Page 64 of Gilded Cage (Kovalyov Bratva 1)

“How the hell did you get in here?” I demand, trying to gain composure.

He lifts his hand and dangles a small silver key in the air. “Thisismy home,” he drawls. “In case you forgot.”

“Don’t remind me. I’d like to go back tomyhome now, please.”

I don’t actually want that, but now is not the time to get into specifics. I’ll start with getting away from here and from him. Then I’ll figure out where to go from there.

“Your home is a pile of rubble and ash,” he says coolly.

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine, directly speaking. But your father brought that on himself.”

“Oh?” I say with an arched eyebrow. “Did I bring this on myself?”

Artem doesn’t answer that question. He just uncrosses and recross his leg, still playing with that silver key the whole time.

He doesn’t look away from me, either.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks. His voice is so infuriatingly casual.

“Do you even care?”

He just shrugs.

I sit down on the edge of the bed, as far from him as I can manage.

“They were innocent, you know,” I say, breaking the tenuous silence.

He raises his eyebrows. “Am I supposed to know who you’re talking about?”

“The people you killed,” I tell him. “Armando Ayala, Silvio Barrera, Ronaldo—"

“Listing names will not make me care about them,” he interrupts. “They were collateral damage. It happens in this business.”

I shake my head. “You’re a monster.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you.”

He is so calm that it rattles me.

And then I realize why.

I was never allowed to mouth off or disobey Papa without facing consequences. My whole life, I’d been conditioned to expect pain for the slightest infraction.

I assumed that would happen with Artem, too. He is every bit as dangerous as Papa was. Maybe more so.

Apparently, though, it’s a different kind of dangerous.

I felt it once before. Saw it with my own eyes, actually. He’d utterly destroyed the man at The Siren who tried to rape me.

Back then, his violence saved me.

Now, it’s about to consume me.

“Stop thinking so much,” he says, interrupting my thoughts. “You’ll give yourself a headache.”

“You didn’t have to kill the house staff,” I continue, refusing to let him derail my accusation. “They were innocent.”

---