Page 41 of The Russian's Revenge Bride
He stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the hardwood floor. “Because I don’t know how to be anything other than what I am. I don’t know how to turn off the part of me that sees threats everywhere, that assumes everyone will eventually leave or betray me. I don’t know how to trust that this is real.”
“So don’t turn it off. Just…let me in. Stop treating me like I’m going to disappear if you get too close.”
For a moment, I thought he might actually do it. Might cross the space between us and let down the walls he’d spent so many years building.
Instead, he gave me that same faint smile, the one that never reached his eyes.
“Thank you for dinner. It was beautiful.”
He kissed my forehead again, that same distant gesture that felt like a door closing, and walked out of the dining room, leaving me alone with the ruins of my romantic ambitions.
I sat there for a long time, staring at the flickering candles and the barely touched plates of food. The jazz standards continued to play, mocking me with their promises of love andconnection and all the things I apparently couldn’t have with my own husband.
When I finally made it back to my room, my eyes burned with unshed tears, but I refused to let them fall. Crying wouldn’t fix anything, wouldn’t bridge the gap that Maxim seemed determined to maintain between us.
Instead, I pulled out my sewing kit and started working on a piece I’d been avoiding. A wedding dress design that had been haunting me for weeks, something raw and complicated that reflected everything I felt about marriage and love and the space between what we want and what we can have.
My stitches were angry and mechanical, each one driven by frustration and hurt and the growing certainty that I was fighting a war I couldn’t win. Maxim was here in this house, sleeping in the room down the hall, wearing a wedding ring that matched mine. But in all the ways that mattered, he might as well have been on the other side of the world.
I stitched until my fingers were sore and my eyes couldn’t focus anymore, until the repetitive motion of needle through fabric became a meditation on disappointment and the particular cruelty of loving someone who refused to let himself love you back.
Outside my window, Chicago slept peacefully, unaware that in a mansion full of beautiful things and dangerous people, a woman sat alone with her needle and thread, sewing together the pieces of a heart that someone else kept breaking.
Chapter 12 – Maxim
The phone buzzed against the mahogany desk at 11:47 p.m., the sound cutting through the silence of my home office like a blade. No subject line. Just a link from Cassandra. My jaw clenched as I stared at the screen, already knowing this wouldn’t be good news.
Eleanor was sleeping upstairs. I’d heard her footsteps on the stairs an hour ago, soft and defeated, and the sound had twisted something sharp in my chest. The memory of her face across the dinner table haunted me. The way she’d looked when I’d walked away from her romantic fucking gesture, from her attempt to build something real between us.
I was a coward. A goddamn coward who couldn’t handle the way she made me feel human again.
The link loaded, and ice flooded my veins.
Grainy security footage. An alley in Chicago, timestamp showing 10:23 p.m. tonight. Two of my men, Akim and Boris, casual as they walked between the brick walls. They were laughing about something, probably Boris’s latest conquest or Akim’s terrible jokes. Young men who’d sworn loyalty to the Bratva, who’d trusted me to keep them breathing.
Then a figure emerged from the shadows.
One moment of recognition before the gunfire started. Clean shots, professional execution. Akim dropped instantly, his skull painting the brick wall behind him in crimson streaks. Boris tried to run, caught a bullet in his thigh, and went down hard. He crawled maybe three feet before the second shot punched through his chest, and he stopped moving.
The killer moved like water, like fucking death itself. No hesitation. No wasted motion. Checked the bodies with cold efficiency, then melted back into the shadows like he’d never been there at all.
Bratva muscle memory. I’d seen enough kills to recognize the style, the instinctive way he’d handled the weapon. This wasn’t some street punk or rival gang member taking shots at us. This was family. This was betrayal carved in blood and bullets.
My grip tightened around the phone until I thought the screen might crack. Within five minutes, my office door swung open without a knock. Lev and Cassandra filed in, their faces grim. They’d seen it too.
“Fucking hell,” Lev muttered, dropping into the leather chair across from my desk. His usually perfect hair was disheveled, like he’d been running his hands through it. “How many of our own are we looking at?”
Then, he added, “Could be Beaumont,” but his tone said he didn’t believe it. “Hiring someone to make it look like an inside job. Divide and conquer bullshit.”
Cassandra didn’t even blink as she pulled up the video on her tablet, replaying the moment of execution with clinical detachment. “You don’t fake Bratva muscle memory,” she said, her voice flat and certain. “The way he moved, the precision of the shots, the post-kill protocol. That’s instinct, not training.”
Lev’s eyes narrowed. “How the fuck can you be so sure about that?”
A smile curved Cassandra’s lips, cold as winter steel. “Because I was trained by Rafael for three years. I know what we look like when we kill.”
The admission hung in the air like smoke. I’d known Cassandra was dangerous, but I’d never realized just how deep Rafael had pulled her into our world. It explained the efficiency, the way she could watch death without flinching, the loyalty that went beyond simple employment.
“Someone from inside knows our routes,” I said, my voice calm despite the rage burning in my gut. “Our schedules. Our safe houses. This isn’t random violence.”
