It's not the first time I've dealt with someone who has had this goal, but it's the first time I've been faced with something so treacherously sneaky.
All the information General Zangier fed to Mathew was sent to the Italians and fueled the war we ended up in, a war to keep me distracted from the fact that they had snuck a rat in under my own roof.
It now makes sense why General Zangier was so pushy about me settling for a small, unassuming family.
I thought he was doing me a favor and understood my desire to simply marry and end all of the questions.
I see now that he was simply pushing for the Chaika family because Mathew Vasiliev had his claws in them.
Killing Leo and derailing the war surely threw Mathew's plan out the window.
I turn to the sink and fill a nearby jug with the required water, then carry it back to the pot and pour it into the soup mixture.
Rose was a plant.
The arranged marriage forced her to be here, but her eagerness to sleep with me and the excitement in those activities weren't because she enjoyed it.
Or me.
It was because Mathew was dangling her family over the abyss with only one way to save them.
A baby.
My infertility has been a closely guarded secret and there was no way anyone could know that such a plan would fail.
God, this is too fucking much.
Rose in my home.
Mathew in the ear of my general.
Beatie in my club… was that an act of desperation?
With the war with the Italians tapering out after the death of Leo, flooding my clubs with poor underage girls was surely a tactic to get me tangled up with the law and stretch me so thin that I wouldn't notice Mathew snaking closer until it was too late.
"Boss." Calvin's voice cuts through my thoughts and wakes me up.
I'm suddenly very present in my mind.
The juice from the peppers is alarmingly wet against my fingers, the scent rising from the pot is strong, and my chest hurts.
It's like a weight has landed on it and I can't quite breathe properly.
I lift my gaze to him and catch the wariness in his eyes.
Wariness born from my last outburst, which is why I've focused so intently on cooking while Rose delivers blow after blow of the truth.
Then I turn my attention to her and my world grows eerily quiet as the weight of her words fully sinks into my soul.
She stands there with blood speckling the back of her hand from how deeply her nails have cut into her skin.
She's pale , her eyes wide and her lips parted as her chest jerks up and down.
Rose is having trouble breathing and she stands there, visibly trembling as she waits for my reaction.
The problem is, I can't decide how to react.
Fury burns away inside my chest like a furnace but there's fear and pain too.
