Chapter Eighteen - Dimitri
The change starts small.
So subtle I almost miss it. Almost.
The morning after the event, Janice emerges from the guest suite where she spent the night.
I’m in the kitchen, pretending to read the news on my tablet while actually waiting for her to appear. She moves through the space like I’m not there—pours coffee, examines the fruit bowl, stands by the window with her back to me.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Morning.” No inflection. She takes her coffee and disappears back down the hallway.
I tell myself she needs time. That last night’s confrontation was intense and she’s processing, adjusting, working through the anger I’d seen blazing in her eyes when we got home.
By day three, I’m not so sure.
Janice moves through the penthouse like a ghost. Present but untouchable. She responds when spoken to directly, maintains perfect politeness, never gives me reason to call her out on anything specific.
She never, ever seeks me out.
The mornings are worst. She wakes before me now—I know because I hear the guest suite door open, hear water running in that bathroom instead of ours. By the time I’m up, she’s already dressed and occupied with something that doesn’t require my presence.
Once, I find her in my study, going through books on Russian history with the kind of focus that suggests genuine interest rather than performance.
“Learning the language?” I ask from the doorway.
She startles slightly, then smooths her expression. “Trying to understand the culture. Seems relevant.”
“I could teach you. If you’re interested.”
“That’s kind, but I prefer to learn independently.” She closes the book, stands. “Excuse me. I should start getting ready for dinner.”
It’s two in the afternoon.
She leaves before I can point that out, slipping past me in the doorway with careful distance maintained between our bodies.
I watch her go, replaying the interaction. Polite. Appropriate. Completely devoid of the fire that usually sparks between us.
Felix notices during our afternoon meeting.
“You’re distracted,” he observes.
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve read the same paragraph of that contract three times. You’re not fine.” He leans back in his chair. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re a shitty liar.”
“She’s pulling away.” The admission comes out more raw than intended. “Janice. She’s… distant.”
“Distant how?”
“Every way that matters. She doesn’t argue anymore. Doesn’t challenge.” I stop, unwilling to voice the rest.
Doesn’t look at me like I’m the only thing in the room that matters.
Felix is quiet for a moment. “You humiliated her in front of the entire Bratva. What did you expect?”
“Anger. Fury. Fighting. Not this withdrawal.”
“Maybe that’s her way of fighting. Strategic retreat instead of direct confrontation.”
“Or she’s planning something.”
“Like what?”
Good question. One I’ve been asking myself for three days while watching her maintain perfect distance.
“I don’t know. That’s what concerns me.”
Felix closes his laptop, giving me his full attention. “Do you want my honest assessment?”
“Always.”
“You broke something. That night at Damien’s estate, when you dragged her out, told her she couldn’t have friends—you broke whatever fragile trust was building. Now she’s protecting herself the only way she can. By not caring.”
“She cares.” I’m certain of that, at least. “She’s just hiding it.”
“Why?”
“Caring gives me power over her. She’s decided to take that power back.”
The analysis feels right even as I voice it. Janice isn’t broken or defeated. She’s regrouping. Building walls I can’t easily breach because they’re not made of anger or fear; they’re made of deliberate indifference.
The most effective defense against someone who thrives on reaction.
“So what are you going to do?” Felix asks.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You could apologize.”
“For what, protecting what’s mine?”
“For the way you did it. For not giving her any say in the rules you’re imposing. For treating her like property instead of—” He stops.
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of someone you care about.”
The words hang heavy between us. I want to deny them, want to maintain the fiction that this is all strategy and possession and nothing softer.
Felix is right. I do care. More than is safe, more than is smart, more than I know how to admit without revealing vulnerabilities I can’t afford.
Janice knows it. Has to know it, given how I react to her, how I lose control when other men so much as look at her wrong.
Which makes her withdrawal even more devastating.
She’s weaponizing the one thing I can’t defend against—her own absence.
***
Day five, and I’m reaching my limit.
I find her in the library—a room she’s claimed as her own over the past week. She sits curled in the window seat, afternoon light painting gold across her hair, absorbed in whatever she’s reading.
She looks peaceful. Beautiful. Completely content without me.
“We need to talk,” I say.
She glances up, expression carefully neutral. “About?”
“This. Us. The fact that you’ve barely spoken to me in five days.”
“I speak to you every day. This morning, I said good morning. Yesterday, we discussed the dinner menu. I’m not sure what else you need.”
“Don’t.” I cross the room, stopping a few feet away. Close enough to see her pulse jump at her throat, far enough that she can’t accuse me of crowding. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t know what you want from me, Dimitri.”
“I want you to look at me the way you did before the event. I want you to argue with me, challenge me, show any emotion besides this polite distance.”
“You made your expectations very clear. I’m allowed no friends and no autonomy.
You want perfect obedience to whatever rules you decide to impose.
” She sets her book aside, finally meeting my eyes.
“I’m giving you exactly what you asked for.
A wife who doesn’t cause problems. Who stays in her designated space and doesn’t embarrass you in public. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“What did you want, then? For me to be grateful? To accept ownership with a smile?” Her voice remains calm, but I hear the edge underneath. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t cage me and expect me to sing.”
“I’m not trying to cage you.”
“Yes, you are. You just don’t like how it looks when I stop fighting the bars.”
The accuracy stings. She’s right—I pushed too hard, demanded too much, and now I’m facing the consequences of getting exactly what I insisted on.
Compliance without connection. Obedience without fire. A wife who’s learned that the safest response is no response at all.
“I don’t want this,” I say quietly. “This version of you. This… absence.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You. The real you. Angry, defiant, challenging, I don’t care. Just not this.”
Janice stands, and for a moment I think she’s going to walk away again. Instead, she steps closer, close enough that I can smell her perfume, see the gold flecks in her hazel eyes.
“You want me real?” she asks. “Fine. I’m furious. I hate that you control every aspect of my life. I hate that I can’t have friends, can’t make decisions, can’t exist without your permission. I hate that you treat me like property while expecting me to respond like I’m cherished.”
“Not this again.”
“I’m not finished.” Her voice stays level, which somehow makes it worse.
“Most of all, I hate that I still want you. That my body doesn’t care how you’ve caged me.
That I lie awake in that guest room thinking about you instead of planning how to escape.
I hate that you’ve made me this—this person who wants her captor. ”
The confession lands like a physical blow.
“We’ve been over this. It’s for your own safety.”
“So you say. It’s all bullshit.” She steps back, rebuilding distance. “Now you’ve heard the real me. Are you satisfied?”
No. I’m not satisfied. I’m furious and aching and desperate to close the space between us and make her understand—
Understand what? That I’m terrified of losing her? That I’d rather have her fighting me every day than accepting this hollow version of marriage?
“Come back to our room,” I say instead.
“Why?”
“I miss you.” I stop, searching for honesty. “I made a mistake, and I’m trying to fix it.”
“By asking me to share your bed again?”
“By asking you to give me another chance. To let me prove that I can be more than the monster you think I am.”
She studies me for a long moment, and I can’t read what’s happening behind her eyes.
“One condition,” she says finally.
“Name it.”
“Diana. I want permission to maintain contact with Diana. Not just texts, actual friendship. Coffee, phone calls, someone outside this world who knows who I was before I became Mrs. Rudenko.”
Every instinct screams at me to refuse. Diana is a vulnerability. A connection that can be exploited. A crack in the armor I’m trying to build around Janice.
She’s also the difference between getting my wife back and watching her retreat further into untouchable distance.
“Fine. Diana only. No one else.”
“Agreed.”
“You come back to our room. Tonight.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Janice.”
“I’ll consider it,” she repeats, and this time there’s a hint of the fire I’ve been missing. “You asked for a real answer. That’s my real answer. You don’t get to command compliance and then complain when I use the same strategy back.”
She’s magnificent when she’s defiant.
I reach for her before I can stop myself, pulling her close despite the tension still humming between us. She stiffens but doesn’t pull away.
“I apologize,” I say against her hair. “For the way I handled your friend. Perhaps I should trust in you a little more, instead of…”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of assuming the worst. I don’t want to lose you.”
She pulls back to look at me, surprise flickering across her face. “You’re afraid of losing me?”
“Terrified.”
“Why? You have all the power here. I can’t leave. Can’t divorce you. Can’t do anything without your permission.”
“Control doesn’t mean anything if you’re just waiting for the first opportunity to escape.”
Her expression softens fractionally. “I’m not planning to escape.”
“Aren’t you?”
She doesn’t answer. Just looks at me with those too-perceptive eyes that see through every defense I construct.
“Come to bed tonight,” I say. “Let me show you that I can give you more than rules and restrictions.”
“What happens if you mess it up again?”
“Then you go back to the guest suite and I figure out how to live with the consequences.”
Janice searches my face like she’s looking for deception. Whatever she finds must be enough, because she nods once.
“Okay. Tonight.”
She leaves the library, and I’m left standing in afternoon light, trying to process what just happened.