Chapter Twenty-nine
Dmitri Konstantinov
The party stopped resonating the second Inna walked out of me, crying.
A woman I was supposed to use like a piece on a chessboard shoved her way into my mind until I forgot who I was.
I overreacted to a hug. That damn hug. I could still see the way Roman wrapped his hands around her as if he owned her.
I should have remembered she was nothing and moved on, but no, I couldn’t even control myself.
And because of that, she cried. Inna Grace Anderson cried because of me.
I had never seen her cry. She was always strong and smiling, even when the world under her feet seemed to crumble.
She didn’t cry like some pathetic girl in need of comfort, but because of me.
Her tears made me want to rip the world apart around me. At the same time, I wanted to make the world stop so I could look at her without thinking about anything else.
When did it start? When did this stop being about control and start being about her?
I couldn’t say. It might have been when I went out of my way to save her father, as she asked.
That obedience was a crack, a doorway, and now she was inside my head.
She was supposed to be fake, but why was she becoming everything?
And the irony was almost cruel. She claimed me with lies to steal from me, and yet it was my heart that began claiming her slowly without knowing.
The rooftop air hit me. I stood at the edge, staring down at the parking lot where cars slid in and out.
Footsteps echoed behind me, and I didn’t need to turn to know it was Roman. I summoned him here to find out how, in the Konstantinov Bratva, he knew Inna. He buried himself in New York, stayed out of sight like we were beneath him, and now he just showed up in my business, knowing my wife.
It was either I dealt with him now or lost my shit trying to make sense of something that refused to align.
“It’s a small world, don’t you think?” Roman said.
I almost laughed at that. Roman never reacted to anything. He had this detachment that said either everything around him was predictable or not worth his time. He handled things alone and quietly, or he ignored them completely.
He moved and stood beside me. His gaze dropped to the same parking lot I had been staring at, as if we were two men sharing a quiet moment.
“A wife?” he added. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”
My jaw tightened. “How do you know her?”
Roman chuckled under his breath. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. He took his time with the first drag.
“I was wondering why Iker invited me to this event,” he said, exhaling smoke into the air. “Now I know why.”
“Roman.” My voice carried a warning this time, and he turned to me. He watched me for a while before stepping closer, lowering his voice as if we were discussing something intimate rather than dangerous.
“I’ve done a nasty business with Iker. It was a clean deal, and now you are here making a mess of it,” he said.
For a few seconds, I just stared at him, letting the words settle. My mind worked through it, trying to understand where the pieces connected.
He sighed. “Fine, I needed this famous Mexican poison, and in exchange, he didn’t want money. He wanted me to find who killed his daughter.” His eyes held mine, like he was waiting for me to connect how that had to do with him knowing Inna.
Silence settled, and I just glared at him. He knew when I didn’t need to talk. Sometimes words didn’t matter. One look did.
“Come on.” He set the cigarette between his fingers and smoked it.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know I killed our father,” he went on, almost bored.
“I needed something that would kill that man slowly. I’m sure you have heard of the Mexican poison that can’t be detected.
It mimics natural conditions, causing symptoms similar to common diseases.
And the man behind that poison is Iker.”
The problem was that I didn’t care about that. He still hadn’t answered any damn shit here.
I cut through it. “How do you know Inna?”
“Inna?” He looked at me, then laughed under his breath. “You mean Grace? What exactly do you want from Iker?” he asked.
“That’s my business.”
“A business that ends with you marrying his granddaughter?” Irritation slipped through his voice. “Give me a break.”
I stilled, his words catching me off guard. I watched him take another drag, my brows pulling together as the words settled wrong in me. Did he just say…
“Iker’s granddaughter?” I repeated. “What does that mean?”
Roman studied my reaction, and whatever he saw answered him. “You didn’t know.” That wasn’t a question. “You didn’t know Iker is Grace’s grandfather?”
Inna and Iker?
The connections snapped into place. She had missing pieces in her records. The silence around her family has always been suspicious. So this was the answer? She was from Iker’s family.
There was no damn way!
Roman scoffed, shaking his head. “Of course you didn’t.” He flicked ash over the edge of the rooftop. “Grace’s mother is Iker’s daughter. She faked her death to disappear from the crime world and marry a contractor. Iker spent years believing she was murdered.”
Each word rearranged everything I thought I understood.
“So to find who killed his daughter, he made a deal with me. He gave me the poison, and in return, I would solve the murder mystery.” His lips curled slightly. “Turns out his daughter wasn’t dead, just hiding.”
I didn’t respond. Not because I didn’t have words, but because every instinct in me shifted direction. Everything I assumed about Inna tilted in entirely different directions.
Inna wasn’t just a desperate girl. She carried dangerous blood. I pulled her into my world without knowing whose name she carried.
My thoughts moved faster now, locking into place one by one. Iker has been after his granddaughter, and I married her and made it clear that she was mine by killing his men. This was a war. He gathered us here because he had something planned.
I looked over the parking lot below, scheming quickly because this party could get dirty any second. Roman didn’t know what he had just revealed.
And the funniest and most stupid part was that I had no intention of letting anyone take Inna. I didn’t care if they were family or not.
“Where is her mother?” I asked.
The ground just shifted beneath me, and I was standing in the middle of it, recalculating every move I was about to make.
“Mexico. She is the one running the family business. Iker gave her a choice. She returns, or he kills her family.”
Oh, did he? So he made a deal with his daughter, and yet he was after the children.
I reached for the cigarette in Roman’s hand without asking and took a drag, the burn settling in my chest, grounding what started to spiral.
Roman leaned back against the railing. “When I found Grace’s mother, she was pregnant. I don’t touch pregnant women and kids.” He paused. “I didn’t tell Iker she wasn’t dead first. I got close to Grace’s family until I was close enough to tell her mother about Iker.”
So that was how he knew Inna. Motherfucker. No wonder Inna said he was an old friend.
“Grace’s mother asked for time. She wanted to give birth first and return to her father.
She didn’t want Iker to know about her family, and she begged me not to disclose the information.
I agreed.” A faint smirk touched his lips.
“She disappeared from the hospital after giving birth. That was the only way to protect them.”
Fucked up shit! Akim dug into Inna’s past and found nothing. Now it made sense. Roman erased them.
“Iker never knew about the family when we closed our deal,” Roman added.
I let out a scoff, the cigarette resting between my fingers. “Well, he knows now. And he wants the boy. Congratulations.”
Smoke lingered between us. Roman’s eyes sharpened. “If he takes the boy, he will kill Grace and her mother.” That caught my attention, and he continued. “He doesn’t have an heir. Just the daughter. And now that there’s a son…” He let the sentence hang, but I didn’t need him to finish it.
I already knew the answer.
“He hates women,” Roman added, almost as an afterthought.
“He killed two wives for not giving birth. The third gave him a daughter. That’s all he has.
” His gaze shifted to me. “And if he gets the boy, he will eliminate the mother and Grace and make the boy believe he is the father and shape him into what he wants.”
This wasn’t just a mess anymore. It was leverage. It was war dressed as family. I opened my mouth to speak when a voice cut through the tension.
“Gentlemen,” Iker said smoothly as he climbed the last steps, “I thought you left.”
Roman and I turned.
Iker approached without hurry. The dim light from the rooftop caught the lines of his face. I studied him differently now, not just as a man running a small empire but as a man who would burn blood to secure a legacy.
My original plan was simple: use him to get Zachary and walk away when the deal was done. But simple plans had a way of dying fast.
I studied him, measuring. This required a smart move.
I wasn’t some amateur scrambling for control.
I was Dmitri. If he were a step ahead while I worked on plan A, I would shift to plan B and take what I came for, anyway.
Power wasn’t luck. It was construction. Men like me built their own worlds, shaped every outcome, and controlled every variable that mattered.
This world was mine. And I would run it so clean Iker wouldn’t see it closing in on him until it was already done.
I dropped the cigarette to the ground and crushed it under my shoe. My gaze locked onto Iker.
“I thought we could talk,” Iker said as he stepped closer.
He didn’t resemble my wife. She looked nothing like him. That worked in my favor.
“Make it quick,” I declared, and he nodded.
His eyes shifted to Roman and back to me. “Do we have a problem that I don’t know about? I have done a clean business with Konstantinovs, but it seems you crossed a line and stepped into mine.”
I held his gaze, aware of what he meant, but I didn’t show it. “Meaning”
“Your wife,” he said. “Did you know who she was before marrying her?”
I let that sit just enough to make it believable. I didn’t know enough before, not like now. At first, she was a convenient lie that fitted perfectly into a plan. Now she was someone else. Someone I wasn’t letting go of yet.
“Inna Grace Anderson,” I said. “Twenty-five years old. Isn’t that enough information?” I paused, letting my tone harden. “But that doesn’t matter. I don’t care who she is, I care about who she knows. Someone I want.”
Iker’s eyes narrowed, weighing the answer. “Someone she knows?” he asked.
Here was the thing: I wasn’t as old as he was, and my mind functioned a hundred times faster than his. I already had a new plan.
“You must know Konstantinovs will do anything to get what they want, even if it means faking a marriage.”
The words tasted wrong, but I didn’t show. Right now, this wasn’t about the truth. It was about control.
Inna was no longer just a role. She stopped being that somewhere along the way. But Iker didn’t need to know that.
“I want Luigi,” I declared. “And Inna knows him.”
The words left me just as the corner of my eye caught a shadow shifting near the staircase. My gaze drifted toward it, but by the time I focused, it was gone.
“I don’t understand.” Iker pulled my attention back. “Luigi attacked me and took someone important. You mean…”
He stopped mid-sentence. The realization formed on its own. It was good to see he bought the setup I planted. He knew Luigi took Inna’s father, so he would believe this.
Roman let out a quiet scoff beside me, already lighting another cigarette. He understood exactly what I was doing, and he knew the name I had just thrown into the room. He also knew better than to speak.
“So, let me get this straight,” Iker said slowly. “How does she know Luigi?”
“A desperate woman will do anything,” I replied.
“I’ll keep her until Luigi faces me. I don’t know what you want from her, but be careful.
She’s still mine.” He knew who I was, so he understood this.
“When I get what I want, then we can talk.” I stepped back.
“If we’re done here, I have other matters to attend to. ”
I moved toward the stairs, but Iker’s voice stopped me. “Wait.”
A small smirk pulled at my mouth while facing away. It worked. It always worked. Everyone always falls for my deception.
“There must be something we can do,” his tone changed. “It seems I misinterpreted the situation.”
You didn’t. I just played smart.
“What do you want?” I asked, turning back slowly.
He stepped closer now, no longer testing boundaries but ready to negotiate.
“Luigi took her father,” he said. “I want him and the boy. Once I have the boy, I will kill the father myself.” His eyes held mine with intent. “Name your price. Whatever you want, I’ll give it to you. You can dispose of the girl after you’re done.”
Dispose.
Roman was right. This wasn’t about anyone but Cole.
“You want me to do what?” My voice grew colder.
“Use her,” Iker said plainly. “Get me to where the father is.”
“And what do I get?” I asked.
“Name it.”
Roman cleared his throat like he was about to interfere, but I lifted a finger without looking at him. He stopped.
“Zachary,” I said.
Iker raised an eyebrow. It took him a bit to let that in. “Zachary the Cuban?” I didn’t need to answer that. He exhaled with a nod. “Alright,” he said. “My family’s future depends on that boy.”
Oh, sure it did. But at that moment, I was the one determining his family’s future.
“You’ll hear from me,” I declared and left.
A quiet sound of rushed footsteps reached me before I got to the staircase. By the time I took several stairs, they had faded, leaving behind a soft, familiar perfume. How could I forget that scent? It became my favorite without me realizing it.
It meant Inna heard everything. She knew exactly what kind of man she was involved with. What she didn’t know was what I had in my mind.