Something very close to rage moves across Roman’s face. “If it comes to that,” Roman says, “then yes.”
My heart stops.
Oleg watches him.
Roman continues, each word measured enough to frighten me more than shouting could have. “They all pay. Andrei. His sons. His loyalists. Anyone who built that house and thought they could bury my mother beneath it.”
I flatten myself against the wall. My head is still spinning from what I’ve heard.
My ex-fiancé is Roman’s brother.
Wait… No.
Half-brother, I think.
I take a step back.
The corridor sways.
Inside the room, Oleg says something else, but I cannot understand it anymore. The words blur under the rush of blood in my ears.
Roman is planning to destroy them. All of them.
Maybe Lev deserves ruin. Maybe Andrei Morozov deserves worse. Maybe this entire world is built on men who eventually turn on each other and call it justice.
But I cannot stand there and listen to the man whose bed I woke in speak of ending a family line like it’s another item on a list.
Especially when I was almost part of that family yesterday.
Especially when he never told me. And what would he do when he found out I was a Markov as well? Did he not see my passport? My last name?
I turn away. Slowly at first, because my legs feel unreliable.
Then faster.
At the stairs, the music from below rises around me, thick and hot and obscene after the coldness of that room. People are laughing. Dancing. Drinking beneath gold lights as if nothing in the world has shifted.
I grip the railing and force myself down.
One step. Another.
By the time I reach the main floor, tears are already slipping down my face.
I wipe them quickly, but more come.
A man near the bar glances at me. I look away. Roman’s table is ahead, half-hidden in its alcove, my coat still draped over the chair. One of his men stands nearby with his back turned.
For once, luck does not hate me.
I reach the table, grab my purse, and check inside with shaking fingers.
Passport.Thank God.
Some sane, terrified part of me had kept it with me all night.
I don’t let myself think about his hands on my waist, his mouth against my shoulder, the picture he took of me smiling in the snow.
By the time I reach the black door and cold air spills in from the street, I’m almost running.