Chapter 30
ROLAN
She accepted me back into bed.
I turn this over on the drive back from the perimeter meeting, somewhere between the city and the estate, while Alexei talks about supply chain adjustments, and I hear approximately forty percent of what he’s saying.
She had every reason not to. She came to my office upset, and I gave her nothing useful in return, but she still let me in.
That means more than I’d like it to.
I’m aware that allowing it to mean anything at all is tactically inadvisable. Yet, I’m doing it anyway.
What I’m also doing is managing the guilt of Sunday night, which is not an emotion I have extensive practice with.
Guilt, as a category, requires caring about the outcome you failed to prevent, and I’ve spent fifteen years curating a professional life in which I don’t get attached to outcomes beyond the operational. The system works because it’s clean.
The only exception is my daughter. But I’ve learned to live with that, to work around it.
This feeling with Elizabeth is different.
I made a mistake the other week. I broke formation and nearly died. All because my girls were more important to me than any strategy.
The consequences of that mistake are more than physical, more than the ache I still carry in my skull or the raised wounds on my flesh. But I can’t let that slow me down. I can’t let any of it get in the way. Not again. So, I push forward.
Dushku won’t wait. He moved once and failed. Failure will either make him cautious or desperate.
In my experience, men like Dushku, men whose power is tribal and whose identity is inseparable from their reputation — they become desperate. He’ll regroup and try again. Next time, he’ll hit harder.
I need to take this out of his hands before that happens, which means I need to go to him rather than wait for him to come to me again.
That means leaving Anya… and Elizabeth.
But she’ll be here when I return. The contract ensures it.
I make the call while Alexei is reviewing the logistics. The jeweler answers on the second ring. He’s been on my list for seven years, rarely used.
“I need you here in an hour,” I say. “Bring options.”
He brings five.
He’s good at his work. I gave him almost nothing, just the basics about her: dark hair, hazel eyes, warm undertones in her skin. He also received implicit instruction that whatever he brings should be worth looking at. He spreads them out on my desk, and I study them.
The emeralds are obvious, but beautiful. Green would enhance those gorgeous eyes. I know without needing to deliberate that these are the ones. A collar that sits at the base of the throat, modest in proportion, not overwhelming. Earrings to match.
Still, I keep all five sets. Two sets of diamonds, the alexandrite that comes with a bracelet, and the ruby with gold hardware, which I find rather extravagant but accept anyway.
I take the emeralds upstairs.
She’s on the bed, as I expected.
Sunday means no lessons. This is her own time, though lesson plans lie spread across a significant portion of the available surface area, and she’s lying in the middle of them with a focused expression.
She glances up when I walk in, face shifting as her guard slips back into place.
Deserved.
I approach the bed.
“I have something for you.”
She eyes me suspiciously. Also deserved. “What do you mean?”
I produce the velvet box from behind my back and hold it out.
She takes it slowly and opens it.
I watch her face.
What I expected: a smile.
What I get: she stares at the contents of the box with her lips slightly parted and blinks twice, as if her eyes are having difficulty with what they’re processing.
“You don’t like it,” I say.
“No — I do. It’s—” She looks up at me and then back at the box.
“It’s beautiful. It’s genuinely beautiful.
” A pause. “But where would I wear it? During lessons with Anya? In the kitchen?” She stops herself.
Worry crosses her face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…
that came out ungrateful. Thank you. It’s stunning. ”
She closes the box and holds it carefully, with both hands, the way she held Anya during the attack — protective, deliberate.
“You’ll be wearing it soon.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“I have to travel,” I say. “A few days. Perhaps a week.”
Her expression doesn’t change. “Can I ask why?”
“Business.”
She reads my face. “Okay,” she finally accepts.
I lean down. The kiss is brief, just a point of contact, just enough. She doesn’t pull back, which is its own kind of answer. I straighten and walk to the door.
It’s a long week.
Three cities, seven meetings, two situations that require personal resolution and don’t lend themselves to delegation.
We lock down the New York alliance and confirm the Chicago connection. The understanding we’ve reached is provisional and not warm, but it holds for now.
Dushku is the remaining problem. He’s gone quiet again. We’re watching his known associates and following the money. I have people in positions that will give me forty-eight hours’ notice when he moves. It’s the best available situation. Still, it’s uncomfortable.
I think about Elizabeth all the fucking time.
I try to focus on the damn meetings, on the problems I have to face, but every five minutes my mind goes right back to her. I find myself, in a hotel room in New York at midnight, calculating what time it is at the estate and whether she’s asleep and whether she’s in my bed or hers.
I hope she’s in mine.
I’m supposed to return on Thursday. I come back on Tuesday.
The bedroom door is closed. I open it.
She’s in my bed. The lamp on the nightstand, a book open on her chest. She looks almost comfortable, settled, occupying the space that’s both hers and mine. She’s wearing one of my shirts.
It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.
When I enter, she turns her head.
“Hi.” The surprise is genuine — the book lowering, the eyes adjusting. “I-I didn’t expect you today.”
“I finished earlier than planned.”
I swear I spot relief cross her face, and then the reflexive management of the relief, the instinct to not let me see too much. She’s not fast enough.
“How was it?”
“Productive.”
She rolls her eyes. I sit on the edge of the bed, lean in, and kiss her.
Her mouth is warm. She tastes like tea. I take my time with it.
She kisses me back. Her hand comes up to my face tentatively.
“I want to take you to dinner,” I whisper against her mouth. “Saturday.”
She pulls back far enough to look at me. The confusion arrives again.
“Dinner?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Like a date?”
“Yes.”
Her lips curve at the edges. Not quite a smile, but in that direction. “Okay,” she says. “Sure.”
“Good.”
I leave to shower. When I return, she’s put the book away and moved to give me space. I get into the bed beside her as she studies me.
“You seem off,” she says. “Are you okay?”
“It was a complicated day.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” I respond. “I don’t.”
“Okay.”
“I just need—” I stop.
She waits.
You is the word that goes in the blank. I need you.
I pull her into a kiss instead.
This one is different from the one when I arrived. That was only a greeting; this is a proper reunion. She’s warm and present. Her hands find my chest, and all the days I spent out, all of it loosens, comes apart.
I take my time with her mouth and with every part of her after that. The slow removal of the shirt, her breath against my neck, the sounds she makes against my bare skin.
I position myself at her entrance, observing her face as I slowly enter the heat of her. How she receives me.
“God,” she breathes.
“No,” I sigh, a thread of guilt worming beneath the pleasure. “There is no god here.”
“It feels like heaven…”
I thrust as deep as I can go, and she claws at my back.
“Wrong again, moya koroleva .” I press my mouth against the shell of her ear. “Only hell can feel this good.”
My body is on top of hers, the skin-to-skin contact I’ve missed so fucking much. I take her nipple between my lips and suck, drawing from her the sound I like the most. My name.
“Rolan!”
No one’s ever made me finish so fast.
Afterward, she lies on my chest, her breathing slowed.
I put my hand in her hair, wishing I were satisfied. Instead, my mind wanders to a dark place, constantly returning without permission.
I shouldn’t be doing this. We shouldn’t be doing this.
I drove back two days early from a city where I had legitimate reasons to stay, and I came directly here, to this room, to this woman who’s sleeping on my chest, and there isn’t a single field mission that makes me as anxious as I was on the way here.
I’m a man for whom attachment is a liability. I understood this about myself long ago. My daughter is the one exception. She is my blood, my life.
And now Elizabeth is becoming another exception.
Can I make her strong enough?
The question surfaces, and it’s genuine. She’s been through enough in the last few weeks to have broken most people. She hasn’t broken.
She came to my office alone and demanded answers even after what she witnessed, which proves that she’s either extraordinarily courageous or exceptionally stubborn.
In her case, it’s probably both.
There’s no doubt she’s stronger than I thought. But is she strong enough for this? For what this world costs? For what being mine means?
Can I truly have her as my queen?
As Anya’s mother?
The question sinks deep into my chest. I follow it down into the depths, searching for my answer.
I don’t find one.
She stirs slightly in her sleep. Her hand tightens on my chest.
I gaze up at the ceiling and think, Maybe that means she isn’t strong enough...
The air thickens in my lungs.
If she’s not, my world will eat her alive .
Fuck. Can I take that risk?
The doubt starts to creep in. Like invading vines, they slither over my heart until all hope is covered in darkness.
By the time the sun starts to rise, I’m staring down at a black pool. In its inky reflection are my two choices: wait for her to get hurt so badly she may never recover… or push her back into the light… and away from me.
The decisions stare back, rippling, taunting.
For the first time in years, I’m not sure what to do next.