Chapter 6 Ruslan
Ruslan
peace – Taylor Swift
Ileave her bedroom feeling dirtier than I do after blood.
The corridor outside the guest suites is quiet in that expensive, suffocating way rich families mistake for elegance. Thick carpet swallows my footsteps. Somewhere farther down the hall, a clock ticks behind closed doors, delicate and smug, as if time itself has manners in a house like this.
I fasten the last button of my shirt with fingers that don’t shake, though I’d almost prefer if they did. Shaking would mean some part of me still gets to be honest about disgust. Instead, I’m exactly what my father raised me to be. Calm. Composed. Useful.
I can still smell her perfume on me.
Too sweet. Powder and flowers and the kind of expensive softness women from old families get drowned in before they’re old enough to understand it’s training.
She’s beautiful, of course. They always are.
Pale skin, careful smile, the right pedigree, the right bloodline, the right father sitting on the right amount of money, and just enough fear to make him pliable.
I’m not cruel enough to pretend she doesn’t know what tonight is. She knows. Maybe not the whole board, but enough of it. Enough to understand that being led to bed by a Dragovich son while both our fathers drink downstairs isn’t romance. It’s leverage with a pulse.
I do what Mikhail asks because that’s what sons like me are for. We don’t get to ask whether we want the task. We get given the task, then judged on the neatness of the outcome.
And God, I hate every fucking second of it.
I hate it because halfway through, I have to close my eyes for one second and picture Salvatore’s face to finish what my father asks of me.
That’s the part that makes me feel fucking vile.
My father is waiting in the study downstairs, exactly where I know he’ll be.
The room smells of cigar smoke, leather, and whiskey. Heavy curtains shut out the city beyond the windows. A crystal decanter sits on the sideboard untouched because my father never drinks when business still breathes in the room.
He stands near the fireplace with one hand braced on the mantel and doesn’t turn immediately when I enter. Another performance. Another lesson. Make men come to your silence, and they’ll fill it with fear on their own.
I close the door behind me and walk farther in. “It’s done.”
His gaze moves over me once, not searching for evidence of sentiment but checking for flaws in the performance. Did I show too much? Did I leave anything on the table? Did I give them more than he intended?
“And?”
“She thinks it matters,” I say. “She thinks there’s interest.”
Viktor’s mouth moves like he almost smiles and then thinks better of it.
My father doesn’t. “Good. Her father will be informed in the morning that continued hesitation on the Petrova account would be unfortunate, considering his daughter’s tendency toward indiscretion.”
There it is. I should be used to it by now. I am, mostly. That’s the part I hate most. Not that I can do this, but that I can do it and stand here afterward with a straight face while men discuss the exact conversion rate of a woman’s humiliation.
“And if he refuses?” Viktor asks.
“He won’t,” my father says. “But if he does, then we remind him how small his world is compared to ours.”
Meaning photographs. Witnesses. Rumors. Maybe a marriage pushed harder and faster than anyone wants. Maybe the opposite. Ruin comes in options when men like Mikhail Dragovich are holding the pen.
Families like theirs need reminding that daughters, sons, beds, promises, and futures are all the same currency once enough power sits at the table. The girl upstairs is a coin with a heartbeat. I’m the hand used to spend her.
“You understand what this means.”
“Yes,” I say.
His gaze sharpens. “Say it.”
I meet his eyes and give him exactly what he wants.
“The alliance isn’t about marriage, it’s about exposure.
If they think their daughter can still be sold elsewhere as untouched or strategically neutral, they hold back on the value.
If they know we can ruin her reputation and their bargaining position with a whisper, they pay full. ”
My father nods once. “Exactly.”
The approval on his face should mean something, but it doesn’t. Or maybe it does, and I hate that too. Boys don’t ever stop wanting their father to look at them and see value, even after they’re old enough to know what that value costs.
“You did well,” he says.
I nearly laugh.
Did well.
I nod instead because I know the choreography. Take the praise. Keep the bitterness under the tongue. Don’t let anyone see the rot. “I had a good teacher.”
Viktor straightens from the shelf. “Orlov will crack fast. He loves that girl too much to let this spread.”
Mikhail’s mouth hardens slightly. “Then he should’ve taught her better.”
Something mean and hot flashes through me then, quick as a match strike. Not because I give a shit about the girl, not really. Because of the hypocrisy of it. Fathers like ours ruin their children in the name of legacy and then speak as if any failure in the outcome belongs to the child alone.
But I swallow it because I’m not stupid.
My father steps closer, and the room narrows, as it always does when he focuses on one of us directly. “There will be more of this.”
I look at him.
“You’re too close to your ascension to allow distraction now,” he continues. “Marriage discussions will move forward soon. Until then, you will keep your appetites useful.”
There’s nothing accidental in that wording. No room to mistake what he means. Useful. Directed away from anything that belongs to me in ways he wouldn’t approve of.
I feel the weight of Salvatore’s absence like a bruise under the skin.
“Understood,” I say.
“Get some rest,” he says. “You leave for Vienna again in three days, and I want your head clear when you get there.”
I leave before I say something reckless.
The hallway outside the study feels colder, cleaner, the kind of false relief you get stepping out of a church after a funeral.
Viktor doesn’t follow me this time. Good.
I’m not fit for company, and he’d only look at me with that flat older-brother understanding I can’t fucking stand when I’m this close to tearing my own skin off.
The driver pulls the car around, and I get in without a word, sink back into the leather seat, and stare out at the city while his engine carries me away from one expensive prison toward another.
By the time we reach my building, I’ve already decided exactly how the rest of the night will go.
I’m going to strip, scrub the woman off my skin until the water turns cold, then open the case and float far enough out of myself that sleep comes before memory does. It’s not a glamorous plan, but glamour’s for fools and magazines. Survival is always uglier than that.
The doorman nods, the elevator crawls, and my key turns in the lock with the small, familiar click that usually means I’m alone.
Tonight, the second I step inside, I know I’m not.
The apartment is dark except for the low lamp near the sofa and the city light bleeding through the curtains, but the air is wrong. Warm, thick steam drifts faintly from the half-open bathroom door at the end of the hall, carrying the scent of water and expensive soap.
I already have the gun out before I fully think it through.
Instinct. Training. The one thing my father gave me that never fails even when everything else does.
I move silently down the hallway, shoes whispering over wood, one hand steady on the grip while the other pushes the bathroom door wider.
Steam billows into the bedroom, blurring the mirror and slicking the tile with heat. I thumb the safety off, the click sharp in the room, and at once a voice drifts through the white haze.
“Careful, cuore mio.”
Salvatore?
My entire body stops.
For one genuinely stupid second, I think I might be dreaming already, that maybe I’m higher than I realize, that maybe I open the wrong fucking door in my own head. Then he speaks again, low and dry and so unmistakably himself it cuts straight through me.
“If you shoot me, I’ll be very annoyed.”
The gun slips from my hand and lands on the tile with a clatter I barely register.
I step forward into the steam like a man walking into a miracle he doesn’t deserve.
He’s behind the glass, one arm braced on the wet tile wall, dark hair plastered back from his face by the shower spray. No shirt, no tie, no polished Vieri armor. Just skin and sharp mouth and those dark, impossible eyes on me through the fogged panel.
He looks unreal enough that if I blink too long, I’m convinced he’ll disappear. Water tracks down his chest in gleaming lines.
For a second, I can only look.
Not because I’ve never seen him naked. I have.
More times than I can count and still not enough to keep this from hitting me like a fist to the ribs every single time.
It’s because he isn’t supposed to be here.
Not after the walls are starting to close around us so visibly that I can almost hear the mortar cracking.
He turns his head and looks at me through the steam, and whatever I’m expecting to see on his face isn’t this.
He looks exhausted. Furious. Relieved.
Alive in that dangerous, wounded way only he manages with me.
“Close the door,” he says.
I do, then I stand there in the thick heat, staring at him like I’ve forgotten how fucking language works.
Salvatore reaches up and pushes wet hair back from his face. “You’re going to keep looking at me like that all night?”
I strip without taking my eyes off him, fingers clumsy for once as I yank at buttons, shove my trousers down, and kick everything aside.
By the time I step in, my pulse is hammering so hard it feels adolescent. Absurd. I haven’t felt adolescent about anything in years. But this—finding him here, in my fucking bathroom, after all the ways this could’ve gone wrong—does something reckless to me.
The water is hot enough to sting, but I barely feel it.