I’ve lost track of the exact date, but I’m pretty suretonight’s Killian’s championship match. He’ll be fighting Ivan Sharapova for the heavyweight title.
My eyes close as I lie in bed and let myself pretend I’m with him at Madison Square Garden. We’re still together and things have never been better.
The past week has been nothing more than a nightmare I woke up from.
The door snicks open, and I sit up expecting the blond. It must be time for supper.
A figure worse than the icy soldier enters my room. The last person on this planet who I want to be trapped inside this room with.
Fedorov strolls in with his cane serving as support and his unsettling gaze already focused on me. Even in his old age, he’s still an imposing man sheerly based off his height. One of the qualities he gave to his prized son, Rurik.
It’s obvious when he was younger, he was a man who dominated rooms on his physicality alone.
These days, it’s from the visceral demented aura he carries. The embodiment of evil itself.
He has silver hair and the unsettling gaze of a shark. His calculated smirk could make the devil proud, and he still dresses in expensive suits, no matter how poor his health has become.
I urge myself to sit still. For me to at least put up a tough front.
But parts of me start quaking against my will. My insides and my hands and even the breath that rattles out of me.
It’s a terrifying prospect to even meet his gaze. To realize we’re alone as he lets the door drift most of the way shut.
“Myshka,” he rasps in his deep, gravelly voice. “How I have missed you.”
I press myself back against the headboard, putting as much distance between us as the small room allows.
It isn’t nearly enough.
The entire Atlantic Ocean wouldn’t be enough.
“I was so pleased when you agreed to work for me again,” he muses. “You were always my favorite, you know. So clever. So obedient and smart. I had such hopes for you.”
He takes a step closer, the cane tapping against the hardwood floor.
“But then you disobeyed me. You interfered where you should not have.”
…to protect Eva.
“You ran from me when you know what happens to traitors.”
…you kept me in a cage.
“I chose to give you a second chance, Myshka,” he lectures, regarding me like you would a child. He pins me with an austere look as if I’m his pupil who’s been naughty. “But once again you proved disobedient. You decided that you would rather listen to Irish thugs than respect the man who has given you everything.”
“I want nothing more to do with you,” I blurt out. “Just leave me alone. Please.”
He takes several more steps toward me. “That is not possible. Not when I have done so much for you and your family. Do you believe you would have survived without me? That Eva would be alive today if I had not given her the treatment she needed?”
Only a foot separates us, his musky cologne filling the air I breathe and suffocating me.
I scoot even further back, pressing myself up against the headboard though there’s nowhere else to go. There’s nowhere to hide, and that realization makes me dizzy.
“You owe me everything, Jhene,” he says plainly. “The blood in your veins. The heart that beats inside your chest. The very air you breathe. All of it belongs tome.”
“Then just do it—get it over with and kill me. Just leave Eva out of it. She’s never done anything to you.”
He smirks, studying me as if I’m endlessly fascinating. “You remind me so much of your mother. Did you know that, Myshka? So defiant. And yet so powerless.”
