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That thought should probably terrify me.

Instead, I find myself smiling faintly as I head downstairs.

I opted for jeans and a silk blouse today. Professional but casual. Nothing like the dress I wore to that little stakeout. The one that rode up when Vasily’s strong arm pulled me over his hard body, pressing me down against him protectively.

The memory has remained with me for days. Lodged right between my eyes like a stone. Irritating at night when I try to fall asleep and my core aches with want.

Even now I feel the change in my breathing, in my pulse, at the memory of his hand slipping slowly down my back.

“You are way out of line,” I murmur to myself, feeling my face heat frustratingly easy. “He was just being nice, probably. So you’d stop bothering him, and here you are.”

It’s a short, five-minute walk across the house to Vasily’s wing. I find him in his office with a man who can only be his brother. Both of them are bent over a spread of blueprints across the desk. Timur is explaining something about the second floor when I walk in.

Neither of them looks up immediately, and I use the opportunity to give little brother a once-over. He is the one Vasily admitted to sacrificing so much for. He’s in jeans and a pullover despite the day already warming up before dawn. His hair is perfectly combed and cut. His eyes are as angular as Vasily’s, though his jaw is softer in a way that marks him as a manager and not a true blue-collar worker.

So this is the man Vasily sacrificed so much for.

“I need to go to New York.”

I interrupt abruptly and practically kick myself. Where is the calculation, Matilda? You know how to run a room. And instead, I just fumbled into this one.

Vasily’s eyes lift, his hands still braced on the table, chest muscles bunched under a t-shirt.

“Good morning to you, too.”

“Good morning. I need to go to New York.”

His mouth twitches. “You’ve gotten very comfortable interrupting me while I’m working.”

I glance at the blueprints.

“You’ve gotten very comfortable keeping me in the dark.”

Timur’s eyes flick between us. He’s standing upright now; eyebrows raised into that ninety-dollar haircut. A fancy watch sits on his wrist, a wedding ring on his left hand. So he got love, too, then. Something else Vasily missed out on, judging from the stoic way he stares me down.

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“I need to see Isla.”

“I know.”

“Then why⁠—”

“Should I leave?” Timur asks, a thread of nervousness in the question. His shoulders are squared, though he’s several inches shorter than Vasily and hasn’t quite grasped the authoritative air. Vasily is looking at me with daggers in those dark eyes.

“Stay,” he says without looking at his brother, his attention and his next words still on me. “Because you’re not going alone. Yuri’s operating at a more advanced level than we expected, and I’m not sure what he knows about you.”

I stare at him. He stares back. After a tense moment, he sighs and says, “I’ll take you.”

For some reason, that catches me completely off guard.

“You?”

“Yes.”