesses, I felt the guilt that had never risen to the surface before.
I was doing exactly what she didn’t want.
She’d begged me to change. To walk away from a life of crime. And I couldn’t. I wasn’t. I had no plans to carry on as this leaderin any different way. Doubling down on revenge as news of the hits kept coming, I disregarded the memory of Claire asking me to quit this tendency for violence.
No, she hadn’t asked. She’d put an ultimatum on me,expectingme to change who I was for her.
She simply didn’t understand that I couldn’t.
At lunch, Andre cleared his throat and glanced at me. I could read it in his expression that he wanted to bring up something I didn’t want to hear, so I beat him to it. “It’s been a long morning, but I think we’re on the right path to giving all those motherfuckers a lesson. I’m sick of their trying to take our turf and disrupt our drug flow.”
Sergei and Roman nodded from the other side of the table. We didn’t often eat together, but they were all here at the same time, handling what seemed like a tidal rush of problems.
“No worries,” Roman said, always the most carefree. “The men are rallying behind all the orders. Like usual.”
Like usual.
Blood was spilled, like usual. We reminded the world that we weren’t enemies they wanted, like usual. Like this, with power and force and no mention of mercy, we would remain one step ahead of them all,like usual. What was unusual was how I still couldn’t stop thinking about Claire.
If she was okay.
If anyone was going after her.
If she had flown across the ocean yet.
If she misses me at all.
“I noticed that Claire isn’t in her room,” Andre said.
I didn’t lift my head, focusing on eating. “She left.”
“You let her go?” Sergei asked.
“She wasn’t here under lock and key,” I growled.
He’d hit the tenderest part of it all. I had let her go because I cared. Because I loved her too much to imprison her in a life she didn’t want.
“I went to check on her after I stopped in to talk to Anya,” Andre said.
I glanced up now, surprised.
“I wanted to let her know that I could get her anything she needed. I gave her my number,” Andre said without any of his typical sarcasm. “She said she wanted Claire.”
Goddammit.
