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Max’s phone rang as they stepped out into the cold sunlight.
“Yeah?”
Roman didn’t think anything of it until Max stopped moving.
He turned to look at his best friend, the one person he trusted, and knew something was wrong.
Max was frozen in place, his expression impassive as he listened to whoever was on the phone, but Roman knew him all too well.
“Fuck,” Max said.
And now Roman was truly concerned. Max rarely displayed emotion. It was one of many reasons they worked as partners. As brothers. When Roman was lost in his fury, it was Max’s steady voice that pulled him back.
“Tell the men to stay the course,” Max said. “For now.”
“What is it?” Roman asked when Max ended the call.
Max hesitated. “Valeriya Orlov is dead.”
And just like that, Roman’s dreams slipped through his fingers like sand.
30
Ruby
Ruby stared out at the city, gleaming under the bright winter sun. It had been harder to stay at the loft since her night out with Roman. She’d had a taste of normalcy and it had been too sharp a contrast to her life of confinement.
Plus, there was Roman.
Or more specifically, her feelings for Roman, which were an absolute shit show.
She’d stopped denying she wanted him a long time ago. Why bother when every time he brushed against her in the kitchen her body came alive? When she was all too happy to let him fuck her at every opportunity?
It hadn’t happened since their night out at the hotel, but only because she’d been careful to avoid him in the loft, denying herself even a drink of water when she was thirsty at night until she was sure he’d gone to bed.
If he was wounded by her hot and cold treatment, he didn’t show it, and she often wondered if he was a man of few emotions or if he’d simply become practiced at hiding them.
She guessed the latter, because he’d been giving her glimpses of them before everything had fallen apart between them. But she didn’t like to think about that because that meant he’d rebuilt the moat around his heart, and the fact that she cared at all about that told her she was screwed.
The only bright spots in her day were her conversations with Olivia every afternoon when she got home from school. Ruby would wait anxiously for the clock to hit five p.m., then dial Adam’s number. She still expected him to give her shit, or worse, to deny her request to speak to Olivia, but he simply handed the phone to Olivia without a word.
Whatever Roman had said to him — done to him — had obviously made an impression.
She opened her palm and looked at the hair pin in her hand. She’d paced the apartment all morning, restless as a confined cat, before homing in on the locked doors.
Whywere they locked? What was behind them? What could Roman possibly be hiding now that she knew about his business?
She could have asked him, but she still didn’t trust him to tell the whole truth, not after what he’d kept from her in the beginning. She didn’t want to give him time to clean up whatever was in there, to manufacture an explanation.
She wanted to see for herself.
She chewed on her lip, then marched toward the halls leading to the bedrooms: one containing hers and Roman’s and one locked door, the other containing his office, the guest rooms, and the second locked door.
She hesitated. Which one should she try first?
She went down the hall with Roman’s office and stopped at the locked door. It looked like all the others — the office and guest bedrooms, the bathroom — but its contents were obviously different.
Something worth hiding.
