“How long do I have?” My voice sounds hollow and distant, as if it’s coming from someone else.
“A week from Saturday,” my father says heavily, regret clear in his brown eyes. “The wedding is in ten days.”
Ten days. Ten days until I marry a man I’ve never met. Ten days until I become the wife of Dimitri Volkov—the man whose brother I loved, whose brother’s baby I’m carrying, whose cold gray eyes promise nothing but ice and hatred.
Ten days until my life ends.
Hours later, I climb the stairs to my childhood bedroom and lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling.
The room is exactly as I left it this morning. Pale blue walls covered with photographs and memories. My old teddy bear is on the shelf. The window seat where I read, a book still on the sill. Everything familiar. Everything safe.
Everything that’s about to be taken away.
I place both hands on my stomach, spreading my fingers over the place where our baby is growing. So small. So impossibly small, but already changing everything.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper into the darkness. “I’m so sorry, little one.”
Sorry that your father is dead. Sorry that you’ll never know him. Sorry that the man I’m about to marry will never love you the way Alexei would have. Sorry that I have to make this choice.
Sorry that I couldn’t save us.
The tears come again, silent and endless. I cry for Alexei, for the future we’ll never have. I cry for this baby who will grow up in a loveless marriage, in a house full of hatred and blame. I cry for myself, for the girl I was this morning who still had hopes and dreams.
And somewhere in the darkness, I think of Dimitri Volkov, the man I’ll be bound to in ten days.
The man who doesn’t know I’m carrying his dead brother’s child.
God help me.
2
DIMITRI
Dawn hasn’t broken yet when I arrive at the cemetery, but that’s the point. I come before the sun rises, before anyone else is here to see.
The last thing I want is for my men to witness their boss kneeling in the dirt, talking to a headstone like a madman.
I can’t see the cracks in the carefully constructed front I put up every other hour of the day.
Four days. It’s been four days since I buried my baby brother, and I’ve come here every morning. It’s at the same time and it’s the same routine. I park at the far edge of the cemetery, walk through the pre-dawn gray, and kneel beside the fresh earth that still hasn’t settled over his grave.
The black granite headstone is simple with his name carved in sharp letters.Alexei Volkov.Beloved son and brother.
The dates underneath are too close together. Twenty-eight years.
That’s all he got. Twenty-eight years of life before someone put two bullets in his chest and left him bleeding out in a warehouse.
I kneel in the damp grass and let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“I should have been there,” I say quietly. The words have become a ritual and a confession I repeat every morning. “It should have been me at that meeting. Not you.”
The headstone doesn’t answer but I don’t expect it to. But I keep talking anyway, because the alternative is going back to my empty estate and sitting in my office and pretending I’m fine and that I’m still in control when everything inside me is falling apart.
“You begged me,” I continue, my voice rougher than I want it to be. “You wanted more responsibility. You wanted to prove you weren’t just the baby brother anymore. And I—” My hands curl into fists against my thighs. “I was so fucking proud of you. You were finally taking initiative and wanting to be part of the business. I thought it was a safe meeting. It was just border territories on neutral ground. It was just negotiations.”
But it wasn’t. It was a trap. A fucking execution.
And I let him walk into it.
