Chapter 31 Aleksei
ALEKSEI
Eight months later…
By the third shattered glass of the morning, no one knocks before entering my office anymore.
They send emails. They send assistants. They send each other.
No one wants to be the man who steps in front of me when I’m like this.
The boardroom still smells faintly of coffee and fear from the meeting I ended ten minutes ago by throwing a printed report hard enough to crack the screen behind Sergei’s head. Not at him. Near him.
A courtesy. He knows the difference.
A warehouse in Queens was hit this morning. Not enough damage to cripple us, but enough to send a message. Another shipment vanished overnight. Two men switched to my father’s side last week. Ever since he made my grandfather’s will public, people have stopped whispering and started choosing sides.
And I still don’t have a wife. Or an heir. Or Zatanna.
It has been eight months since she left.
Eight months since that email hit my inbox. Short. Formal. Final.
I have looked for her. Quietly at first. Then harder. I put people on her old apartment, old contacts, the studio she recorded at, even the part-time places she worked before us. Nothing.
That alone makes me angrier than it should.
I throw a file across the table. “Explain to me how this keeps happening.”
No one answers fast enough.
Sergei finally says, “Your father is hitting the weak points. Small strikes. Fast exits. He wants pressure, not chaos.”
“I know what he wants.”
“Then you also know this is working,” Anton says.
I stare at him until he looks down.
A knock comes at the door. Only one person still knocks like that.
“Come in.”
Ilya walks in, takes one look around, and says, “You’re being an ass again.”
“No one asked you.”
“No, but someone has to say it.”
He drops a folder on the table and looks at the others. “Out.”
They leave without argument.
The second the door shuts, he turns to me. “This is getting worse.”
“I noticed.”
“Did you?” he asks. “Because from where I’m standing, you’re still acting like you can brute-force your way through this.”
I sit and pour a drink. “Get to the point.”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Marry Alena.”
I stop. Then I laugh once. “No.”
“You need a wife. You need public support. You need a family alliance strong enough to shut your father up. Alena solves all three.”
“Alena is poison.”
“Alena is useful.”
“She’s his solution, not mine.”
“She’s a solution,” he says. “That’s more than you’ve got right now.”
I drink.
He keeps going. “Your father made the will public. Investors are nervous. Your people are nervous. Men are leaving because they think you’re cornered and too distracted to fix it.”
I look at him. “Distracted.”
“Yes,” he says. “That.”
I know what he means.
Zatanna.
Eight months, and I still think about her every day. Not in a vague way. Not in a memory that fades. I think about her when I wake up. When I look at a report. When someone says marriage. When another woman sits across from me and says all the right things and I feel nothing.
That is the real problem.
Every woman since her has felt wrong.
Not bad. Not ugly. Not unqualified.
Just… wrong.
Ilya watches me for a second. “You haven’t moved on.”
I say nothing.
He nods once. “Right.” Then he says the part that irritates me more than the rest. “I saw her, Aleksei. She wasn’t extraordinary. Pretty enough, sure, but plain. Younger than you by a lot. You’ve had better.”
I put the glass down hard enough to crack the base.
His expression changes immediately. He saw that. Then he smiles. “Wow,” he says. “You really are that far gone.”
“Careful.”
“No,” he says. “You be careful. Because if your father sees even half of what I just saw, he’ll use it.”
“He already tried.”
“And you still haven’t accepted what that means.”
I get up and go to the window because if I stay too close to him, I may hit him just to shut him up.
He follows anyway. “Why not marry her, then?” he asks.
I turn back slowly. “She is not an option.”
He folds his arms. “You don’t want Alena because she would be politics. You don’t want the socialites because they mean nothing. And you don’t want Zatanna because she would mean too much.”
I hate that he’s right. “I am not discussing this.”
“You already are.”
“No. I’m enduring you.”
He ignores that. “Your father is bleeding you. You’re losing warehouses, men, and time. And still you’d rather hold out for a woman who resigned by email and disappeared.”
“She disappeared because I failed her.” That comes out before I can stop it.
Ilya goes quiet.
I pour another drink. “I should have handled it differently.”
“Yes.”
“I know.”
“That’s not the same thing as fixing it.”
I look at the rain on the glass.
He’s right again. I’m tired of him being right.
“What do you want me to say?” I ask. “That I can marry Alena and end this cleanly? I can’t.”
“Because you don’t want her.”
“Yes.”
“And because you still want Zatanna.”
I don’t answer.
He lets out a slow breath. “You know what this sounds like?”
“I’m sure you’re dying to tell me.”
“It sounds like you’re fighting two wars and confusing them.”
That sits in the room for a second.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am making business decisions with personal damage in the middle of them.
But the facts stay the same.
I won’t marry Alena. I won’t hand my father what he wants. And I still haven’t found the one woman who made every other option feel dead on arrival.
Ilya looks at me and asks, “Then what’s your plan?”
I answer honestly. “Hold the line. Hit back. Find her.”
His face changes at that. “You really do love her.”
I look at him. I don’t say yes. I don’t say no either.
I just say, “Get out.”
He does not move for a second. Then he picks up the folder, gives me one last look, and walks out.
I’m alone again.
I stand there for a while, staring at the rain on the glass, the half-finished drink on the desk, the city pretending none of this matters. Then I sit, take out my phone, and do the one thing I tell myself not to do.
I open her picture.
It’s not even a good one. Not polished. Not posed.
She’s half-turned away from the camera at her desk, laughing at something Owen must have said, hair falling over one side of her face, coffee in her hand.
I took it off a security still the week after she left, because apparently that is the kind of man I became without even noticing.
I stare at it longer than I should.
Eight months.
I have spent eight months trying to function without her and failing in ways no one gets to name out loud. I work. I threaten. I drink more than I should. I hit back harder than necessary. I sleep badly. I wake up angry. I sit across from women I should want and feel nothing.
Then I look at her face on a screen and feel everything at once.
Pathetic, I know.
I zoom in anyway. Her mouth. Her eyes. The line of her throat.
I remember exactly how she sounded when she laughed in Cancún. How she looked in my shirt. How she went still the first time I let her touch the scars.
My chest feels tight all over again. I lock the phone, unlock it, open the picture again.
This has to stop.
Either I find her or I bury this properly. Those are the only two options left that don’t end with me blowing up everything around me.
I grab my coat and leave before I can think better of it. I don’t take a driver. I don’t take security.
I just need air, movement, something outside the office and the war and my father’s voice. The city is cold and wet and full of people who don’t know my name unless it helps them.
I walk for almost an hour without paying much attention to where I’m going.
Midtown, then lower. Past restaurants packed with the dinner crowd, bars spilling noise onto the sidewalk, women in heels stepping over puddles, men smoking under awnings and pretending they’re not waiting for someone to save them.
I keep my hands in my pockets and my head down. Then I stop.
A restaurant window.
Warm light. Small tables. The kind of place people go when they still think dinner can fix things. And through the glass, I see her.
For one second, I actually think I imagined it.
But no. Zatanna.
Dark hair. Soft sweater. The turn of her face I would know in a room full of strangers.
All the air leaves my lungs.
She’s here.
I move closer to the glass without meaning to, just enough to be sure. My pulse is suddenly hammering so hard it feels violent. I haven’t prepared for this. I’ve thought about it, cursed it, wanted it, but I have not prepared for the reality of just seeing her.
She’s standing near the front, not seated. Talking to someone. A man.
He says something. She steps in and hugs him. Everything in me goes cold.
Not hurt first. Anger.
Immediate, irrational, ugly anger.
Who the fuck is he? Why is he touching her? Why is she letting him?
My jaw locks so hard it hurts. My first instinct is to walk inside and put an end to whatever this is before the thought has time to become ridiculous.
Then the man shifts. Moves aside just enough. And I finally see her properly.
Not just her face. Not just the sweater. Her body.
The shape under the fabric. The curve of her stomach.
My mind blanks. No.
The thought isn’t even fully formed. It’s just impact. Shock so complete it wipes out everything else.
Zatanna is pregnant.
I stand there on the sidewalk staring through the glass like a man who’s been shot and hasn’t hit the ground yet. The restaurant keeps moving around her. Waiters passing. Glasses clinking. The man stepping back and saying something she doesn’t quite smile at.
But all I can see is her belly. Rounded. Visible. Real.
I never imagined I would find her like this.
Not after tearing the city apart in quiet ways and loud ones, putting men on old addresses, old jobs, old names, following every thin trail until it vanished. Not after months of searching every place that made sense.
And there she is anyway. Casual as daylight. Standing in a restaurant I could have walked past a hundred times. As if the city had been hiding her in plain sight while I bled trying to drag her back out of it.