I stood up, the chair scraping harshly against the floor.
**********
The house was quiet as I climbed the stairs, but it wasn’t a peaceful quiet. It was the silence of a held breath. When I entered our bedroom, the only light came from the moon reflecting off the fresh snow outside.
She was awake. She was sitting at the foot of the bed, her back straight, her hands folded in her lap. She looked like a penitent awaiting a sentence, her hair falling over her shoulders in dark waves. She didn’t move as I approached, but I saw her eyes widen, catching the moonlight.
I stopped a few feet away, the space between us charged with everything we hadn’t said.
“Are you going to lock me away?” she whispered. Her voice was small, but it didn’t shake.
My jaw tightened. The question stung because part of me wanted to. I wanted to put her in a room of glass and steel where nothing could touch her, where she couldn’t lie to me, where she was safe from the world and from herself.
“No,” I said.
She let out a breath she seemed to have been holding for hours. “Your men might prefer me gone. With the car coming closer and all.”
“My men want a lot of things,” I said, stepping closer. “What they don’t do is decide what happens to you.Ido.”
“And what do you decide, Alexei?” she asked, finally looking up at me. “Am I a prisoner here? Or am I still your wife?”
“You’re safer next to me,” I said.
But what I didn’t say—what I couldn’t say—was that I didn’t trust anyone else. I didn’t trust the world to be kind to her. I didn’t trust her father not to use her as a shield. And I didn’t trust her not to hide from me again.
I moved to the edge of the bed and sat down, not touching her, but close enough to feel the heat radiating from her body. The silence stretched out, no longer sharp, but heavy.
Tentatively, she reached out. Her fingers brushed against my wrist, just below the cuff of my shirt. Her touch was light, almost a question, but it hit me like a physical blow. In the war room, I was a god of lightning and stone. I was the man whoordered deaths with a nod. But here, in the dark, with her fingers on my skin, I was just a man who was terrifyingly, hopelessly compromised. She was the only thing in this world that could make me hesitate. She was the flaw in my armor.
“Alexei,” she murmured, her voice soft. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” I snapped, the word harsher than I intended. “Don’t apologize for something you’d do again.”
“I did it for him,” she said, her grip on my wrist tightening. “Not against you.”
“There is no difference in my world, Mila. If you aren’t with me, you’re against me. There is no middle ground. There is no ‘for him.’”
I turned my hand over, lacing my fingers through hers, pulling her hand up to my mouth. I kissed her knuckles, my eyes never leaving hers. I wanted to swallow her whole. I wanted to reach inside her and pull the truth out of her lungs.
I leaned in, my mouth finding hers. It wasn’t a soft kiss. It was hungry and demanding, a desperate attempt to reclaim the territory I felt I’d lost. I felt her melt against me, her body betraying her anger and fear.
When we broke the kiss for air, she opened her eyes slowly, her gaze on mine.
We fell back onto the pillows, a tangle of limbs and suppressed fury. The space between us was still threaded with danger, with the knowledge that the morning would bring more blood and more difficult choices. But for now, there was only the friction of our bodies and the frantic beat of two hearts that didn’t know how to beat in sync anymore.
A while later, Mila was asleep, her breathing deep and even. She had shifted in her sleep, her head resting on my chest, her hand curled against my shoulder.
I lay awake, staring at the ceiling. I reached down, my hand sliding under the pillow to feel the cold, familiar weight ofmy gun. Then, I moved my other hand. I rested it gently over her belly, over the place where my child was growing.
The duality of it—the gun and the life—was the sum of my existence.
As I felt the slight, rhythmic rise and fall of Mila’s stomach beneath my palm, the coldness in my soul solidified into something much more dangerous than anger. It became a vow. I would not lose her. And I would not lose this child.
Whoever came for her, whoever threatened what was mine, would find a monster who had finally found something worth the darkness. They would die—no two ways about it.
Chapter Seventeen
Mila’s POV
