I turn slowly.
Alina stirs, her long lashes fluttering as she blinks herself awake. For a moment she just looks at me, caught between sleep and awareness. Then memory must rush back to her once she registers me, her expression shifting instantly. Her spine straightens. One hand clutches the sheet to her chest as if she’s suddenly aware of how exposed she is.
“Morning,” she says quietly, her voice hoarse with sleep.
I don’t answer.
She pushes herself upright, confusion knitting her brows when I don’t move closer or acknowledge the space between us. The silence stretches, thick and uncomfortable.
“That’s it?” she finally asks.
My jaw tightens. “What do you expect me to say?”
“I don’t know,” she mutters, glancing down before looking back up at me. “Something.”
I turn fully then and meet her gaze, but not the way I did last night. Not with the same hunger that clawed its way up from my belly, fracturing the last of my restraint. I give her the version of me that is carved out of discipline. The one who keeps this empire intact.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I say.
Her lips part. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
The word lands harder than I intend for it to. I see it immediately in the way her face falls, the subtle fracture thatruns through her composure. Hurt flashes there, sharp and unguarded, before she tries to swallow it down. She fails, and I see it anyway.
She shakes her head, disbelief edging into her voice. “What the hell is this? What are you doing?”
“I’m reminding you who I am,” I say simply.
“And who is that?” she asks.
“The man who killed your mother,” I say flatly. “Don’t forget that.”
She flinches as if I’ve struck her.
For a split second, it nearly breaks me. The urge to cross the room is violent and nearly undoes the careful mask I’ve slipped into. It would do me no good to take the words back and tell her the truth beneath the wall I’ve built. Last night had been foolish. Giving in to that desire was dangerous in a way she will never understand. The softness she saw would get her killed if the wrong eyes noticed it.
Especially Nikolai’s.
So I turn away before the crack in my resolve shows. I let the cruelty settle over me like cooling steel and force whatever feeling this is down until I’ve crushed it beneath my feet.
“Lev will escort you downstairs,” I say, my hand closing around the door handle. “As I said before, don’t try to leave this house again.”
Her breath catches. “And if I do?”
I turn just enough for her to see my expression. “You’ll come to regret it.”
Then I open the door and leave
By midday,I’m drowning myself in work. It’s the only way I know how to survive the aftermath of a mistake.
Contracts stack beneath my hands. Shipping manifests scroll past on my screen in neat columns of numbers and routes. Threat assessments pile up beside territory maps marked with red ink. I force my mind to lock onto the familiar rhythms of command. Anything to bury last night under layers of discipline and responsibility. Anything to smother the memory of her warmth curled against my side when her body had sought mine without knowing why.
My men rotate through the office with updates, each one delivered with the same rigid professionalism they always use. No one mentions Alina. No one dares to, anyway. They talk instead about bank transfers and shell companies, about ghost accounts that funnel money through Cyprus and back into Moscow under names that have been burned into my memory for years.
Viktor Morozov’s aliases.
More threads surface as the hours pass, each one leading back to him like veins returning to a rotten heart. Offshore accounts tied to intermediaries who don’t exist on paper. Payments routed through charitable foundations and “educational grants” that don’t exist. The same signature patterns as the ledger Alina found in my study, the same handwriting.
