What was I doing?
He was my kidnapper. My captor. A man who'd stalked me for weeks, torn me from my life, forced me into a marriage I never wanted. I should hate him—did hate him, with every rational part of my mind.
But there in the library, with his scars visible and his grief laid bare, he'd been something else. Someone else. A man shaped by loss, haunted by the same demons that haunted me. A man who'd seen my wounds and called me worthy.
It would be so easy to soften. To let the hatred bleed into something more complicated, something dangerous. Stockholm syndrome, I told myself. That's all this was. A psychological response to captivity, to isolation, to the confusing intimacy of being watched so closely by someone who claimed to care.
But as I lay down and pulled the covers up to my chin, I couldn't shake the feeling of his hand on my knee. The roughness of his voice when he'd talked about his mother. The way he'd looked at me like I was precious. Like I mattered.
The ring on my finger caught the moonlight, and for the first time since he'd forced it on me, I didn't immediately want to tear it off.
That scared me more than anything else.
I rolled over, pressed my face into the pillow, and told myself that nothing had changed. That I was still a prisoner. That he was still my enemy.
But sleep, when it finally came, was softer than it had been in days.
And in my dreams, green eyes watched me with something that looked terrifyingly like love.
Chapter 10 - Vasily
She was different the next morning.
I noticed it immediately—the slight softening around her eyes, the way she didn't flinch when I entered the breakfast terrace. She still didn't smile, still held herself with that rigid wariness I'd grown accustomed to, but something had shifted. Some wall had developed a crack.
It should have pleased me. Instead, it unsettled me in ways I couldn't name.
I'd revealed too much last night. Sitting in the library's darkness, her unexpected presence loosening something I usually kept locked tight, I'd spoken about my mother. About finding her. About the guilt that still woke me in cold sweats seventeen years later.
I didn't talk about these things. Not with my brothers, not with anyone. The vulnerability was a liability—a weakness that enemies could exploit, that subordinates could misread as softness. I'd built my empire on the foundation of being untouchable, unreachable, a man who felt nothing that could be used against him.
And then Gabrielle had stood in my doorway in her silk robe, hair tousled from sleep, and I'd cracked open like an egg.
"Good morning," she said as I took my seat across from her.
Two words. Practically nothing. But it was the first time she'd greeted me voluntarily since the wedding.
"Good morning." I poured my coffee, watching her over the rim. "Did you sleep well?"
"Better than expected." She didn't meet my eyes, focusing instead on the fruit she was arranging on her plate. "The library helped. Having someone to talk to."
The admission hung in the air between us. I wanted to push—to ask what else might help, what else she needed, how I could give her more moments like last night. But I'd learned that pushing Gabrielle only made her retreat further into her shell.
"The library is always available," I said instead. "Day or night. As am I."
She looked up then, something unreadable in her dark eyes. "I'll keep that in mind."
We finished breakfast in silence, but it was a different kind of silence than before. Less hostile. Almost companionable.
It terrified me how much I wanted more of it.
Reality intruded, as it always did, in the form of a phone call from New York.
I took it in my study, Semyon's voice tight with controlled tension as he delivered the news. Another warehouse hit—not the main distribution center, but a smaller operation in Queens that we used for storing legitimate merchandise. The losses were minimal, but the message was clear.
"Pankratov's testing us," Semyon said. "Probing for weaknesses. Seeing how we respond."
"Or trying to draw us out." I stood at the window, watching the sea glitter under the afternoon sun. "Make us overextend, spread our resources thin."
