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“Robert Cooper was a man unworthy of you,” he breathed, and I soon recognized his tension had turned to anger.
He opened the folder and my heart dropped to my feet.
In silence, I stared down at the picture on top. Robert was leaning against a scantily clad woman on a balcony, kissing her cheek. Sergei flipped to the next and there was another woman.
And another.
There were so many, a different girl in every picture. In some they were kissing, and in others they were out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, but there were several that were taken through a window that showed them in bed together.
There wasn’t a question in my mind about what they were doing.
Bile roiled deep in my belly. Each picture had a date stamp in the lower right-hand corner. Robert had been unfaithful to me during our entire relationship. No wonder he’d never really complained about my desire to wait to have sex until marriage, because he was fulfilling that need elsewhere the whole time.
“He didn’t deserve you, babygirl.”
“I didn’t know any of this,” I whispered.
“A few weeks before your wedding, I’d heard word that the Lenkovs were going to move to collect on his debt. Nikolai, the man you’d met upstairs, had given him more than enough chances to pay up with several extensions, but Robert kept gambling anyway. He was starting to become a liability, and the Lenkovs could only allow that for so long.”
“They would have killed him,” I breathed.
“Yes. That would have also left you penniless. At the time, I wasn’t certain that Nikolai wouldn’t make an example out of you too, so I came up with a plan and took matters into my own hands. I called Nikolai and made him a deal. I would pay your ex’s debts in full and take care of the matter for him. The only thing he had to do was promise me that he wouldn’t touch you,” he explained.
My heart swelled in my chest.
“It was the beginning of an alliance, I admit that, but I would never have pursued it so ruthlessly if it hadn’t been for you. You were always meant to be mine, and I made sure of it, babygirl.” He gripped my chin and forced me to face him. “You are myeverything, my beautiful wife.”
I swallowed past the ball in my throat, glancing down at the pictures for a second before I turned back to him.
“You may take as long as you need with this file,moya malyshka. I’ll be here holding you the whole time,” he whispered, kissing my cheek.
I reached for it, flipping through the pictures more slowly this time. I recognized some of the faces from charitable functions throughout the years. Some were even women that had come around when I was at his place. I’d missed all the signs. I hadn’t had any clue that this was going on. I’d never questioned him.
The man that had left me at the altar was the real monster. The man I’d married had been my savior.
“Did you kill him with your own hands?”
“No. I gave the order to my men. They carried out the hit and documented it for me so I could present it to Nikolai after it was done.”
“How?”
“The details are unimportant, my love,” he warned.
“I want to know,” I pressed. For some reason, it was important to me.
“His death was simple. My men pressed a gun to the back of his skull and pulled the trigger. It was a quick death.”
“He didn’t deserve a quick death,” I scowled.
His mouth perked up in the slightest smirk and his pride in me was clear. “There’s the queen I married,” he chuckled, wrapping his arms around me and kissing my forehead. For a while, we just sat there like that, and I enjoyed the feeling of his warm security surrounding me.
There weren’t any pictures of Robert’s death in the folder, but I didn’t need to see them. I had a feeling that Sergei would have refused to show me them anyway and that was okay. I trusted him that the job had been done.
“You deserve better than him, and you know it, don’t you, babygirl?”
I nodded into his chest.
“Answer me,” he demanded gently.
