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“A sister to you. Yeah, I know but I won’t even tolerate it as a joke.” Roman completes for him, however, when my gaze travels back to Alec’s clenched jaw, something tells me that’s not what he wanted to say.

“Besides Alina hates everyone.” I add.

“She doesn’t hate you.” Alec grits out. Do I sense jealousy?

“She doesn’t hate me either.” Elara says, standing next to me, her green eyes looking up at me as all three of us stare at her with widened gaze.

“What?” She asks and I kiss her forehead.

Do I need a reason for it? The fuck not.

So, I lift her chin up, going down to catch her lips with my own and devour the living shit out of her. Our tongues tangle, making me ravenous but when a moan slips past her lips, I pull away.

“Let me stab their eyes and ears,” I whisper, “then you can moan all you want.”

“Oh, c’mon dollface, I’m your Mishka—” my fist meets Roman’s chest and that gets him to stop talking.

Elara laughs burying her face in the crook of my neck as I haul her body up into my arms.

“I was hiding behind a cubicle when you came looking for me that day in the washroom.” She adds rapidly.

“You mean Alina helped you hide from me?” My growl makes her giggle as she nods sheepishly and the urge to bite her cheeks hits me straight in the chest.

“So, Alec is the only one Alina hates?” Roman’s chuckle causes all of us to laugh at Alec’s expense while he grits his teeth so hard, I’m surprised they’re not broken under the punitive grinding.

“Put me down, I’m hungry.” Elara adds a few seconds later and I comply, going back to work and sit in front of my laptop.

It’s Elara’s birthday in one week.

Now, I’m not a man made for grand gestures, but I want to do something special for her.

I never asked why she doesn’t remember me. At some point, it stopped mattering. All that matters now is that she’s here, in my home, eating my food and kissing me.

Still, I want to take her back to the bridge where we first met. Maybe have dinner by the water, at the very place where I once thought I’d lost her forever. The happy memory of us there might quiet half my nightmares.

And if she remembers that night…that would just be an added bonus.

I tap a few keys on my laptop and order a thousand pink roses because pink is her favourite colour, then force myself back to work.

Roman and Alec dropped by to inform me that there were two shipments, one of drugs and the other of children. Vasily was trafficking women and kids across the ocean and wanted me to oversee the entire shitshow of an operation?

I was hacking into their software, finding data, anything that can help me to track the victims and get them to safety.

No one was there for me, and I wanted to be someone who would’ve protected me as a child.

I’m also trying to hack into Elara’s phone, but I’m hitting a wall.

The phone’s encrypted. I can’t brute-force it without wiping the data, and data is all I need.

Because she’s losing herself.

I knew she is still hiding something from me, but every time her phone buzzes, she goes silent, entirely still.

It buzzes twice a day, like clockwork, and I know—I know—it has something to do with her ex-boyfriend, that she apparently never had.

Which also fucks me up, since she said I’m the only man in her life, and something tells me she wouldn’t lie about this.

Hell, she was about to say she loves me, but I panicked at the last moment. It wasn’t love. What we have is not love, it transcends every emotion known to mankind.