Page 10 of Ivory Ashes

No, I should feel like a piece of shit because I wanted her at all.

Since the day we met, actually.

The only reason I was at their engagement party is because my father demanded it. “Family unity is important, Mikhail,” he snarled when I suggested staying home. “You need to show your loyalty to your brother. You need to remind people that you’re still here.”

Still here after my world shattered. Still here after they took everything from me.

“Plus,” he added, “Helen will be there.”

It would have been physically impossible for me to care any less about Helen Drakos, the Greek mafia princess. My father didn’t care about her, either. Not really.

Then and always, my father’s goal was to make sure everyone knew the full might of the Novikov Bratva. He didn’t want there to be any more questions about whose horse the family name was being hitched to.

Before my father announced Trofim as his official heir, there were whispers it would be me. That it should be me.

I don’t mind answering those questions with an obvious truth: It should have been.

But I played the dutiful spare and watched Trofim parade his new pet around their engagement party without ever really looking at the spectacle. She was a nameless, faceless woman in a green dress. My sadistic brother’s trophy.

Then Viviana came over to me.

I felt her watching me as the party dragged on. It was a prickling awareness. An itch down my neck. The same kind I feel when I’m being approached from behind. A vulnerability I can’t ignore.

She hadn’t tried to talk to me all night. There was no time, not when Trofim needed everyone to see the woman he would impregnate and then spend the next lifetime cheating on with a revolving door of mistresses.

I couldn’t even blame him—well, not for that, anyway. It’s what our father did. His father before him. A real noble lineage of Novikov pakhans fucking anything with a heartbeat, wedding vows be damned.

I was the freak who broke the mold. Alyona and I were only twenty-three when we got married, and I never once even thought of straying from her.

But during a break in the parade, Viviana slipped away. Trofim was caught up in a financial circle jerk with a group of businessmen desperate to strike deals with our family and too afraid to approach our father. He didn’t see his little wifey-to-be cross the room. He didn’t see her walk towards me.

But I saw.

I noticed all of it without noticing the one thing that was truly important.

I wanted her.

That realization rang loud and clear only once she was standing in front of me. The moment she curled her honey gold hair behind her ear and smiled.

It wasn’t some fate bullshit or love at first sight. Life has kicked me when I’m down enough times for me to know that there’s no reason to roll over and show it your soft underbelly. No, it was that my brother’s fiancée had fuck-me lips and an ass I wanted to take a bite out of.

The second thought quickly chased the tail of the first: I should feel like a piece of shit.

But I didn’t.

I still don’t.

Viviana Giordano is the first woman I’ve wanted—the first woman I’ve fucked—since I lost Alyona three years ago. And I still don’t feel one shred of guilt.

I spread my arms out across the bed in a long stretch. It’s empty, thank fuck. Viviana must have made the right choice and ran.

No matter how glad I am I finally got to feel her tighten around my cock, it wouldn’t have been worth it if she’d tried to stick around afterward. The last thing I need is some lovesick damsel in distress pining after me.

I meant what I told her last night: I didn’t walk into this suite last night to save her.

I was on this path long before she made her dirty deal with my brother.

The moment I lost Alyona and our daughter, I knew I was done being the spare to my brother’s heir. I was done waiting in the shadows while someone else called the shots. I was never going to let anyone else have the power to hold my family’s fate in their hands.

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