Our fingers don’t touch.
That feels deliberate.
I drink too quickly. Cold water hits my empty stomach and makes me realize I haven’t eaten properly since yesterday.
Yaromir watches my face. “Have you eaten?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“That means no.”
“It means mind your business.”
“If you marry me, you become my business.”
The words land low in my stomach. Why does he even care?
I set the glass down on the desk, careful not to look at the scattered papers, because I know what just happened on top of them. “I don’t belong to you.”
“No,” he says. “You don’t. Not yet anyway.”
I blink.
He steps closer, but stops before the air can turn dangerous again. “I have no interest in dragging a woman through a wedding while she hates every step.”
“You don’t mind being hated.”
“No. But I prefer to be hated accurately.”
For the first time since I entered his study, I almost smile.
It’s small. Bitter. Gone immediately.
He sees it anyway.
I look away from him. The room feels too clean, too controlled, too much like him. Dark wood. Books arranged with precision. Heavy curtains. Fire burning low. A large desk that still holds the shape of what happened between us, even though no one else would notice.
I hate that in this room, surrounded by his power, I feel less invisible than I did in Dmitri’s world.
Dmitri looked at me like a pretty thing. Yaromir looks at me like… I don’t even know what to make of that look, but it turns my stomach to knots.
“What happens to Dmitri?” I ask.
His expression doesn’t change, but something shrewd enters his eyes. “That depends on what you want.”
I look at him then. “I want him humiliated.”
“Then he will be.”
“I want him to know I didn’t crawl back.”
“He will know.”
“I want Katya to know too.”
For some reason, saying her name hurts more. Maybe because I expected nothing better from Dmitri in the end. Maybe some part of me always knew he was capable of this.
But Katya was my friend, or at least as much of a friend one could be in this world. The truth was I never belonged with them. They were Bratva princesses, where I was a mere underling’s unwanted daughter.
