Page 44 of Mafia King’s Dangerous Vow

“Yes.”

The word is blunt. She absorbs it. I need her to. Not because I want her afraid—I don’t. But apology without consequence is just noise.

And this mattered.

Tamara looks around the apartment, really looks in a way I’ve seen her do with rooms. Not decorating. Reading.

“This place is hers,” she says quietly.

I say nothing.

She reads the fireplace, the bookshelves, the pale couch, the exact placement of objects no one has shifted in years. “Not obviously,” she adds. “Not in a feminine way. But it’s preserved around an absence.”

The words find the gap between ribs I didn’t know I’d left open.

I should tell her to stop. I don’t.

“You never changed anything,” she says.

“No.”

“Because you loved it?”

“Because I wasn’t ready to decide what stayed.”

Her gaze returns to mine. There’s no triumph in her face, no satisfaction at having found something true. Only a kind of careful sadness that irritates me because I don’t know what to do with it.

“That sounds exhausting,” she says.

A humorless breath leaves me. “It was easier than changing it.”

The truth sits between us. Uncomfortable. Intimate in a way I didn’t authorize.

Tamara wraps her arms around herself. The movement makes her look younger than she is. Then she straightens again, collecting herself piece by piece.

“Before, I told Mikhail that the apartment feels embalmed,” she says.

That almost gets a smile from me. “She would have liked that.”

“Elena?”

“She had a vicious eye for accurate insults.”

Tamara almost smiles. “Then I’m sorry I didn’t meet her.”

I wasn’t ready for that either.

I look back at the painting. The tear is still there. Small. Ugly. Real.

“I don’t know how to live in a room once it stops being a memorial.” I don’t mean to say it.

Tamara doesn’t move. Then, quietly, “I do.”

She inhales once, steadying herself. “That’s my job. Taking spaces people have outgrown and figuring out what can remain. What has to change. What still matters.”

The words should sound like a pitch. They don’t. They sound like an offering.

I wasn’t expecting that. I don’t know what I was expecting.