My heartbeat roared in my ears.
“She is not the only reason,” Fyodor said finally.
“But she is a reason.”
“I’ll handle it. It won’t happen again.”
The room fell quiet, and then the chairs shifted. Footsteps echoed from inside, and I stepped back just in time, turning down the hallway and slipping into the shadow near the living room before the study door opened. Viktor and Mikhail exited first, voices lowered now, moving toward the elevator. Fyodor remained behind for a moment while I stood very still.
My mind refused to settle as I absorbed everything I had just heard. He had silently dismantled three operations in the past five weeks and had stopped two shipments. He had done all of this to protect the Chernykhs. My family. His enemy. The war I had been bracing for, counting down toward, had not arrived. It was not because my brothers weren’t searching. But because he had been quietly dismantling every spark that could ignite it. The certainty I had built around him began to crack.
He was the enemy. The captor. The man who had married me without permission. The strategist who had turned me into leverage. But the evidence didn’t align with the role I had assigned him.
If Kliment had his way, there would have been blood by now. Chernykh blood. Romanov blood. Retaliation spiraling into something unstoppable.
Instead, there was tension and surveillance, and movement. But no open war had started yet. Because he had pulled the weapons and redirected the raids. He had interfered for weeks. My chest felt tight, so I moved to the balcony doors and pressed my palm against the cool glass.
Safe.
The word crept in uninvited. I was not free by any definition of the word because the doors that could take me out were still locked. The elevator still required clearance, but Ihad not heard gunfire because he had not allowed chaos. I had not received news of bodies lining the streets because he had stopped it. If I had made that call the night he handed me his phone, it would not have resulted in a rescue but in an ignition instead, and he had known that.
Yet he had given me the choice anyway.
My reflection stared back at me in the glass, and I hated that my pulse didn’t spike at the thought of him anymore. I hated that his footsteps in the hallway didn’t automatically tighten my spine. I hated that when he moved through the penthouse, it no longer felt like something closing in on me. It felt steady instead.
The study door closed softly behind him, but I didn’t turn around even when I felt him approach.
“You are still awake,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You should sleep.”
“I heard you.”
Silence. Not denial.
“Which part?” he asked calmly.
“All of it.”
He didn’t react outwardly, but something shifted in the air, and I finally turned around slowly to look at him.
“You’ve been stopping Kliment from escalation against the Chernykhs for weeks,” I said.
“Yes.” My throat felt dry.
“Why?”
He studied me carefully.
“Because escalation would have forced a response and war, which would have put you in the middle of it.”
“I’m already in the middle.”
“Not like that.” Silence stretched between us.
“So you have been doing it all for me,” I said.
