Page 221 of Gilded Cage (Kovalyov Bratva 1)

Esme

I feel tears pooling at the corners of my eyes. Artem squeezes my hand.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

I nod. “I was just… remembering,” I tell him. “Monsters.”

“What?” Artem asks, his dark eyes boring into mine.

“He told me once that he had monsters in his head,” I say softly. “And he tried to outrun them all the time. It was around the time Papa started sending Cesar away on missions. He was gone weeks at a time sometimes and when he returned…”

“He was different,” Artem finishes. It’s a statement, not a question.

“If he came home at all, he would hole up in his room and I wouldn’t see him for days. Other times, he would come here first, before coming home.”

Artem sighs deeply. “I’ve spent so long hating him,” he says.

“Why?” I ask.

I feel that sense of being ready to turn a corner when you know there’s something scary around the bend.

Whatever Artem says next will change everything.

He pulls away slightly so that he can look at me. His fingers inch up and he grazes them over my cheek.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “But I owe you the truth.”

I shudder, my eyes going wide.

But I can’t stop him, even though a part of me wants to.

I need to hear this.

“I want the truth,” I whisper.

“I was married once… a long time ago.”

I stare at him, blinking through my confusion. He wasmarried?

He had never mentioned another woman before.

He had certainly never mentioned a wife.

“I don’t talk about her,” Artem says, as though he can see the question in my eyes. “I loved her. She was kind and strong. The type of person who saw beauty and goodness in everything, including me. Maybe that’s that drew me to her in the first place. She saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. It made me want to be the person she thought I was.”

His tone unsettles me. It’s weighed down with fatigue as though he’s speaking of distant feelings that he’s been burdened with for years.

My heart trembles a little all the same.

I do feel a twinge of jealousy, but I feel more sadness than anything else.

Artem’s face is stoic, nearly expressionless, but I think I know him well enough now to know that it hurts him to do this to relive this part of his past.

“But in this world, love is a liability,” Artem continues. “It’s a weakness that our enemies use against us. I thought Marisha was safe. We were in Moscow over the holidays. She wanted to see the town where I was born. It was meant to be a celebration of what was to come.”

I don’t answer. Don’t move. Don’t even dare to breathe.

“But my enemies found us,” he tells me. “They’d been tailing us for a long time and they targeted her when she was alone in the house.”

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