Page 77 of Keeping Ruby

Fucking hell, her voice is so small. So broken. I want to fix it—this—her. “She is nothing compared to you. I have been enthralled with you since the first moment I saw you, Ruby. You’ve been mine since the moment you arrived.”

“And yet you were with her.”

“I was in denial. Being with her was never right. I felt it the moment you arrived, and I’ve been yours since.”

For long moments, she sits in my lap and cries. Finally, she speaks. Her words send shards of ice-splinters into my veins. “She was with my brother. With Artyom.”

The ice bursts, frozen shrapnel spearing my heart with fear. “You saw him tonight?”

He wasn’t supposed to be there, either.

She nods. My heart contracts. “He spoke to me.” I let her twist in my arms to face me. “He said my father left me a large sum of money. A fortune, he said.”

“What else did he say?”

“He implied that it’s the only reason you married me. Because you want access to the money—that you bought the bank where the money is being kept.”

“So, he knows I bought it,” I mutter, making a mental note to call Ilya.

“So, it’s true, then?”

My eyes snap to hers. “I bought the bank, yes. But I don’t want or need his money.” She deflates, and I realize there was a part of her that believed him.

I catch her face in my hands. “I need you to listen to me very carefully now, Ruby. Artyom isn’t to be trusted. If he is ever near you—ever comes close to you—you run. You run to me and you tell me, do you understand?”

Her brows furrow, the little wrinkle of uncertainty deepening as she searches my eyes. Then, to my relief, she nods. “Okay.”

“You’re never to be alone with him.”

“You act like I want to be alone with him,” she says softly, disbelievingly. “I was there for that phone conversation where he threatened to sell me, Kirill. Until I was too used to be sold again—then he would put me down. And I was there tonight when he told me?—”

“What did he tell you?”

“He wants to destroy me. To hurt me. To leave me broken in the way I suspect my father—Ivan—broke his mother.”

She shudders as I gather her into my arms. I vow, “I’ll never let anyone hurt you.”

“I’m so tired,” she whispers, and for the first time, I can literally hear the exhaustion in her voice.

Thirty-Five

Ruby

It’s no surprise after the drama of last night, that I wake with the flu. I’ve never been an easy crier. When I cry, I cry hard. And I’d been so angry last night. So heartsore.

Even after Kirill helped me out of my dress, ran the brush through my hair and tucked me into bed, I’d been unable to stop crying. The emotions—or maybe the stress of my life in general—just kept pouring out of me.

Wave after wave of sorrow expelled from my body in torrents of terrible tears. Anger at Anya for ruining a perfectly wondrous night, and disgust at the man I shared blood with, who wanted nothing more than to destroy me for holding the love of an evil man. Anger at the man I’ve fallen madly, achingly in love with.

Usually, when I cry hard like this, I wake with a stuffy nose and symptoms of a head cold. Today, I’m vomiting.

“Get out,” I moan over the bowl of the toilet after my most recent episode. He ignores me, as he’s ignored me every time before. I try to shoo him away with a weak wave of my hand. “I’m done now. Please, go away.”

“Stop telling me to go away.” Kirill wrings out the cloth before he returns to press the cool material to my forehead. “Is there anything I can get you?”

The idea of food makes me want to die. “No.”

“I think I should call a doctor.”

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