Page 49 of Beautiful Ruin

I rise slowly from the couch, my legs unsteady as if moving through water. My mind is too full, buzzing with the ghost of his mouth still on mine and the desperate way he’d leaned into me like he couldn’t help himself the way I couldn’t.

I walk out of the sitting room in a daze, leaving him behind. Each step carries me farther from the man I shouldn’t have touched and deeper into consequences I’m not ready to face. My heart thuds painfully hard against my ribs as I make my way down the hallway and up the stairs and into the sanctuary of my room.

The moment the door clicks shut behind me, I collapse. My back hits the wood and I slide bonelessly to the floor, legs folding beneath me. I press trembling fingers to my lips, tracing where his had been moments earlier. The imprint feels branded into my skin, one I know I shouldn’t want but can’t stop craving.

I crossed a line tonight.

Not a small one but a catastrophic one.

If Ivan ever found out I touched that man, the consequences would be brutal, unforgiving in a way that would make tonight’s look like child’s play. My uncle may trust Rowan with my life, but he would sooner gut him where he stands than watch his perfect blade be pulled off course by me again.

That much has been revealed to me tonight.

I squeeze my eyes shut, fighting the swirl of emotion rising in my chest. Despite the danger and the certainty that I should run and distance myself for the sake of us both, I don’t want to. I want Rowan Vasiliev like a sin I’ve already decided I’ll gladly burn for.

The soft ping of my laptop cuts through the silence in my room.

Blinking, I force myself upright. My legs feel numb as I walk to the desk. A new message sits at the top of my inbox from the private investigator I hired in secret days ago after getting the politsiya to send over my mother’s file as a secondary measure to dig further into what I found.

My body slumps into the chair as I stare at the screen for a long moment. When I finally work up the strength to lift my arm, I notice my hand shaking. I click on the email chain to pull up the message waiting for me.

It is short and direct.

Your father has been found.

My breath catches.

After all these years of silence, of wondering where my father is, now I will finally have answers. Strangely, part of me wants to delete the email and pretend I never saw it. It would be easier that way in order to keep from rocking the boat any further than I already have at this point. Another part, the one that kissed Rowan tonight, refuses to let the truth stay hidden any longer.

I open the email and wait for the photo attached to it to load.

An older man stares back at me, one I only recognize in a vague sense that feels too distant to form any emotional connection. The report with it details that he is alive and living quietly in a small apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. He has had no contact with any gang or Bratva within the area, and no obvious ties to my uncle. The investigator notes suspicious activity in the form of one cryptic meetup at a location right in the dead center of the city. But other than that, there is nothing.

I close the laptop slowly and settle back into my chair.

Now what?

15

ROWAN

For the next several days, I become a ghost inside my own home.

Avoiding Sofia turns into an obsession that borders on religious. If she enters a room, I leave through another door, already slipping out the back before her footsteps even register. I adjust patrol routes, shift training hours, even take meals at strange, irregular times just to ensure our paths never cross.

To the rest of the household, nothing seems abnormal. I’ve always been more on the antisocial side—silent, watchful, preferring the shadows to conversation. No one questions why the Pakhan’s blade moves like smoke through the halls of this estate.

But inside my own head, every second near her feels like standing too close to a fire that is about to consume me and burn me alive.

I berate myself nonstop about the kiss.

God, that kiss… it is the dullest blade of all cutting me open over and over with each twist of my memory replaying in high definition. It is want and weakness that I cannot afford to entertain, let alone crave this badly. I’ve replayed that night far too many times in the dark of my room as my hand drifted low on my belly before sense has snapped at me like a whip against bare skin.

It all haunts me in unforgivable ways.

Every moment since, I’ve been locked in a brutal internal war. I call myself a fool, weak and disloyal. I should have shoved her away at the first brush of her lips against mine. Or even stopped her before she ever reached for my cheek to soothe it with ice wrapped in cloth. Instead, I let her in and see me vulnerable. And worst of all, I kissed her back.

I have no business letting the Pakhan’s niece taste me like that. Which is precisely why I must stay as far away from her as physically possible.