“Dead?” His mouth curves, but it isn’t a smile.
Anger sparks under the fear, hot and sudden. “You don’t get to say that to me. You don’t get to come into my house, sit in my living room, and act like you belong here. What the hell is wrong with you?”
His gaze doesn’t waver. “I needed to see you.”
I force myself to speak, though the words scrape raw on the way out. “What do you want?”
His gaze sharpens, and for a heartbeat I see it—the man I used to know, the one whose touch once unraveled me, whose promises burned hot under my skin. But it’s gone as quick as it appears, replaced with something heavier. Sadder.
“You,” he says simply. “And our boy.”
The floor seems to tilt beneath me. My fingers go cold, the strap of my bag slipping from my shoulder.
He knows.
Of course he knows.
He speaks after a long moment. “I couldn’t risk my enemies coming to find you. Using you against me. That’s why I stayed away for so long.”
I want to scream at him, to throw the nearest lamp at his head, and demand answers until that iron mask of his finally cracks.
But I can’t. Because the truth is, I’m too stunned to think straight. And the other truth is that my body is betraying me. My heart is racing, but not all of it is from fear. It doesn’t know the difference between rage and desire. The way he’s looking at me now, like he’s memorizing every inch, every breath, every fragment of me, it sends me spiraling backward.
I hate myself for it, the way he could shatter me with a single kiss.
“You can’t be here,” I manage, but the words sound weak.
“You don’t mean that.”
The room suddenly feels too small, the walls pressing in around me, the air thick with the scent ofhim. “Have you been watching me?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No shame. Just the brutal truth, dropped between us like it’s nothing.
I swallow again. “Why?”
He rises from the chair in one slow, fluid movement.
For the first time, I realize how much space he takes up. How the room itself seems to bend around him. He’s taller than I remember. I had forgotten how much smaller I feel in his shadow, how easy it is for him to make the world shrink until it’s only him and me.
My body reacts before my mind catches up, instinct screaming at me to retreat. But there’s nowhere to go. My shoulders hit the wall, the plaster biting into my skin as if to remind me I’m cornered.
While he doesn’t close the distance, his presence stretches across the space like fire crawling across dry earth, searing without ever touching me.
“Now what?” I demand, though my voice comes out thinner than I intend. “Now you’ve decided it’s safe, so you just… show up?”
“Yes.” Again with that maddening certainty.
God, I want to hit him. My palms itch with it. To claw at him and force him to feel some fraction of what I’ve carried. And yet—horrifyingly, traitorously—beneath that fury is another impulse altogether. One that makes my lips burn with the memory. I want to kiss him.
That thought terrifies me more than his sudden reappearance ever could.
“You can’t just walk back into my life, Maksim.”
His mouth curves downward, the faintest crack in his iron composure. “Please, Ivy.”
I shake my head hard, trying to pull myself together before I unravel completely. “Leo doesn’t know about you.”
His eyes flare. “We’ll fix that.”
