Chapter 21
Alexei
Alina insists on changing before leaving the house, and I don’t object. I love the way she looks in her lounge clothes, all cozy and comfortable, with her beautiful face completely bare, but I know she likes to dress up. Besides, it’s getting cold out, so she needs to wear something warm.
So I wait while pacing around the living room, doing my best to think about all the ways I’ll fuck her tonight instead of dwelling on the soul-crushing call with my father and his agonized plea at the end.
Normally, this strategy would work only too well, but I’m too wound up right now, too much on edge to concentrate on anything but the poisonous cocktail of fury and guilt swirling inside me.
I lied to Alina. It isn’t a walk I need but a hard, bloody fight.
And not with my guards—I need them all intact for what I’m sure the Molotovs are planning.
An underground MMA gym was going to be my destination but no longer.
Since Alina is coming with me, it has to be an actual walk.
A leisurely lakefront stroll instead of the no-holds-barred, grueling battle that would’ve let me work off some of the toxic rage burning me up inside.
Finding my hands clenched, I take a breath and slowly let it out as I consciously uncurl my fingers.
I’m not the only one who needs to get out of my head, and if a walk helps Alina take her mind off what happened in that piece-of-shit hostel, it’s the least I can do.
It’s my fault this happened to her. I should’ve been there to protect her, to keep her safe.
Just like I should’ve kept my sister safe all those years ago.
Fuck.
I slam the door on that thought before it can cause the rage to boil over.
Now is not the time to think about Ksenia and my father. Not when I have no outlet for the violence bubbling inside me. I would never in a million years hurt Alina, but the strangers we meet today might not be so lucky if I don’t get a hold of myself.
Finally, she emerges from the bedroom—and I forget about everything but her.
She’s wearing a cream-colored sweater-dress that falls to the middle of her calves and hugs her slim curves in a way that sends all my blood rushing down south.
She’s topped it with a beige leather jacket lined with shearling, and on her feet is a pair of brown riding boots.
But it’s her face that steals my breath: her plush, soft lips are once again painted red, her jade eyes are smoky and mysterious, and her porcelain skin shimmers with a subtle peach tint on the apples of her cheeks.
She’s so fucking gorgeous it’s unreal.
Finally finding my tongue, I tell her so, and a pretty flush adds more color to her face as she rubs her hand over her short hair.
“Even with this?” she asks with a wry smile.
“Especially with that.”
As beautiful as her long hair was, it stole some focus from the striking perfection of her features.
Now there’s nothing to distract the eye from the stunning symmetry of her bone structure and the sensual lushness of her lips.
Not that I’d object if she grew out her hair again—she can do whatever she wants with her appearance.
No makeup, clothing, or hairstyle can change how utterly addicted I am to my wife.
Who, it seems, is finally warming up to me.
That thought is like a soothing balm over the raw anger inside me, and I calm further when Alina casually rests her hand on the crook of my elbow as we exit the building and head down the street.
My guards follow, some discreetly, others less so.
More of them are stationed throughout the neighborhood, snipers strategically positioned at windows and on roofs, ready for anything—such as an assault by Alina’s brothers, whom I don’t trust one bit.
I’m armed to the teeth as well, just in case.
As we walk through the tourist-packed streets toward the waterfront, I ask Alina if there are any places she particularly likes in the city, given that she’s been here before.
She tells me about a coffee shop she enjoys, and we stop by there to get a pastry and a cup of matcha latte—the latter with oat milk, as per her new diet plan.
The pastry is not on the approved foods list, but the dietician said that occasional treats are okay, and I figure this falls into that category.
I get one for myself as well, along with a black coffee, and we consume it all while strolling along Promenade du Lac and debating the merits of the Alps in the summer versus the winter.
It’s the closest thing to a date I’ve had with my wife, and I’m not surprised to find myself enjoying the fuck out of it.
This is what our courtship should’ve been like, what I’d envisioned when I arranged our betrothal.
I figured as our official engagement announcement approached, we’d get to know each other by going out to dinner and the movies, hitting up museums and art galleries, all the normal things.
But Alina’s attitude toward me and our union, combined with her brothers’ hatred of my family, made it impossible, as did the awful tragedy of her parents’ deaths when she was nineteen.
From that point on, all I could do was hope that once I made her my wife, she’d come around.
And now that it’s looking like she has, I’m over the fucking moon—or I would be, if not for the lingering discordant echo in my mind after the conversation with my father.
I do my best to forget it as we continue on, discussing everything from the latest happenings in Moscow to the progress Slava has made with his English.
Hearing about the latter is bittersweet for me.
I miss my nephew. I wish I could see him grow up instead of hearing about it secondhand.
Maybe one day, Nikolai will bring him to Moscow for a visit, and I’ll see him in person again.
The odds of them inviting me to Nikolai’s compound in Idaho after my forcible retrieval of Alina are somewhere between zero and negative ten.
We’ve just stopped by a monument to watch a yacht pass by when an unfamiliar female voice calls out, “Alina?”
I whip my head around to see a tall, lanky blonde with facial piercings staring at us with wide blue eyes from some dozen meters away.
“Alina?” she repeats, coming toward us, and I realize who she is. I saw her in the footage my security team pulled up after the incident in the hostel.
It’s the young woman Alina stayed with when she ran away, the one she told me was not a witness to Alina’s self-defense efforts—a fact the cameras confirmed by showing her leaving the hostel an hour prior.
“Birgit?” Alina exclaims, extricating her hand from my elbow and switching to English. “I had no idea you were still in town!”
“And I had no idea you were here either. You just up and disappeared on me!” She sounds way more accusing than the length of their acquaintance warrants, and I narrow my eyes as I observe their interaction.
While Alina was recovering after the surgery, I had my security team look into this woman, and off-hand, I don’t recall anything too concerning in her file—though there was a mention of a brief relationship with a girl in college.
Could that be it?
Did she view my wife as more than a potential friend?
Motherfucker. Did something happen between them in that dingy hotel room?
“Oh, fuck. Your hair…” Birgit sounds shocked as she stops in front of us—close enough for me to slice open her carotid artery with the blade in my pocket.
Her gaze jumps to my face for the first time, and she blanches at whatever she sees there, smartly backing up a couple of steps.
But she regroups quickly, refocusing on Alina.
“That diagnosis you mentioned…” Her gaze drops to Alina’s stomach. “Are you—”
“Not anymore.” Alina’s voice thickens, and the jealous fury flaring within me sputters and dies, smothered by a hollow ache.
This stranger knows about it all. The cancer and the pregnancy that never was. The baby that was never meant to be, the one Alina had been so convinced was a girl.
I’ve done my best to move past it, but the images still come to me at night, pulling me out of what little sleep I manage—the tears on Alina’s face when she told me she was bleeding, the deathly pallor of her skin when the doctors informed us that the embryo had never truly existed.
Worst of all is the knowledge that it’s all my fault.
That it all happened because I wanted to tie her to me once and for all, to bind us together as irrevocably as two people can be bound.
Some primitive, irrational part of me still wants it, a child that would be hers and mine—even as fear of what a pregnancy could do to her is front and center in my mind.
“I’m sorry,” Birgit says softly, and I force myself to focus on her and the potential danger she represents instead of the sucking emptiness in my chest.
Even if her relationship with my wife was exactly as Alina presented it—just a kind stranger helping out—the body Valery’s forensic team disposed of makes me wish she’d disappeared from Alina’s life for good.
Here in Western Europe, the Molotovs and the Leonovs don’t have the same pull as we do in Russia, so it’s not entirely impossible that Alina would be questioned if some overzealous, too-righteous-for-bribes detective figured out that she was one of the last people to have seen the missing man alive.
Because he is missing, as far as the police are concerned. The Molotovs made sure his body would never be found. They also wiped any and all security footage that placed Alina anywhere near that hostel. The only thing linking her to the dead man is the woman standing in front of me.
Who now knows that Alina is still here in Geneva.
Alina chooses that very moment to look up at me, and the way she pales tells me that I’m not hiding my thoughts well.