"Because I was supposed to be you." Elena's voice is quiet. Stripped bare. The mask she wore for forty-four days is gone and what's underneath is not a villain but a woman who built her identity around a future that someone else's choice erased. "And when I wasn't, I didn't know who else to be."
Siobhan considers this. The room is quiet. The answer is honest. It's not sufficient. Two contractors are dead. Finn lost a finger. Siobhan spent six hours in a chair. The damage Elenaenabled cannot be weighed against the wound that caused it. The scale doesn't balance. It never will.
But Siobhan assesses with clarity rather than sentiment. And the clarity says: Elena Drakos is a tragedy, not a monster. The distinction matters even when the categories overlap.
"I hope you find out."
Elena blinks. She expected fury or ice. Not this.
"Who else to be," Siobhan says. "I hope you find out."
Elena nods. Stands. Walks to the door. Stops. Her hand on the frame. She doesn't turn around.
"The dress. At the boutique. When I smoothed the fabric at your shoulders." A pause. "That part was real."
She leaves. The door closes. Siobhan sits in the quiet room and puts her hand on her stomach and breathes. She doesn't watch Elena go.
I was watching from the hallway. I come in and sit beside her. "Are you alright?"
"I'm alright." She looks at me. "She's not a monster."
"No."
"She's a woman who was given no good choices and made the worst one."
"Yes."
"I could have been her. If things had gone differently. If my father had promised me to someone and that someone chose another woman." She pauses. "I would have been furious."
"Would you have gone to Viktor?"
"No." Certain. Immediate. "But I understand why someone might."
I take her hand. Hold it. We sit in the quiet room where the afternoon light comes through the windows and the harbor is visible in the distance and the war is over and Elena Drakos is leaving for Athens and the world is more complicated than it was forty-four days ago and also simpler, because the womanbeside me is carrying my child and I love her and those two facts simplify everything.
Evening at the penthouse… Siobhan is asleep on the couch, laptop open. Ward Risk Advisory. The world doesn't pause. Neither does she.
I cover her with a blanket. Stand at the window. The city below. My territory. The empire I've been holding together since I was twenty-two years old.
Dmitri's debt. One of my brothers will marry a Russian woman. The arrangement stands. The price of Siobhan's life, paid with someone else's freedom. A debt I haven't disclosed.
The secret sits in my chest the way Siobhan's secret sat in hers. The parallel is precise and damning. I'm withholding information that will change a life because the timing isn't right and the justification feels sound and the cost of honesty is a conversation I'm not ready for.
"You should have trusted me." Her words. The standard I swore to meet fifteen hours ago on a factory floor with my forehead against her stomach and my hands shaking.
I will tell Lex. I will tell all of them. Not today. Today the war ended, and my wife is safe and my child is growing and Elena is gone and Viktor is dead and the alliance holds and I need one day. One day of the ordinary miracle of a sleeping wife and a warm blanket and a city that looks, for the first time, not like territory but like home.
Tomorrow, I pay the debt.
Today I stand at the window and watch my wife sleep and her hand rests on her stomach even in dreams and I understand now what I didn't understand before. That gesture. The one I saw a hundred times and never read correctly.
She was holding our future. She was holding it alone. And I will spend the rest of my life making sure she never has to hold anything alone again.
Chapter 37
Siobhan
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