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“Mr. Sinclair has arrived.”

A dark, electric thrill hums straight through my veins. “Let him in.”

The guard nods and retreats. I straighten up and turn my gaze back to Jake, whose bloodshot eyes are darting wildly around the room in absolute terror.

“Well,” I say, a cruel smile curling my lips. “It looks like your ex-husband—the man you claim loves you so deeply and could never let you go—is here to see you.”

The heavy steel door swings fully open with a low, metallic groan.

I don’t even need to turn around to know he’s there. The room’s temperature shifts instantly, and the heavy, suffocating gravity of Tristan’s presence rolls over my shoulders like a thunderclap. The distinct scent of his cuts straight through the damp basement air. Across from me, Jake’s eyes widen with frantic, desperate hope, tears spilling down his bruised cheeks.

“Tristan…” he whispers, clinging to the name like a dying man grasping for a lifeline.

Chapter 37

TRISTAN

The news flashed across my phone four hours ago. Billionaire heir Jake Wesley presumed dead after private jet crashes in the Atlantic.

I didn’t believe it for a fraction of a second. I don’t know the exact mechanics of what Maksim had planned, but I know the man. Maksim doesn’t grant clean, anonymous deaths to those who cross him. If he decides you are going to die, he doesn’t let you vanish into the ocean unnoticed. He wants you to look him in the eye. He wants you to know exactly whose hand is cutting your throat, and he wants you to feel every ounce of pain you have earned before the dark takes you.

When Maksim’s text arrived an hour later with nothing but the coordinates to his grandfather’s estate, my suspicion became certainty. The Petrovs don’t invite people to the patriarch’s mansion for social calls. When you are summoned down to the lower levels of that house, someone is either being interrogated, broken, or buried.

Now, the heavy reinforced door swings shut behind me with a hollow, metallic thud. The room smells of damp concrete, old copper, and cold sweat. In the center of the floor, tied to a wooden chair bolted into the ground, sits Jake.

Seeing him like this hits with a strange, clinical weight.

This is the man I once loved. The man I married in my twenties, who shared half my youth, my bed, and my early ambitions. For years, our lives were entangled in a way that felt permanent.

Now, he is bruised, disheveled, and zip-tied to a chair under a buzzing fluorescent tube. And the architect of his ruin isn’t a rival syndicate or an anonymous enemy.

It’s Maksim.

Maksim—the man I am entirely, hopelessly in love with. Maksim, who moves through violence with the elegance of an apex predator, and who never lets go of his prey once he’s decided its fate.

I feel no urge to intervene. I feel no sudden surge of sympathy. Jake made his calculations, traded in threats and blackmail, and walked willingly onto Maksim’s territory. These are simply the consequences playing out in real time.

Jake’s swollen, bloodshot eyes lock onto mine the second I step fully into the light.

“Tristan…” he gasps, his cracked voice trembling with raw, frantic relief, clinging to my presence like a man expecting a rescue that isn’t coming.

I don’t say a word.

I keep my hands buried in the pockets of my overcoat, standing motionless beside Maksim, and look down at the wreckage of my past with flat, unblinking eyes.

“Tristan, what the fuck is going on?” Jake asks, his gaze ricocheting between Maksim and me. “What is all this? Why is he saying I’m dead? Does the world think I’m dead?”

Maksim lets out a slow breath.

He rises from the metal chair with deliberate grace, smoothing his hoodie, and turns to face me.

My chest tightens at the sight of him. I haven’t been able to reach him for almost a week—not since he walked out of our apartment. The shattered, uncertain look in his eyes that night, as if he didn’t know where our relationship stood or whether he could ever resolve things with me, has haunted every hour of the past week. I called, I texted, I went out of my mind looking for him, but he stayed completely silent until an hour ago, when he sent me nothing but a text telling me to come to this basement.

“I am not letting him go,” Maksim says, his eyes locking onto mine, hard and searching.

“I never said you should,” I reply evenly. My gaze drops briefly to Jake, who is frantically darting his eyes between us, before I look back at Maksim. “I can’t stop you, Maksim.”

“You’re going to watch him die here,” Maksim tests, taking a half-step closer, scanning my face for a flicker of hesitation. “You can hate me all you want after this—”