Chapter 21 – Iris
The closer I drew to Ilya whenever we were alone, the more unsettling his duality became publicly.
In private, he had started doing small things I wasn’t sure he even noticed. Like reaching out to brush my hair behind my ear, holding my gaze longer than necessary, and stopping by my room just to check on me.
If I fell asleep reading on the couch, I would wake with a blanket pulled over my shoulders. No one else could do that except him.
Sometimes, he would show up in my room with a cup of tea already made the way I drank it—no sugar, just a little milk.
Once, after a particularly tense run around the estate, he asked if I had eaten. When I said no, he threatened to fire the chef for ignoring my hunger. I had to laugh it off, telling him that food was ready yet.
Those moments felt almost ordinary. Domestic, even. They settled under my skin in a way that made the rest of him harder to accept.
Then someone else would walk into the room, and the softness disappeared, replaced with his usual toughness. It was clear that he wasn’t the same man when he was with me.
I got the more affectionate version of him while the rest of the world was stuck with the cold, ruthless beast they knew him as.
One evening, I witnessed his dual personality during a dinner at the estate with a handful of Tarasov associates.
They were seated around the long table, discussing logistics, politics, and shipments. At first, the conversation stayed careful. Measured.
Beside my husband, I sat and kept my eyes on my plate most of the time, listening more than speaking.
Near the end of the meal, one of the men—a little too free with the wine—set his glass down harder than necessary.
“I’ve been looking at some of the older transport numbers,” he said, voice carrying just far enough. “People are talking like money is still moving through accounts that should be dead. Like there’s some big internal problem.”
Ilya glanced at me across the table before asking him, “You don’t think there is?”
“No. Not at all.” The man continued, “I went through what I could get my hands on. The numbers don’t support it. Nothing’s missing in the books I saw. If there was a real leak, it would show clearer than this.” A pause. “If you ask me, it feels like someone’s reading patterns that aren’t there.”
The table fell quiet, and the remaining men exchanged covert looks among themselves. One cleared his throat, as if warning the previous speaker to keep his mouth shut.
Ilya didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even shift in his chair.
“Interesting.” He set his glass down, looked at the man, and said, “So you mean to tell me that whoever found out about the missing funds didn’t know what they were doing?”
The question was quiet. Almost polite.
The man hesitated. Color crept up his neck. “I’m only saying the evidence doesn’t hold. Closed accounts stay closed. The amounts people are whispering about don’t match anything I’ve reviewed. Maybe the concern is coming from outside information that wasn’t fully checked.”
Ilya let him finish. Then he spoke, still calm, still even. “You reviewed the books, you say. Which ones?”
The man was quiet, his eyes shifting across the faces of the other men.
“Don’t look at them,” Ilya said, his voice low and intimidating. “Look at me.”
The man swallowed hard.
“Show me the pages you checked. Give me the dates,” Ilya added, his gaze unwavering. “Tell me who signed the original closures and who you believe is still authorizing the transfers that keep appearing after those dates.”
The man opened his mouth, then closed it. He tried again. “I don’t have every file in front of me—”
“No,” Ilya said. “You don’t. You have a partial review and a theory you decided to test at my table.” A pause. “You framed it as doubt, but what you actually did was suggest the people raising the concern are either mistaken or chasing ghosts.”
Cold sweat trickled down the man’s temple like he was hot all of a sudden despite the cold weather.
“That the real problem is the ones who noticed the money moving, not the ones moving it.” Ilya didn’t raise his volume once.
He simply kept going, pointing out every gap, and by the time he finished, the man’s face had gone pale.
Ilya gave a short nod to two of the men standing near the wall. “Escort him out of the premises.”
Boris and Yuri stepped forward, removing the man without a struggle. No one at the table looked at anyone else for a long time after that.
When the last of the guests left, I went upstairs without waiting for him. I needed space to clear my head.
I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to sort through the feeling that had been building all evening. It wasn’t a simple fear.
I’d seen violence from him before. What unsettled me was how easily the shift happened. How the man who adjusted blankets and brought tea could become someone capable of that kind of calm, public destruction without any visible effort.
A few minutes later, I heard the door open and close. He didn’t speak right away. He just stood there a moment, leaning against the door frame and watching me.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Don’t you think you were hard on him?” I turned to him, meeting his gaze.
“Who? Yevgeni?” He raised his brows. “Trust me, he wasn’t even invited.”
“You humiliated him, Ilya,” I said softly.
“I did, didn’t I?” He pushed off the door frame and crossed the room with a few long strides.
“You didn’t have to,” I insisted. “It’s okay for people to disagree with you.”
He halted in front of me. “Do you think I was hard on him because he disagreed with me?”
I thought for a second. “Is there another reason?”
“You, me, and Ivan are the only people who know about the missing funds,” he said.
Slowly, the realization set in and my heart skipped a beat. “He wasn’t supposed to have that information because it’s not public yet.”
“Exactly,” Ilya said. “Did you also notice that when he started talking, the rest of the men at the table suddenly lost their composure?”
I had. I’d noticed the covert glances they exchanged.
He was quiet for a few seconds. Then he sat in the chair near the window, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped.
“This world doesn’t run on trust,” he said. “That’s why I made a list of the people I suspected had a hand in this and invited them all to have dinner at my place.”
“You planned this?” I asked, amused.
“It was a trap. And they walked right into it,” he replied. “We might not have the identity of the traitor. But at least we now know everyone at the table tonight knows something.”
I was impressed. Very impressed.
“Now what?” I asked him.
“We wait,” he answered. “They know I’m on to them, and it’s only a matter of time before one of them makes a mistake. And when they do, I’ll be here.”
Ilya’s approach was smart. He handled the situation with the wisdom of a man who knows the game like the back of his hand.
After a while, he stood and came closer. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed. My sweater had twisted slightly at the collar during the evening; I hadn’t noticed.
He reached out and straightened it with two fingers, tugging the fabric back into place near my neck. The touch was brief. Almost absentminded.
He didn’t pull his hand away immediately; instead, he let the tips of his fingers rest against the side of my neck for a second longer than necessary. Warm. Steady.
Something in my chest pulled tight.
I’d spent weeks telling myself that the softness was temporary, that it was strategy or habit or nothing more than the byproduct of proximity.
Sitting there with his hand still near my skin, I couldn’t hold that story together as cleanly as I had before. I didn’t pull away.
He noticed. Of course he did. His eyes stayed on mine for a moment, then he let his hand drop and stepped back just enough to give me space.
His touch raised a flutter in my chest, a reminder that every day, I found new reasons to find him attractive. The scent of his cologne invaded my senses, and I could feel his warm breath against my skin.
Slowly, he traced his thumb along the curve of my mouth, and I felt my breath hitch. He locked eyes with me in a way that weakened my knees.
The silence stretched, my heart racing with the growing awareness that I might have begun falling for this man. Against my better judgment.
And that alone scared me more than anything else.