My eyes drifted to the side Caitlin had pointed, but instead of seeing Romeo, it was Dmitri.
He moved through the crowd, his shoulders straight, and his presence impossible to ignore. Akim walked beside him. They were discussing something as they headed down the hallway.
Our argument replayed in my mind, but this time it settled differently. His anger and the way he reacted pulled me back to reality in a cruel way. He made me so comfortable in this life that I forgot none of it was real. That I was just playing a role that could end the moment he decided it should.
“He must have been jealous,” Caitlin said beside me, her eyes focused on the direction Dmitri disappeared into
I let out a quick scoff, shaking my head. “Jealous? Why would he be?”
She turned to me, brows lifting slightly. “What do you mean, why? He’s your husband. He stood there and watched you hug another man. Everyone saw how excited you were to see Roman.” She smiled. “I’d be jealous too.”
I went still for a second. Jealous? The word sounded strange in my head. I almost told Caitlin that I was a fake wife and that Dmitri wasn’t my husband on paper. But the words stayed where they were, caught behind everything else.
He couldn’t have been jealous. People don’t get jealous unless they care.
My thoughts hadn’t settled when I caught Romeo moving toward the same hallway Dmitri had gone. The black suit fit him too well, clean along his frame, nothing like the boy I remembered who used to drown himself in oversized shirts.
I stared.
Back then, Romeo was quiet in a way that made people underestimate him. He always wore ridiculous glasses, always typing, and always thinking. He barely spoke unless it was me. I used to think he lived inside his screen. Now he walked like a man who had stepped out of it with confidence. The kind that didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. People moved slightly when he passed, not obvious enough to notice unless you were looking for it, but it was there. That same invisible force I came to associate with Dmitri. A quiet authority that filled a spacebefore anyone spoke a word.
What were they going there to do? Was Dmitri going to start a fight with him as well? A part of me wanted to follow them. Not because of curiosity alone, but because Romeo was one of the few pieces of my past that still felt real. He knew my family. Not the surface-level details people picked up and forgot, but the ordinary parts of my life.
He was the only person I could speak with freely.
He would be surprised to hear that my mother never came back from the hospital after giving birth to Cole. She walked out of our lives without a goodbye, leaving behind a silence that stretched for years. And my father didn’t last long after that. One day, he was there, the next, he was gone too. Everything faded until there was nothing left but me and Cole.
I thought some parts of my life were gone, and yet here he was.
Akim returned, and he wasn’t with Dmitri anymore. Which meant he left him back there with Romeo. I couldn’t just stand there and pretend I wasn’t curious about what was happening. I needed to see it for myself. But I had to get there without drawing attention.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Dmitri Konstantinov
The party stopped resonating thesecond Inna walked out of me, crying. A woman I was supposed to use like a piece on a chessboard shoved her way into my mind until I forgot who I was. I overreacted to a hug. That damn hug. I could still see the way Roman wrapped his hands around her as if he owned her.
I should have remembered she was nothing and moved on, but no, I couldn’t even control myself. And because of that, she cried. Inna Grace Anderson cried because of me. I had never seen her cry. She was always strong and smiling, even when the world under her feet seemed to crumble. She didn’t cry like some pathetic girl in need of comfort, but because of me.
Her tears made me want to rip the world apart around me. At the same time, I wanted to make the world stop so I could look at her without thinking about anything else.
When did it start? When did this stop being about control and start being about her? I couldn’t say. It might have been when I went out of my way to save her father, as she asked. Thatobedience was a crack, a doorway, and now she was inside my head. She was supposed to be fake, but why was she becoming everything? And the irony was almost cruel. She claimed me with lies to steal from me, and yet it was my heart that began claiming her slowly without knowing.
The rooftop air hit me. I stood at the edge, staring down at the parking lot where cars slid in and out.
Footsteps echoed behind me, and I didn’t need to turn to know it was Roman. I summoned him here to find out how, in the Konstantinov Bratva, he knew Inna. He buried himself in New York, stayed out of sight like we were beneath him, and now he just showed up in my business, knowing my wife.
It was either I dealt with him now or lost my shit trying to make sense of something that refused to align.
“It’s a small world, don’t you think?” Roman said.
I almost laughed at that. Roman never reacted to anything. He had this detachment that said either everything around him was predictable or not worth his time. He handled things alone and quietly, or he ignored them completely.
He moved and stood beside me. His gaze dropped to the same parking lot I had been staring at, as if we were two men sharing a quiet moment.
“A wife?” he added. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
My jaw tightened. “How do you know her?”