Page 79 of Beautiful Ruin

This is the plan.

I move through the familiar corridors like a ghost, every step guided by years of instinct. The layout is etched into my bones—the blind corners, the narrow hallways meant for the staff to disappear down when guests are being entertained.

The first set of guards appear at the end of the hallway near the library. They hesitate when they recognize me but lift their guns anyway to aim at my chest.

“Don’t—” one of them starts to say.

The words are cut off by the bullets from my gun catching them both in the chest before they are able to flex their fingers over their triggers. They collapse together in a heap and I move forward, stepping past them without looking down. Another guard rounds the corner seconds later, dropping just as the last two did from another round from my gun’s chamber.

Ivan is already waiting for me when I arrive.

Perhaps, in his own way, he always knew this was how it would end too.

The study looks exactly the same as it always has. The heavy desk sits near the tall windows overlooking the dark gardens, shelves of leather-bound books line the walls, and the faint scent of cigar smoke lingers in the air like the ghost of countless late-night strategy sessions we had together.

Ivan stands at the windows with his hands clasped behind his back. The only source of light is a lamp in the far corner of the room, casting long shadows across the space. In his reflection, his expression is calm, almost resigned, as he stares out at the chaos unfolding below.

Ivan breaks the silence first. “I wondered how long it would take for you to come.”

My hand finally eases from the door handle, my fingers aching from how hard I’d been gripping it. I close it quietly behind me, the lock engaging with a soft click that echoes like a final punctuation mark.

When he turns away from the window, he studies me with an expression that is hard to nail down. It isn’t quite anger. There is a deep line between his brows that suggests how disheartened he feels, how tired, maybe. Though I know better than to mistake weariness in a man like him for weakness.

He looks older at this moment.

Though the same silver is at his temples and the same faint lines mar his skin, something in him has aged.

His voice is quiet when he speaks again. “Of all the people who might come through that door… I had hoped it wouldn’t be you.”

My grip tightens around the gun in my hand. “Why would you expect anyone else?”

I’m asking because some part of me still wants to know if he imagined I would come back to him eventually. If even now with his house being dismantled around him, and everything he’s ever built now crumbling, he still believed in the back of his mind that I would turn up at the last second and stand where I always stood.

Beside him, not against him.

Ivan’s gaze tightens suddenly. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have. You betrayed me just as my own sister did.”

I say nothing.

Truthfully, there are no words left in me for him. They have all but dried up just as my tears have since I have been out from under his heavy hand. I tried to warn him of this outcome, that the Pact would retaliate in the only way it knows how to, by crushing its rebellious factions.

What exactly is left to say after that?

The awful thing is he already knows what it has cost me to walk through this door and face him for the last time. I can see it in the way he looks at me now as though he’s examining the very wound he inflicted himself and can’t decide whether he regrets it or not.

Ivan takes a slow step closer to me. “I gave you everything, Rowan.”

“And I have never forgotten that,” I say. “I still haven’t.”

His eyes dart down to the gun in my hand before finding mine again. “Then explain this.”

Love in his world will never be enough. There will always be a debt, waiting for the day the bill finally arrives to be paid. His care has always carried a quiet hunger for ownership underneath it.

That is the thing I finally understand about him, then.

About all men like him.

They give and give and give but never without an invisible ledger taking in every expense and calculating the final total at the end. They tell themselves it is love because that word is easiest to twist into control. Somewhere along this long, brutal road, I have realized something Ivan never allowed himself to understand. Loyalty without conscience is not strength.