Page 117 of Sinful Blaze

Everyone knew.

“You’re not like him,” Sofiya offers, her voice quiet.

“I look like him.” I rub a hand over my jaw. “And sometimes, I… Blyat’. I catch myself sounding like him. Making the same decisions as him.”

Mak shrugs a shoulder. “There you go. You catch yourself. And you stop yourself. Yeah, you’re brutal sometimes, but anyone can see you’re nothing like the bastard.”

“And what happens when I get married? If I get married?”

Sofi scoffs. “Do you have a harem of women we don’t know about?”

I squint at her. “Fuck, no.”

“Do you plan on entertaining women in and out of a revolving door?”

“Absolutely not.”

“So what’s the problem?” they ask in unison.

Fucking hell, I wish I had a drink in my hand.

I also wish my siblings weren’t so goddamn perceptive.

“If I marry Daphne…” I sigh and try again. “If I marry her, I’ll have everything I’ve been so sure I didn’t want or need. I’ll have my wife, my daughter, my own family. Shit, maybe even a few more kids.”

Makari’s looking at me with his soft eyes and sympathetic smile. “Again, Pash… what’s the problem?”

My teeth clench. I don’t want to say it out loud. “What does she get if she marries me? Aside from my name, my money, and everything this Bratva has, what else is there? What if I’m just as bad to her as Kostya was to Mama, and I don’t even realize it?”

“You can’t beat yourself up over shit that hasn’t happened, and probably never will. And if it does…” He glances at Sofi, who nods in agreement. “… we’ll be right there to kick your ass. We happen to adore Daphne. You really think we’d let you raise a hand against her?”

I clap a hand on his shoulder as a sign of gratitude, but I’m all talked out. Sharing my feelings is fucking exhausting.

I wipe my hands on my pants and head to the car. But when I get there, I stop.

My reflection glints under security lamps in the darkened window of the driver’s side door. A man with a shadowed jaw, a furrowed brow, a stormy gaze, frowns back at me.

I know that man. I’ve fought him, and every time I did, I lost.

For a fleeting moment, his left eye clouds over and the scar from my brow changes places to the top of his cheekbone. He scowls at me. Weak, I hear my father’s reflection snarl in my ear. You’re weak and pathetic. Letting a woman get under your skin? You’ll be the end of everything I built. Be a man and grow the fuck up.

I blink. The illusion vanishes.

The scar shifts back into its proper place; the eye clears.

But nothing changes the fact that when I see my reflection, it’s not me who I see.

And when I think about everything I am doing for the Bratva, everything I’ve done for Daphne, my stomach sinks to recognize one horrifying truth.

Kostya Chekhov would have done the exact same things.

45

DAPHNE

I don’t know what sort of “business” Pasha does in the middle of the night. I’m not sure I want to know.

What I do know is that, whatever it is, it compels him to come home and sit on the bed next to me for a while.

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