Page 98 of Sweet Obsession
I’d told Sofia to bring soup, medicine, anything she might ask for. But Luna hadn’t asked for warmth or comfort, she’d asked for a cat.
A small gray thing with sharp green eyes that now purred in her lap, her fingers stroking its fur, a ghost of a smile tugging at her lips. A real smile. The kind I hadn’t earned.
Jealousy twisted low in my gut, hot and bitter. I gripped the edge of my desk, watching her laugh faintly at something the damn animal did. That softness, she gave it so easily to something that wasn’t me. That’s what gutted me. Not her silence. Not her distance. But the fact that I had destroyed the part of her that could once look at me like that.
The door opened. Nikolai stepped in, his scarred face grim. “Gabriela’s gone,” he said. “She told the guards she wanted air, said she wanted to get familiar with Russia... then disappeared. They lost her. Sloppy bastards.”
My jaw clenched. I already knew what he was going to say next.
“We think Chernov or the Vargas cartel reached out. Promised her sweet things. The girl’s naïve enough to believe them.”
Rage cracked through me. I was really trying, not to start a war. But they were forcing my hand. Chernov had never tasted war. Not real war. Not the kind where you watched your people bleed out on marble floors while your city burned around you. I had. And I wasn’t afraid to go back there.
But I knew the cost.
Defeating the Odessas here in Yakutsk and wiping out Vargas in Colombia would take blood. And the ones who mattered most, Luna, my father—were the ones who would bleed first.
I glanced at the drawer, where the folder sat locked away. The documents Luna stole from her father, proof of Odessa’s deals with Luis Rojas—weren’t just leverage. They were blood-soaked currency. A fuse waiting for my match. And when I strike, it won’t be loud. It’ll be clean. Surgical.
My throat was tight. Beneath the fury, guilt churned in me like rot. I had promised Luna I’d protect her sister. That no one would touch Gabriela. And now she was gone. Just like Stepan. Just like everything I’d once failed to protect.
I’d burned Luna’s past to ash. Forced her into this world. And now that world was eating away at everything she loved. I had made her a queen of rubble.
“I’ll find her,” I snarled. “Take Viktor. Take Oleg. Every man we have. Tear the city apart if you must. But bring Gabriela back, alive, untouched. No one tells Luna until she’s safe.”
Nikolai gave a tight nod and left, the door thudding shut behind him.
Alone again, I turned to the feed. Luna’s image flickered on the screen. My tether. My undoing.
A memory pulled me under, the first ambush at the warehouse. The second attack, not even forty-eight hours later.
The blood. Her panic. The way I’d held her while her body trembled in mine, whispering she was safe even when I knew she wasn’t.
Chernov had tried to take her from me. I could still see it, her body pressed against that cliff’s edge, blood soaking through her shirt, fighting off several men alone. What a strong woman my wife is. She didn’t scream. She didn’t beg. She fucking fought like death itself owed her something. I should have ended Chernov that night. But I didn’t. And that mercy, that hesitation, it would cost me everything.
I thought I knew betrayal. But finding out her own father had sold Stepan out, offered him like a lamb to her ex-boyfriend’sfamily cartel, split me open in a way I hadn’t felt since I buried my brother. It wasn’t just treachery. It was a knife twisting through everything I thought I understood about pain.
And it was Luna who found the proof. Luna who discovered what I hadn’t seen. She pieced it together when I couldn’t. She’s always seeing more than I want her to.
I couldn’t tell her about her sister’s disappearance. Not yet
Not when she was sick, raw, already balancing on the edge of breaking.
I shut off the monitor. I couldn’t stand watching her give her gentleness to anything but me. I left the study, boots echoing on cold marble, and walked straight to her room, heart thudding like war drums.
I knocked once, then stepped inside.
She looked up, bleary-eyed, her voice weak but laced with suspicion. “What are you doing here?”
The cat leapt from her lap. She pulled the blanket tighter around her body. She looked fragile. Achingly so.
“You’re sick,” I said, my voice rougher than I intended.
I walked toward her slowly, kneeling beside the couch. “I couldn’t stay away. Not when you’re like this. Not when I know I’m the reason you’re hurting.”
Her expression shifted—just for a moment. A flicker of something that wasn’t hate.
“I’m just learning to live alone,” she whispered, eyes shining. “I’ll be fine.”
