Page 111

Then I walked out the door.

CHAPTER 27

Sergei

My heart was breaking.

The locks engaged automatically after Riley and Nikolai escorted my wife toward the waiting vehicle. I watched as three steel bolts slid into place inside the frame. The security panel changed from amber to green. Cameras tracked the SUV as it left Beacon Hill, passed the first checkpoint, and turned down the street.

I remained in the foyer with her collar in my hand for a long time. The black leather was still warm where it had rested against her throat, the silver ring pressed into my palm hard enough to leave an imprint.

After a while, I moved through the townhouse because standing still made the silence louder. Her coffee cup remained near the kitchen sink. A hair tie circled the handle of the upstairs bathroom drawer. One of her pencils lay diagonally across the sideboard, exactly where she had put it days earlier to see whether I would straighten it. The bag my men had prepared for her sat open in the middle of our bed. I stared at it for a long time.

Then I started unpacking it. I returned the toiletries to the bathroom, the clothes to her drawers, and the body armor to the wardrobe. I aligned every object carefully because order was what my hands understood when everything else had failed. When I finished, the bedroom looked almost untouched.

But my heart was broken.

Before Alessia, the townhouse had been quiet because no one lived there except me. There were no shoes beside the fireplace, no half-finished designs on the dining table, no arguments over the temperature, no Italian curses drifting down the stairs when she discovered I had moved something she insisted was already in the correct place.

Once, I had called that quiet peace. Now it felt like death.

Headlights swept across the front windows twenty minutes later. I checked the camera even though I recognized all four vehicles. Maxim entered first, followed by Ivan and Aleksei. Nikolai came in last.

Maxim found me in the living room with the collar still in my hand. His gaze settled on the leather, then moved to my face.

“She is safe with me,” he said. “You know that, right?”

“I do know that.”

“She asked Riley and the girls to stay with her.”

I nodded. Maxim waited for me to say something else, but I didn’t. I just stayed quiet.

My eldest brother stepped farther into the room. “You arranged an aircraft without telling her. You prepared documents, guards, and a destination after signing an agreement that prohibited every part of that plan.”

“Yes.”

“Do you still believe you were right in doing all of that?”

The answer should have been simple. Dmitry had put my wife in a rifle scope. He had ordered Arsen killed in front of her and sent the photograph of her in his sights before the blood cooled. He had named her as his next target because he knew the words would take me back to a Moscow street where my mother died and Mila’s New York apartment before reason could follow.

Palermo was fortified. Raffaele could surround Alessia with hundreds of men. An ocean would separate her from Dmitry while my brothers and I finished the war on our turf.

Every part of the plan made tactical sense.

“She would’ve been safer there,” I sighed.

Maxim’s expression hardened. “That wasn’t my question.”

“I was just trying to keep her alive.”

“You were pushing her away because you think your presence is the danger,” Maxim said sharply.

Ivan moved into the room and then strode toward the security panel. He opened the hidden flight record with three touches and turned the screen toward me.

“You used a Bellandi pilot outside our normal rotation,” he said. “You created the route alone, stored the travel documents together, and told no one about any of it.”

“Fewer people meant fewer leaks.”