Within twenty minutes, it was over.
Fifteen Italian bodies. Four of ours were wounded, two dead. The warehouse was a loss, but the inventory had already been moved—we’d learned long ago not to keep anything valuable in obvious locations.
I was checking the perimeter, making sure no one had escaped, when I saw him.
A body slumped against the far wall, blood pooling beneath him. But something was off. His clothes were wrong—not the expensive suits the Italians preferred, but street clothes. Working class. And his features, even slack with death, were distinctly Slavic.
Russian.
“Boss,” Dimitri called. “You need to see this.”
I crossed to where he stood over the body, and my blood turned to ice.
The dead man was Russian. Mid-thirties, maybe, with the kind of hard features that spoke of a difficult life. And clutched in his hand, now stained with his own blood, was a piece of paper.
I pulled it free carefully. Cyrillic script. Neat handwriting I didn’t recognize.
The letter was addressed to Mila.
The world seemed to tilt sideways. Her father’s fingerprints were everywhere.
“Alexei?” Konstantin’s voice sounded distant.
I could barely breathe past the rage and betrayal flooding my system. She’d lied to me. Not just once, but repeatedly.
And now a man was dead. My warehouse was destroyed. My people were bleeding.
Because of her father. Because of her secrets.
“Get everyone back to the mansion,” I said quietly. Too quietly. Dimitri knew me well enough to recognize the danger in that tone. “Lock down security. No one in or out without my approval.”
“What about the body?”
“Burn it. Burn everything.” I folded the letter carefully, precisely, and tucked it into my jacket.
The drive back to the mansion took forever and no time at all. I sat in the back of the car, staring at the blood on my hands—some mine from a graze I hadn’t noticed, most from the men I’d killed—and tried to understand.
She’d been lying to me. My wife. The woman I’d claimed, protected, and obsessed over. The woman who’d somehow carved herself a space in my chest and made a home there.
She’d been lying.
**********
She was waiting in the foyer when I walked in.
I saw her before she saw me—standing near the stairs, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, that nervous tell she had when she was afraid. She wore one of my shirts again, too big, drowning her frame. Her hair was pulled back messily, and even from across the room, I could see the shadows under her eyes.
She looked small. Fragile. Terrified.
Then she saw me, and her face transformed with relief so genuine it made something crack in my chest.
“Alexei!” She ran toward me, and instinct made me catch her even as rage screamed at me to push her away. “Oh God, I heard about the warehouse—are you hurt? Is everyone—”
I cupped her face with my blood-stained hands and kissed her, cutting off her words. For one heartbeat, I let myself forget everything. I let myself breathe her in and feel the warmth of her against me, alive and whole.
And mine.
Then I remembered the letter. The body. The Russian intermediary who’d died carrying a message to my wife from her supposedly dead father. The rage came roaring back.
