When Dimitri emerges, he sees me standing there and I know from his expression that he knows I overheard, but he doesn’tsay anything. He just offers me his arm—a gesture that’s become routine when we walk anywhere together—and leads me toward the car.
“That was kind,” I say quietly once we’re settled in the back seat.
He shrugs, looking out the window. “His mother needs surgery. I can afford it.”
“It’s more than that. You didn’t have to do it.” I study his profile in the fading evening light. “You did it because you care.”
“I take care of my people,” he says gruffly, still not looking at me, but I can tell he’s embarrassed by this based on the slight pinkening of the tips of his ears. “That’s the job.”
But I heard the way he called them family. I saw the immediate decision to help without even considering the cost.
This isn’t just about duty or obligation. This is about something deeper.
The next day as I walk toward the kitchens, I overhear Mrs. Kozlov mention her grandson.
“The surgery, it went well, thank God,” she says, and I nearly trip over my feet hearing howtearfulshe sounds. I didn’t know Mrs. Kozlov knew how to feel anything but irritation. “They say they got all of it. He will need treatment still, but surgeon was best in the country.” She pauses, then adds quietly, “Mr. Volkov, he arrangeeverything. Would not even let me thank him proper. Said it was nothing.”
I stop short, pivot, and hurry away before Mrs. Kozlov realizes I’m there. My heart pounds. This is who Dimitri is. Not the cold, cruel man who locked me in this house, but someonewho protects his people ferociously and completely without expecting gratitude or recognition.
That night at dinner, I watch him differently, and I see things I’ve been too angry or scared to see before.
The way his men look at him is not just with fear or respect but with genuine loyalty, the kind that can’t be bought or forced. They’d die for him, I realize, not because he pays them well (though I’m sure he does) but because he’s proven again and again that he’d die for them too.
He notices me staring and a dark brow quirks up. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say quickly, looking down at my plate, feeling my face flame at being caught.
But it’s not nothing. It’s everything shifting, realigning, becoming something I don’t know how to process.
He carries the weight of every decision and every life under his protection. Every risk he takes and every enemy he makes in the process of keeping his people safe. I can see it in the tension that never leaves his shoulders, in the way he checks his phone constantly for updates, how he looks exhausted because he’s too busy making sure everyone else is secure.
This isn’t the monster I'd imagined. This isn’t the cruel tyrant who married me for revenge.
This is a man trying to lead. To protect. To honor his dead brother by keeping everyone who matters safe.
The realization makes everything infinitely more complicated than simple fear or hatred ever was.
But with that realization comes guilt. So much guilt I feel like I’m drowning in it.
I loved Alexei. Right? Ilovedhim.
He was charming and sweet and made me feel special, like I was the only person in the world when he looked at me with those bright blue eyes. He made me laugh and made me feel safe. He promised me a future where our families didn’t matter, where love could overcome anything.
He was my fairy tale. My escape from the darkness of the world I was born into.
Except what I’m feeling for Dimitri is different. It’s not the breathless excitement of stolen moments and secret meetings. It’s not the thrill of forbidden romance or the comfort of someone telling me everything will be okay.
What I feel when I look at Dimitri is complicated in ways that make my head spin.
Alexei felt like a fairy tale. Beautiful but ultimately fragile, existing in the spaces between reality where consequences couldn’t touch us. Dimitri feels like truth. Hard and unforgiving and impossible to ignore.
And that makes me a piece of shit, doesn’t it?
To be pregnant with one brother’s baby while having…. whatever these are for the other. To be replacing Alexei in my heart when his grave is barely settled.
I spend an afternoon in the library where I first really talked to Dimitri, and I cry great, wracking sobs that tear through me like violence. I cry for Alexei, for the future we’ll never have. I cry for this baby who will never know their father. And I cry for myself,for being such a horrible person that I could forget the man I loved so easily because that’s what this feels like. I’m forgetting him. Replacing him. Trading his memory for something darker and more complex with his brother.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper to Alexei’s ghost and my own guilty conscience. “I’m so sorry. I loved you. I swear I loved you.”
