Page 97

Sergei

“You already know most of what happened,” I continued. “I struck Yuri’s cash house. His men went to Mila’s apartment. Raffaele pulled me out and used Bellandi contacts to recover her body before the Volkovs could erase her entire existence.”

Alessia nodded, her eyes searching mine.

I broke the old seal. The paper made a dry whisper as I drew out the report, and suddenly I was back inside the Bellandi safe house with nine stitches pulling behind my ear and rainwater drying on the shoulders of my funeral coat.

“The examiner recorded every wound,” I said. “How much blood she lost. Which one killed her. The condition of her body when she reached the morgue.”

Alessia’s face tightened, but she didn’t look away.

“But in addition to all of that, he found something else.”

I unfolded the report and turned it toward her. She began to read. Her gaze moved down the lines of medical language, and I watched the moment she reached the part that mattered. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. One hand rose slowly to cover her mouth while the other settled against the desk, the wedding ring bright against the dark wood.

“Mila was pregnant with my child,” I confirmed softly.

The truth felt different spoken aloud. It had lived inside me for so long without a sound that hearing it in my own voice made the loss seem newly created, as though, somewhere beyond the walls, a second future had just gone dark.

“Did you know?” she asked.

“No.”

“Did she?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

That uncertainty had cut deeper than almost anything else. Mila might have known for days and been waiting to tell me. She might have learned that morning. She might not have known at all.

“I kept thinking about her call that night,” I continued quietly. “Whether she sounded different. Whether she tried to tell me about it and I changed the subject because I was watching the street. Whether the future was already there while I kept waiting for the right week to ask her to marry me.”

Alessia came around the desk.

“I had a ring,” I continued. “Not with me that night. It was locked in another apartment because I thought keeping it separate from her made it safer.”

The bitter stupidity of that belief remained intact after all these years. I had hidden the symbol of our future, changed the routes I used to reach her, checked the locks, and watched every vehicle behind me.

I had protected everything except the woman herself.

“I don’t even know whether the child was a boy or a girl,” I said. “Only one line in a report describing a life I hadn’t known existed until it was already gone.”

Alessia’s fingers closed around mine, and I looked down at our joined hands. The warmth of her fingers brought me comfort.

“When your attorney said no child would ever become a conditional term of our marriage, I could barely breathe,” I admitted. “It wasn’t because I expect or demand a child from you. It’s because I had already lost one before anyone gave me the chance to want it.”

Her grip on me tightened.

“I never told my brothers. Maxim knew there was something in the report, but he never asked what.”

“Why didn’t you tell them?”

“Because they had already survived our parents. Because Mila’s death was another reason for them to follow me into a war over her.”

“It didn’t make it your failure.”

“I’m the one who hit Yuri Volkov’s cash house.”

“Yuri ordered armed men into Mila’s home.”