Page 137 of Ivory Ashes

He sounds haunted, raspy, mournful. Wherever he’s been, he still isn’t out of fight mode.

“Viviana,” he says, rising to his feet. His shirt is ripped and there’s a dark stain on the hem of his pants. “Do you understand me? This is an order.”

“I thought I wasn’t a prisoner here,” I say softly.

“If you were a prisoner, I’d be keeping you away from the world. But I’m trying to keep the world away from you.” His voice cracks and he scrapes a hand over his jaw. “I can’t—I can’t let anything happen to you. I can’t?—”

“Can’t what? What happened? Where have you been?” I reach for his hand. My fingers barely brush his wrist before he spins away from me and paces across the floor.

“I can’t focus on keeping my men alive if I’m worried about one woman doing something stupid and getting herself killed.”

The words are ice-cold. Don’t read so much into it. He isn’t protecting me because he cares; he’s protecting me because my death would be a distraction.

“I’ve managed just fine without you,” I snap. “If I’m such a distraction, why don’t you just forget about me and focus on your job?”

“I can’t!” he roars.

Between one blink and the next, Mikhail is looming over me. His chest is heaving and his jaw is set. There’s something wild in his eyes I’ve never seen before.

“If I could forget about you, I would have done it by now,” he hisses. “I would have done it before I broke into your bridal suite that night. I would have forgotten about you the moment I saw you at your engagement party to my fucking brother.”

I can’t breathe. Can’t move. If I do, I’ll break this moment. This glimpse into Mikhail’s head will shutter closed forever.

“I never should have looked at you.” He says it softly like he’s talking to himself and I’m not here. “I hadn’t looked at anyone for three years. Why should you have been any different?”

If he wants me to answer, he’s out of luck. My throat is closed tight. I couldn’t find the words right now even if I wanted to.

He drags a blood-crusted knuckle across my cheek. “You smiled at me. You were the first person in fucking years to do that. Everyone else was too afraid—afraid of me, afraid they’d say the wrong thing and set me off. But you just smiled and introduced yourself.”

I remember. I’m your new sister.

I had no idea what I was doing when I walked up to the handsome loner in the corner. Truth be told, I still have no idea what I’m doing.

Mikhail brushes his finger over my bottom lip. I can taste blood.

“Whose blood is this?” I ask softly. “Are you okay?”

Maybe he’s talking like this because he’s hurt and confused.

Even if that’s the case, though, he ignores my question.

“When I looked at you, you smiled, and… I wanted you.” Mikhail drops his hand. “That’s why I couldn’t let you marry my brother. Not because I wanted to fuck you, but because he didn’t deserve you. If you married him, you wouldn’t have survived it. You would have ended up like Alyona, and I didn’t want to watch it happen again.”

Alyona.

The name sparks in some deep, forgotten part of my brain. I heard it in passing a few times. Trofim and his father talking to each other, complaining about “Alyona and the baby” and how they “fucked him up.”

I didn’t know what or who they were talking about. Asking Trofim questions never got me anywhere I wanted to be, so I stayed quiet.

But with Mikhail…

“Who was she?” I whisper.

“My first wife.”

Out of all the things Mikhail could have said, that answer didn’t even register as an option.

My chest hitches, but I try not to make a noise. Mikhail was married before. To someone else. I don’t have any right to be jealous, but I am.

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