Chapter 29
ALEKSEI
The second I step into the hallway after him, I know I’m one wrong word away from putting him through glass.
He’s halfway to the elevators, walking with that same unhurried arrogance he’s had my entire life, like every room belongs to him by right and everyone in it exists to tolerate him.
His suit is flawless. His posture immaculate.
You’d never know he just walked into a hospital room to unsettle a sick woman and needle her son for sport.
“Stop.”
He does. Slowly. Turns. Mildly irritated, as if I’ve interrupted something trivial. “Alyosha.”
“Don’t.”
His mouth twitches. “Still dramatic.”
I close the distance between us in three hard strides, every part of me wired too tight. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
He adjusts a cufflink. “I came to see my wife.”
I laugh. “The wife you’ve been estranged from for years?” I ask. “The one you pretended didn’t exist while you were still living in the same house? The one you flaunted a dozen women in front of?”
His expression doesn’t change. That almost makes it worse. “We’re still married,” he says.
Something in me goes white-hot. Of course that’s the answer. Not regret. Not guilt. Ownership. Paper. Possession.
A legal tie he thinks excuses everything.
I step in closer. “You don’t get to use that word like it means something.”
He meets my gaze with that cold, polished calm I inherited enough of to hate in him. “It means exactly what it says.”
No. It means control.
It means he still thinks every woman attached to his name is an extension of his status, no matter how badly he’s failed them.
He tilts his head. “You seem upset.”
That does it.
I grab the front of his collar and slam him back against the wall hard enough to make one of the nurses at the far end of the corridor gasp. Security starts to move, but one look from my men stops them.
His hands stay loose at his sides. That’s the most infuriating part. He doesn’t even flinch.
“Careful,” he says softly. “Hospitals are terrible places for family scenes.”
My grip tightens. “Then stop creating them.”
He glances past my shoulder, toward the room we just left. Toward her. And then, with deliberate casual cruelty, he says, “Are you sure this is about your mother?”
The question lands like a knife sliding in slow.
He continues before I can answer. “Or is it about that girl?” He makes a small, disapproving sound. “She must be half your age.”
My hand fists tighter in his collar. The urge to break his jaw is so immediate it nearly does itself. “She is none of your business.”
“No?” His eyes flick over my face, amused in the most poisonous way. “She looked frightened. Not of me, of course. Of understanding you.”
I slam him harder into the wall. “Say her name again.”
He smiles. A slow, terrible thing. And then, because he knows exactly when a man is ready to cross a line and exactly how to step just beyond it, he says, “I have a proposition for you.”
I don’t let go. “Talk fast.”
“Marry Alena.”
For a second, I actually think I misheard him. Then rage comes roaring back so hard it sharpens everything. “No.”
He continues as if I didn’t speak. “And I’ll back your claim.”
That gives me pause. Tiny. Involuntary. Real.
He sees it. “Twenty percent,” he says. “Of the fortune. Control stays with you. Publicly, I support the succession. Privately, I receive a percentage. You know it’s a reasonable demand.”
I stare at him. Reasonable. He says it like he’s asking for a seat at dinner, not a cut of an empire he’s spent half his life trying to manipulate out from under me.
“With Alena’s family behind you,” he adds, “you become untouchable. Their money, our infrastructure, your grandfather’s name. You’d be the most powerful man in this city.”
I almost laugh again.
His answer to everything: power. Optics. Alliances. Blood and marriage treated like assets on a balance sheet.
And Alena.
Of course, Alena.
Elegant, connected, ruthless enough to survive him and polished enough to survive me. On paper, she’s perfect. The kind of woman boardrooms would applaud and society columns would worship.
And she would poison the inside walls of my house in a week.
My grip loosens just enough for me to pull him off the wall and let him stand. I smooth his collar back into place, not out of respect. Out of contempt.
“You really don’t understand me at all,” I say.
“No,” he replies evenly. “I understand you very well. Better than she ever will.”
He means Zatanna.
The fact that he uses the pronoun like that, as if he’s already reached into my head and found the shape of the problem, makes my vision narrow.
I take one step back, then another, not because I’m calmer but because killing him in a hospital corridor would complicate the week more than I can afford. “Alena is not an option,” I say.
“She was before.”
“She isn’t now.”
His gaze sharpens slightly. “Because of the girl.”
I don’t answer.
“That,” he says quietly, “is why you’ll lose.”
The words hang between us.
I think of my mother in that room. Pale and tired and still somehow seeing too much.
I think of Alena sitting in my fake date with that smile on her face.
I think of Zatanna standing in my hospital hallway trying not to show fear after my father looked at her once and understood exactly where to strike.
Then I look back at him. “No,” I say. “That’s why you will.”
For the first time, something in his face goes flat. Not anger. Calculation. The kind that comes when a man realizes he may not be as far ahead as he thought.
Good. Let him wonder. Let him take that home.
By the time I get back to my mother’s floor, I am holding myself together with habit and spite. Nothing else.
The hallway is too bright. The hospital too quiet in all the wrong ways. My father’s voice is still in my head, smooth and poisonous, every word designed to make me feel twelve years old again and trapped in a house where the walls listened better than the people did.
I hate that he still knows how to do it. I hate even more that part of me walked away without breaking something.
The doors to my mother’s wing slide shut behind me. My men stay back without being told. Good. I can’t stand another witness right now.
And then I see her.
Zatanna is standing near the window at the end of the hall, arms folded around herself, staring down at the city like she’s trying to make sense of it from thirteen floors up. She hears me before she sees me, turns, and the second her eyes land on my face, something in her expression changes.
No questions. No bright concern. No performance. Just a soft, immediate understanding that I am not alright.
That undoes me faster than anything my father said.
I make it three more steps. That’s all.
Then I stop in front of her, and whatever it is I’ve been using to stay vertical all day gives out. I don’t even think. I just reach for her.
And she opens her arms.
I pull her into me hard enough that she gives a startled little breath, and then I’m there, bent over her shoulder, my forehead against her neck, one hand at the back of her head, the other around her waist like if I don’t hold on, the whole goddamn floor is going to tilt out from under me.
I don’t do this. Not with anyone. Not like this.
But with her, the instinct is immediate. Primitive. As if my body made the decision before pride had a chance to interfere.
She doesn’t say anything at first. Just holds me.
Her hands move slowly up my back, then settle there, warm and steady through the fabric of my shirt. Not possessive. Not pitying. Just there.
And for one shamefully long moment, I let myself stay.
Her perfume is faint under the hospital smell. Her hair brushes my jaw. Her pulse beats lightly against my mouth where my face is turned into her neck. She is soft in a way my world never is. Alive in a way this building doesn’t feel.
Safe. The thought startles me even as I feel it.
Not because she is safe. She isn’t. Not anymore. Not because of me. But because with her, some corner of me stops bracing for impact.
How is that possible?
We’ve known each other what, two weeks? Less?
Enough time for bullets and lawyers and sex and one stolen beach that already feels like another life.
And yet here I am, forty-three years old, standing in a hospital hallway holding a woman I barely know like she’s the only thing keeping me on my feet.
I don’t have a word for that. I’m not sure I want one.
“Aleksei,” she says quietly.
I pull back just enough to look at her.
Her eyes search my face, and I know she sees more than I meant to show. The anger. The exhaustion. The crack in the armor I usually keep welded shut.
I should step away. Instead, I keep one hand at her waist and say, “He was there.”
Her brows draw together. “Your father.”
I nod once. She doesn’t ask what he said. She’s smarter than that. Smarter than most people who claim to care.
“What did he want?” she asks instead.
Everything, I almost say.
My mother’s dignity. My inheritance. My obedience. My weaknesses, named and measured and dragged into daylight.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “No matter what.”
She’s in my world now, standing in a private hospital wing after my father looked at her once and understood exactly where the damage could be done. Nothing about that is okay.
Still, the fact that she says it to comfort me and not herself does something dangerous to my chest.
I look at her for too long. And there it is again, that impossible question I keep circling and refusing to answer.
What is this?
What is she to me, that I can walk out of a conversation with the man I hate most in the world and end up here, in her arms, with no instinct stronger than hold on?
I know I feel something. That much is clear now.
It is not just want. Not just possession. Not just the chemical disaster of sex and adrenaline and proximity.
It’s worse than that.
Because I can’t name it, and unnamed things are harder to control.
And how is it even possible? We’ve known each other such a short time. Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is a negotiation, a business deal, a passing appetite.
It is not enough time for this.
But then, I was taught early that time means less than intensity. Some people can know each other for years and never leave a mark. Others arrive like a match in a dry room and suddenly everything is altered.
Zatanna, apparently, is fire.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” I say, the words leaving before I can stop them.
She blinks. “With what?”
I look at her. At the woman holding me together in a hallway full of fluorescent light and old rage.
“With you.”
The honesty of it seems to surprise us both. Her face softens.
And because she is who she is, because she never lets a moment stay entirely tragic if she can help it, she says quietly, “That makes two of us.”
A laugh escapes me. I lean down and press my forehead to hers, just for a second. Her eyes close. Mine do, too.
If anyone sees, I don’t care.
That may be the most dangerous part of all.
When I open my eyes again, the hallway hasn’t changed. My mother is still sick. My father is still alive. The week is still burning away.
But something in me is quieter.
I slide my hand from her waist to her jaw, my thumb resting just below her ear. “I should send you home.”
“You won’t.”
“Probably not.”
She gives me the faintest smile.
And standing there in the sterile light, with her still close enough to feel and the whole ruined machinery of my life waiting just outside this moment, I realize that naming what I feel may not matter as much as one other, more brutal fact:
Whatever it is, it already has me.