32
Lev
They send two men for me just after sunrise, which is polite by Bratva standards and a bad sign by any other measure.
Neither of them speaks on the walk to Dmitri’s office. They don’t need to. Men don’t get escorted through a guarded compound before breakfast unless somebody has died or somebody is about to. Since I’m still breathing, I can make an educated guess which category I belong to.
I knew this was coming the second Polina walked out of my quarters with that file in her hands and murder in her eyes.
I enter Dmitri’s office alone. One look tells me this is not a private conversation.
Dmitri stands behind his desk. Alexei is seated to his right with his elbows on his knees and violence written all over his face. Tony leans against the wall beside the windows, quiet as ever, though I don’t miss the fact that he is armed twice over. Boris has taken the chair near the bookshelf. He looks old, tired, and furious.
No one offers me a seat.
Dmitri rests one hand on a file spread open in front of him. “You know why you’re here.”
“Yes.”
Alexei lets out a low, humorless laugh. “At least he’s not stupid.”
“That remains under review,” Dmitri contends. His eyes stay on mine. “You seduced my cousin, dated her for months knowing what kind of hell that could cause her, all the while knowing damn good and well your father ordered the hit on her parents.”
I swallow hard and force out, “Yes.”
Alexei rises so fast his chair jerks back across the floor. “That’s it? That’s the whole fucking answer?”
I refuse to flinch as I keep my eyes on Dmitri. He’s the one in charge here. Not his little brother, no matter how bad the man’s temper may be. “Do you want a longer one?”
“I want a reason not to kill you,” Alexei snarls.
“I don’t have one.”
That buys me half a second of silence.
Dmitri closes the file. “Why?”
There are a dozen ways I could answer. None of them change what I did.
“Because I chose my family over her,” I answer simply. “Then I kept choosing it every day after.”
Alexei swears and takes a step toward me. Tony leaves the wall at once, not to defend me, but to head off the very immediatepossibility that this meeting ends with Alexei breaking my jaw before Dmitri says his piece.
“Sit down,” Dmitri tells his brother.
Alexei stares at him for one long second, then yanks his chair back into place and sits, though every line of him promises this is temporary.
Dmitri looks at me again. “Did you ever intend to tell her?”
“I told myself I was waiting for the right time.”
Dmitri nods once, as if that answer fits what he already knew. “Did you tell anyone else? Did your father send you to her hospital?”
“No. Nobody in my family knows we’ve been seeing one another.”
Alexei sputters his lips. “How noble.”
“I never said I was noble.”
