Chapter 9
KATE
Every morning, I wake to find that Cole has already left our bed, his cold pillow testifying he’s been gone for hours.
Every morning, I pull on clean yoga pants and a new hoodie before I collect my coffee and skyr in the kitchen.
Every morning, I stop by Cole’s office to find him buried in work, sometimes on conference calls, sometimes so deep in code I have to say his name three or four times to get his attention.
Every morning, he refuses to let me work for his clients.
He’s my husband, he says. He provides for me, he says. He takes care of Lone Wolf, he says.
All of it is absolute bollocks, and I tell him so every chance I get.
He’s a feckin’ control freak. He should call the pope, because it’s a genuine miracle he bothers to have any Lone Wolf employees at all.
He better not try taking me to the dungeon, because I know he’d rather be in his office working alone, every hour of every day of every feckin’ week.
I let him take me to the dungeon.
Because there’s one thing I don’t say when I’m slagging him on the regular, one truth that’s so explosive if I said it out loud, we’d be through. Cole would send me back to Baltimore, divorce me, annul our marriage, whatever it took to keep me away.
I barely whisper the words out loud to myself: Tarasov has the upper hand.
All of Cole’s obsessive work, every single one of our daily fights, is because we’re powerless against the true threat. Tarasov set a deadline. Cole guts the Canton Crew, or my life as CyberGhost is exposed to the authorities. My husband destroys my clan, or he destroys me.
And I’m the one who put him in this position. I opened the feckin’ gate. I let the bratva shitehawk in.
The whole week passes. Seven days of getting used to armed men at the gate, monitoring my coming and going, my visits to Granny, and my strolls about the garden when I can’t stand another second locked up inside the house.
Seven days of living as a billionaire—of tolerating Nilsson as a helpful shadow around the house, of accepting Anna’s delicious meals as something I deserve. Seven days of waiting.
And on Thursday, a few minutes before midnight, I’m standing next to Cole’s desk in his office, watching the seconds wind off a timer in the lower left corner of one of his screens.
“Don’t do it,” I say.
He doesn’t bother answering. He’s spent the day testing his solution. He’s carved out a corner of Da’s sprawling files to open up to Tarasov, a careful selection of the cryptocurrency transactions my father believes will save the Canton Crew.
Cole has insulated the clan as much as possible. He’s diverted funds to other accounts. He’s put up firewalls so high and so strong Tarasov will never be able to cross from the crypto sandbox to truly sensitive matter.
But it’s still a betrayal. A threat. And I’m powerless to keep Cole from damaging my clan.
“Please,” I say, and I hate the begging tone behind the word.
He scrolls through the list of vulnerable files one last time.
“There has to be another way,” I plead.
He puts his finger on the single key that will grant Tarasov access.
“He’s goddamn fucking bratva.” I barely recognize the high pitch of my voice. “If you give him this, he’ll only ask for more.”
Cole reaches out to catch one of my curls that’s gone wild. He twists it around his finger, smoothing it with his thumb. “He’ll hurt you,” he says, his voice gentle.
“Let him!” I wail, because the alternative is admitting Tarasov already has hurt me. He broke me years ago, before I ever had a glimmer of coding or hacking or the goddamn Red Cap Raiders. “I’m a Lynch!” I argue. “I’m supposed to take shite for my clan.”
“Not like this,” Cole says. “Not when I have the power to keep you safe.”
He presses the key.
I pull away so quickly, my hair rips free. I can’t stay and watch Tarasov rampage through Da’s files. I can’t force myself to monitor the damage, to catalog every hit and tell myself I’m lucky because it could have been so much worse.
Stomping upstairs, I try to believe my tears are because I let Da marry me off to such a colossal eejit.
When I reach the second floor, I glare down the hall at our bedroom. There’s no way I’ll sleep with that gobshite tonight. I stomp down the other wing, to one of the perfectly appointed guest rooms that overlooks the garden.
Slamming the door closed, I storm to the window. At the back of the garden, there’s a black-clad guard with a harnessed dog at his side. I don’t want to live in a house protected by paid soldiers. I don’t want to live under threat of the bratva. I don’t want any of this shite.
I yank the curtains closed so hard the cord rips free.
I use the same fury to tromp over to the bed, to slam on the nightstand lamp.
I glare at the painting on the wall, a dark-haired woman in a red-and-yellow dress with a monkey tangled in her skirt.
Her heavy eyebrows meet in a scowl as she mocks my useless fury.
I’m shaking now, my arms and legs trembling like I’m trapped beneath an ice-covered pond. It takes me three tries to tear back the bed’s jade-green coverlet, to pull loose the hospital corners on the flat cotton sheet.
My teeth are chattering. I’m too cold to yank off my hoodie, too cold to strip to my knickers. Instead, I climb into the bed and pull the covers up to my chin and stare at the nightstand lamp and tell myself I should have found a better solution.
I don’t remember falling asleep, but I sit up with a start when the door slams back against the wall. Cole fills the doorway, his face a flat mask.
“No,” he says.
I clutch the bedclothes to my chest. “Go to hell.”
“This is not your room.”
“I know it’s not my room,” I say, as if I’m speaking to a very stupid child. “But it’s the room I’m sleeping in tonight.”
“No,” Cole says again.
I turn my back on him, punching my pillow into place and planting my head.
That turns out to be a strategic error. Cole Wolf is capable of moving in absolute silence. I don’t know he’s crossed the room until his hands tug away the coverlet.
His fingers grip my biceps like he’s trying to forge me into a new woman. I shriek as he drags me to the edge of the bed, a cry that cuts off abruptly as he slings me over his shoulder, a firefighter dragging a reluctant victim to safety.
“Put me down!” I shout, pounding his back with my fists.
He shifts his hands to secure his grip. I kick helplessly as he carries me down the hall. Bellowing like a gutted cow, I fight him every step of the way, until he drops me on our bed with enough force to clack my teeth together.
I immediately scramble for the door. “Let me go!” I howl, as he pins my arms and drives me back to the bed.
“No.”
I jackknife, trying to get past him. This time, his arms find my waist. He lifts me like I’m some sort of loose-limbed doll. My jaw is already set when he deposits me back on the bed, but once I’m there I spit: “I’m sleepin’ alone tonight!”
“No.”
I try to strike him, but he catches my wrist and pins it to my side. I throw my head back, hoping to smash his chin, but he leans out of harm’s way. I raise my knee, going for his soft bits, but he twists and I only bang his hip.
I’m twitching like a rabbit caught in a trap. Tiny, harsh breaths scratch the back of my throat, caught between sobs and screams of frustration. “Leave me the fuck alone!”
“No.”
He says it like a fact, as simple as two plus two equals four. And then his hands close around the hem of my hoodie, pulling it over my head. He strips me out of my yoga pants. His fingers work the hooks of my bra as smoothly as pouring milk. He lets me keep my knickers.
I’m panting when he’s done. I’m exhausted. I watch him shrug out of his own clothes, leaving a pool of black on the bedroom floor—turtleneck, T-shirt, trousers. He strips off his boxers, revealing his cock at half-mast.
“Go on, then,” I taunt, cocking a hip. “I’m your wife, aren’t I? Fuck me now. Fuck me later. I don’t get a say.”
“No,” he says.
His grip is tight on my biceps, pushing me back on the bed. He climbs up beside me, using his weight to bring me down to the mattress. He pulls my stiff body to his chest, a brittle little spoon to his big one. When I don’t yield even a bit, he drapes one arm across my belly.
“I hate you,” I whisper.
“No,” he says, one last time, his lips very close to my ear.
I want to hold myself as stiff as a fireplace poker. I want to scream loud enough to drag in the armed guard from the gate. I want to stiffen my fingers and find every soft, vulnerable fold of his flesh.
But I’m tired to the very bone. And his breathing is so perfectly slow and even. And in my heart of hearts, I know this fight was never against him. I was fighting Tarasov, struggling in a way I didn’t, I couldn’t, years ago.
I’m almost asleep when I realize the nightstand lamp is glowing red through my eyelids.
Even tonight, even when I fought like my life depended on it, when I hated my husband more than I have any night since I said I do, he remembered my terror. He left the light on because I can’t bear to sleep in the dark.
He protected me. He cares.
But he still betrayed my clan, and I don’t know what either of us will do in the morning.