Chapter 17
Zita
Ican’t stop moving. My bare feet whisper against the marble floors as I pace the mansion’s corridors like a caged animal, my silk robe trailing behind me with each restless turn.
Three hours have passed since we returned from the restaurant after I watched my husband kill three men without hesitation.
Everything I thought I understood about Tigran Belsky might be completely wrong.
The images replay in my mind on endless loop.
I keep seeing Tigran moving through the chaos with lethal precision, his body shielding mine from bullets, and blood spreading across his shirt.
I can’t forget the way he looked at me, checking for injuries before acknowledging his own, as if my wellbeing mattered more than his survival.
No one’s ever protected me like that. Not my father, despite his wealth and political connections.
Not the bodyguards he hired who kept a professional distance and treated me like a job rather than a person, nor the guards I have here.
Tigran threw himself between me and death without hesitation, calculation, or anything but pure instinct to keep me alive.
I find myself at the door to Tigran’s study, my hand raised to knock before I fully realize where my wandering has led me.
I can hear the soft murmur of his voice speaking in rapid Russian to someone on the phone.
He’s always tending to business, even with a fresh bullet wound in his shoulder and the doctor strongly suggesting twenty-four hours of rest.
I don’t knock. Instead, I turn the handle and step inside without invitation, the same way I invaded his conference room weeks ago. Just as I’ve been invading his carefully ordered world since the moment we met.
Tigran sits behind his massive desk, his shirt replaced by a simple black t-shirt that accommodates the bulky bandage on his left shoulder.
Multiple monitors display security footage from tonight’s attack, frozen on frames that show masked gunmen breaking through the restaurant’s entrance.
His phone is pressed to his ear, and his free hand moves across a tablet, scrolling through what looks like personnel files.
He looks up when I enter, taking in my restless energy and disheveled appearance.
Without breaking his conversation, he gestures for me to take the chair across from his desk.
I ignore the invitation and move to the window instead, staring out at the mansion’s grounds where armed guards patrol in patterns Tigran designed himself.
“Da, understood. Twenty-four hour surveillance on all known associates. No exceptions.” He ends the call and sets the phone aside, but his attention remains focused on the screens displaying evidence of tonight’s violence. “You should be sleeping.”
“So should you, per Dr. Kozlova.” I turn from the window to face him directly. “I suspect we’re both having trouble with that.”
“I couldn’t shut down my brain,” he says with a small smile then winces when he moves too quickly. “Perhaps I should have accepted more painkillers than the local anesthetic.”
“You’re too stubborn.” I say it with affection instead of admonishment while moving around the desk to stand beside his chair, close enough to see the exhaustion in his eyes. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Protect me.” The question comes out rawer than I intended, carrying all the confusion and growing attachment I’ve been trying to suppress. “You could have died.”
For a moment, I think he’ll deflect the question with business talk or cold pragmatism. Instead, he turns in his chair to face me fully, his expression more open than I’ve ever seen it. “You’re my wife and my partner,” he says simply. “Protecting you isn’t a choice I make. It’s who I am.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a deflection.”
“What answer do you want, Zita?” His voice carries an edge of frustration that suggests I’m pushing him toward territory he’d rather avoid. “What will satisfy your need to understand my motivations?”
“The truth.” I lean against the edge of his desk, forcing him to maintain eye contact. “The real reason you were willing to take a bullet for me. Is it our partnership or…something else?” I’m not even sure what answer I want as I ask the question.
“There were many reasons.” He reaches up to touch my face, brushing his thumb across my cheekbone with surprising gentleness.
“That’s still not an answer. I guess… I want to know if saving me was a duty or a choice. If I’m a duty, I understand your actions. If I’m a choice…” I throw up my hands. “I want to know how you’re thinking and feeling.”
A vulnerability I’ve never seen before flickers across his face. “You want to know what drives me?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to be my father.” The words come out flat and matter-of-fact, but there’s darkness and sadness underneath. “I won’t let my wife become another casualty of the violence that built this empire.”
“What do you mean, another casualty?”
Tigran is quiet for so long that I begin to think he won’t answer. When he finally speaks, his voice is grim, and his expression suggests he’s sharing something he’s never told anyone. “My father killed my mother when I was nine years old.”
The statement makes me recoil in shock. I knew his mother was dead, but I never imagined this.
“The official story was she was caught in crossfire during a failed assassination attempt on Nicky,” he says, his voice steady despite the magnitude of what he’s revealing. “It was structured as a tragic accident where an innocent woman died because of her husband’s dangerous lifestyle.”
A lump of emotion lodges in my throat. “That wasn’t what really happened.”
“No.” He moves his hand from my face to rest on my shoulder as though anchoring himself.
“She was arguing with him about expanding the drug operations into elementary schools. She said it was bad enough that teenagers were dying from overdoses, but recruiting children as young as eight to run packages crossed a line she couldn’t accept. ”
My stomach turns as I imagine a mother trying to protect children she’d never meet, standing up to a man who built his power on fear and violence. She wasn’t involved in the daily business at all, so it must have taken tremendous courage to try to stand up to Nicky.
“She threatened to go to the police if he didn’t shut down the school operations immediately.” His tone is flat, as though he’s reciting something rather than remembering. “She told him she’d rather see him in prison than watch him destroy innocent lives for profit.”
I place my hand on his shoulder for meager comfort. “So he silenced her.”
He nods. “With a single bullet to the back of her head while she was packing a suitcase to leave him.” The clinical detachment in his voice doesn’t hide the pain beneath.
“Then he called his Sovietnik, who was Boris Levnov then, to help stage the scene. They fired a shot through the window to break it and added evidence of a struggle that never happened.”
The brutality of it steals my breath. Not just the murder itself, but the cold calculation required to cover it up, to transform a domestic execution into a martyrdom story that would generate sympathy rather than suspicion.
There’s only one way he could know all the details. “You saw it happen.” My heart breaks for the little boy he was.
He nods once. “I was hiding in the closet of their bedroom. She’d told me to pack my favorite toys while she gathered her things.
” His gaze focuses on something beyond my shoulder, lost in memories that’ve shaped every decision he’s made since.
“When I heard him coming, I hid in the closet. When he entered, I didn’t cry out a warning to her.
I watched him put the gun to her head and fire, all the time remaining mute.
I was too frightened to cry out and warn her. .
“I’m so sorry.” I want to hug him, but I don’t reach out yet. He’s still walled off. “You did what even most adults would do, Tigran. Your mother wouldn’t have wanted you to get in the middle of it and be killed too.”
He shakes his head. “I acted like a coward and will never do so again.”
“Could she have fought him off? Was she trained in self-defense and weapons?”
He pauses but shakes his head.
“Unlike me, your mother had no training to protect herself. A warning might have bought her seconds, but she couldn’t have saved herself, and you couldn’t have saved her.” I speak passionately, trying to breach the distance he’s imposing.
He doesn’t reply to my reassurances. Instead, he continues reciting what happened. “I watched him arrange her body to support his story, and he practiced his grief before he called for help.”
The image of a nine-year-old child witnessing his mother’s murder and father’s subsequent horrifying actions makes my chest ache with sympathy and rage. “Did he know you were there?”
“Not until years later, when I was old enough to understand the value of keeping his secret.” Tigran’s laugh is bitter and empty. “He used my silence as proof of my loyalty and my willingness to prioritize family interests over moral concerns. He didn’t realize I was too scared to speak up then.”
“You know the truth, and you did nothing of which you should be ashamed. In all these years, you never forgot what you saw. You did that for her.”
He hesitates, nodding. “I never forgot what she stood for, and what she was willing to die for.” He meets my gaze again, and I see the truth written clearly in his expression. “I swore over her grave that I’d never become him. I’d never silence a woman for having the courage to speak truth.”
The parallel between his mother and me is impossible to ignore, with both of us challenging the methods of powerful men, refusing to stay silent when it matters.
The difference is that Tigran chose protection over violence when he backed me up that day in the meeting.
“Is that why you listen when I argue with you? Why you don’t punish me for speaking my mind? ”
“Partly.” He slides his hand down my arm to capture my fingers. “It’s mostly because I’ve learned the strongest women are the ones who refuse to be silenced unless the silencer resorts to barbarity. I need a strong woman beside me if I’m going to reshape this organization into something better.”
The conviction in his voice eases some of the anger and sadness inside me lingering after hearing what he went through. “I’m sure your mother would be proud.”
“I hope so. I want to leave something our children could inherit without shame.”
The casual reference to future children makes my pulse accelerate. “You think about the legacy we might leave behind?”
“I think about it constantly.” He brings my hand to his lips, pressing a gentle kiss to my knuckles.
“I think about raising sons who protect instead of dominate and daughters who speak up instead of being hidden away.” He looks down at me.
“I never want them to know we were forced together by a contract instead of choosing each other.”
I nod. “We chose each other in a series of moments and choices—when you gave me that emerald ring, when I stopped trying to find loopholes in our marriage contract, and when we both decided to build something real instead of simply enduring something forced upon us.”
“What have we built?”
I study his face, noting the way exhaustion has softened his usually sharp features, the way vulnerability has replaced the cold authority he wears like armor in public. “Trust and something that feels dangerously close to the kind of marriage I never thought I wanted.”
“Dangerous because it makes us both vulnerable?”
“Dangerous because it makes us both want things we can’t afford to lose.” I move closer. “Caring about each other could be the thing that gets us both killed.”
“We won’t allow that.” He pulls me down onto his lap, careful to avoid jarring his injured shoulder. “We need to be smarter about protecting what we’ve built though.”
I sink against him, still being careful to avoid the bandage. “How do we do that?”
“We have to eliminate the threats against us by rooting out any remaining traitors in our organization, and making it clear to everyone that attacking my wife is a death sentence.”
The promise in his voice should frighten me. Instead, it brings a comfort I never expected to find in threats of violence. “What do we do after we eliminate the threats?”
“We keep each other safe and try to run the organization with more planning and less violence.”
“I’m sure that’s a life of which your mother would approve.”
His expression softens. “I’d like to think so.”
When he kisses me, it’s with tenderness and something deeper, like recognition or maybe gratitude for finding something real in a world built on lies and violence.