The certainty in it should reassure me.
Instead, it makes the hospital room, the private floor, the men in the hall, the whole shape of his life snap into focus all over again.
This is real. Not exciting-book dangerous.
Realdangerous.
29
ALEKSEI
The secondI step into the hallway after him, I know I’m one wrong word away from putting him through glass.
He’s halfway to the elevators, walking with that same unhurried arrogance he’s had my entire life, like every room belongs to him by right and everyone in it exists to tolerate him. His suit is flawless. His posture immaculate. You’d never know he just walked into a hospital room to unsettle a sick woman and needle her son for sport.
“Stop.”
He does. Slowly. Turns. Mildly irritated, as if I’ve interrupted something trivial. “Alyosha.”
“Don’t.”
His mouth twitches. “Still dramatic.”
I close the distance between us in three hard strides, every part of me wired too tight. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
He adjusts a cufflink. “I came to see my wife.”
I laugh. “The wife you’ve been estranged from for years?” I ask. “The one you pretended didn’t exist while you were still living in the same house? The one you flaunted a dozen women in front of?”
His expression doesn’t change. That almost makes it worse. “We’re still married,” he says.
Something in me goes white-hot. Of course that’s the answer. Not regret. Not guilt. Ownership. Paper. Possession.
A legal tie he thinks excuses everything.
I step in closer. “You don’t get to use that word like it means something.”
He meets my gaze with that cold, polished calm I inherited enough of to hate in him. “It means exactly what it says.”
No. It means control.
It means he still thinks every woman attached to his name is an extension of his status, no matter how badly he’s failed them.
He tilts his head. “You seem upset.”
That does it.
I grab the front of his collar and slam him back against the wall hard enough to make one of the nurses at the far end of the corridor gasp. Security starts to move, but one look from my men stops them.
His hands stay loose at his sides. That’s the most infuriating part. He doesn’t even flinch.
“Careful,” he says softly. “Hospitals are terrible places for family scenes.”
My grip tightens. “Then stop creating them.”
He glances past my shoulder, toward the room we just left. Toward her. And then, with deliberate casual cruelty, he says, “Are you sure this is about your mother?”
The question lands like a knife sliding in slow.
