“I will never be safe with you,” she whispered, so low the others couldn’t hear. “I’ll just be a different kind of prisoner.”
She turned and walked out of the room. Anya hurried after her, casting a worried glance back at me.
“She has spirit,” Viktor remarked, lighting a cigar. The blue smoke curled toward the ceiling.
“She’ll learn her place,” I said, though the words felt like ashes in my mouth.
“Will she?” Roman asked from the corner, a smirk playing on his lips. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re the one being led on a leash, cousin.”
I turned on him, my movement so fast he actually stepped back. Then he chuckled, and I did the same, shaking my head. The predatory instinct that usually governed my life was screaming, but it wasn’t directed at our enemies. It was directed at anyone who dared to comment on her.
“The marriage is finalized,” Viktor said, his voice a lethal rasp. “The alliance is set. Everything else is irrelevant.”
As we walked out of the study, my heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird.
**********
I found myself in the garden an hour later. The sun was setting, casting long, bloody streaks across the sky. The air was turning cold, the first hint of autumn biting at the edges of the summer heat.
I stood by the fountain, watching the water churn.
I told myself this was a strategy. It was a cold, calculated move to protect her and maintain the balance of power. I could tell myself that the tightening in my chest was just stress, the result of a looming war with the Italians. But I knew that wasn’t it.
I could still feel the phantom heat where her fingers had brushed mine. I could still see the way her hazel eyes had blazed with defiance. She wasn’t just a girl to be protected anymore. She was a challenge. She was a puzzle I wanted to solve, a soul I wanted to claim—not because of her father, but because of the way she looked at me as if she could see the monster beneath my suit and wasn’t afraid to call it by its name.
In my world, everyone bowed. Everyone whispered. Everyone played the game.
Mila Petrov didn’t play. She fought.
And as I stood there in the dying light, I realized with a terrifying clarity that I didn’t want a submissive wife. I didn’t want a girl who would sit quietly in the shadows of the Lobanov name.
I wanted that fire. I wanted to own the flame that had burned in her eyes when she signed that contract.
I checked my watch. In a few hours, we would stand before the priest. Then she would publicly be mine.
I pulled my phone from my pocket and dialed Dimitri.
“Boss?”
“Double the perimeter sweep,” I ordered. “And tell the kitchen to send a bottle of the ’96 Krug to Mila’s room. Tell her… tell her it’s to steady her nerves.”
“Right away, boss.”
I hung up and looked back at the house. Up in the west wing, a single light was burning in her window.
I didn’t believe in love. I didn’t believe in fairytales. I believed in power, in loyalty, and in the blood that bound us all. But as I watched that light, I felt a shift in the universe.
The war wasn’t just coming from the Italians. The real war was beginning tonight, within the walls of this estate, between a man who thought he could control everything and a woman who had nothing left to lose but her heart.
And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure if I was the one who was going to win.
**********
The silence of the Lobanov estate at three in the morning could be called elusive. It was a living, breathing thing—the hum of the security servers, the rhythmic footfalls of guards on the gravel paths below, the distant, muffled sound of a city that never sleeps.
I sat in my darkened office, the only light coming from the bank of monitors built into the wall. My eyes were burning, raw from hours of staring at thermal feeds and intelligence reports. Enzo’s men were moving. Our informants in the North End had seen the movement—cars being prepped, shooters being pulled from the suburbs. They were circling us like vultures over a dying beast, waiting for a crack in the armor.
I tapped a pen against the mahogany desk, the sound sharp and repetitive.
