10. Aleksandr
ALEKSANDR
Iwake slowly, dragged from sleep by a dull, unfamiliar soreness threaded through my muscles, pulling at places I haven’t strained in far too long. It’s a deep, satisfying ache. The kind earned through exertion I haven’t allowed myself to indulge in for years.
For a moment, I don’t move.
I simply lie there, staring up at a ceiling that isn’t mine, letting my senses crawl their way back to awareness. Afternoon light slips past her curtains and washes the room in a golden gold that feels almost obscene given what happened here.
The air is still faintly scented with sex and her.
A scent I never planned to get used to, yet has already filled something in me I didn’t know had ever been empty to begin with. My hand curls reflexively around the sheets as I turn my head toward the other side of the bed.
She’s still asleep beside me. Her hair is scattered in a dark halo across the pillow under her cheek. Her lips are parted slightly, breath soft and even as she rests. Without the fire in her eyes, she looks almost angelic.
Dangerous in a completely different way.
A quiet huff escapes me as I drag a hand down my face, amusement and disbelief waring inside my chest. A woman half my age, and she’s managed to exhaust me so thoroughly that the idea of getting up feels like a chore.
If the men in the Pact could see me now—someone who once went nearly seventy-two hours without sleep in the middle of a territorial war—brought down by one morning spent in bed with his wife, they’d never let me hear the end of it.
The irony is not lost on me.
Had this been reckless? Absolutely.
Overly indulgent? Without question.
A violation of every boundary and rule I’d set for myself where she was concerned? Yes to all of them.
But regret?
Not even remotely.
If anything, the memories alone drag a slow, satisfied smile across my mouth. The way she buckled beneath me, clung to me as she said my name like it wasn’t a threat to wield against me but a plea for more, more, more. It has been a very long time since I allowed myself something so… primal.
So undeniably mine.
Last night changed the terrain between us, I know that with bone-deep certainty.
Whatever this marriage was meant to be—a political mechanism to use her for my own benefit, a leash to keep her father in line—the ink on that paper that had been meant to bind her to me in name only isn’t that anymore.
It’s real now.
If she were to look at me with even a fraction of the desperation she did when I was buried inside her this morning, I know with humiliating clarity I would fold completely to whatever she wanted no matter the demand or cost it would take to give it to her.
I linger beside her a few more minutes, using the time to memorize the soft curve of her shoulder beneath the sheet and the faint marks I left on her neck. She shifts slightly in her sleep, her knees drawing up slightly from the soreness between her legs.
I let out a slow breath. I want her so goddamn badly.
Reluctantly, I force myself out of bed instead of moving closer to her.
The cool air hits my skin and snaps some discipline back into me.
I gather my clothes from where they were strewn across the floor, moving with the quiet practice.
As much as I want to give in to the baser instinct screaming at me to climb back into bed with her and wake her up with my face between her legs, the sun tells me I’ve slept far past my usual schedule.
By now, both of my lieutenants have likely already begun our usual work.
If this were any other day, I’d send word to them to handle our operations in my absence.
They’ve been trained for that extensively, to the point of running our Bratva at the possibility of my death, imprisonment, or temporary disappearance.
However, today is unfortunately not one I can afford to slack off.
Malyshko’s covert threats still bother me.
More than I care to admit. More than I should allow in all honesty. And after what shifted between Katerina and me this morning, they matter even more. Because for the first time in a very, very long time, I have something that can be taken from me.
Something I am not at all prepared to lose.
I bend to retrieve my shoes, reaching under the bed to where I must have kicked them off in my hurry to undress myself. My fingers touch the cool leather, my eyes darting up just as something strange catches my attention.
A sliver of black is tucked just beneath the mattress boards, concealed enough that only someone down on the floor would notice it.
Curiosity hones into focus without a second thought. I crouch and reach under the bed and close my hand around it. It resists for a moment from how it’s wedged before slipping free into my grasp. When I turn it over, realization clicks coldly inside my mind.
A burner phone, made obvious by the simplicity of the model and the cash-only bought, nearly untrackable SIM card I find sitting inside the back slot.
For a second, I simply stare at it.
I turn the device slowly in my hand, letting the weight of it settle into my palm. This isn’t a model I give to my men in the field. They use encrypted devices—tested, monitored, rotated every month to keep our secrets from falling into the wrong hands.
This? It’s civilian trash. The kind used by journalists and panicked men trying to hide affairs from their wives.
Someone who believes they’re smarter than the network the Pact owns would believe something store-bought with cash could allow them full anonymity.
There is no possibility that she acquired this from anyone under my command.
None.
Which means she brought it here herself to use for reasons I was never meant to discover.
A quiet, cold ripple moves through me.
Surprise is a luxury I learned to outgrow years ago.
By twenty, I knew better than to let it show.
By thirty, I couldn’t afford to let it fester.
By the time I took my seat at the head of my Bratva’s table five years later, surprise was nothing more than a liability disguised as emotion I buried along with the rest of my family.
Yet the faint jolt, subtle but undeniable, sets my teeth on edge.
Interesting.
Very, very interesting.
I don’t wake her when I rise to my feet. For a man trained to move without a sound like I am, it isn’t difficult. Her breathing remains slow and steady, each gentle breath tugging at something deep in my sternum that I can’t name.
For a moment, I simply stand there and watch her.
This burner phone tells me one of two truths. Katerina is hiding something from me that she believes is worth the risk of her life if I were to ever find out, or her father’s influence is still reaching her from behind my walls.
Neither possibility sits well with me.
The first speaks to betrayal, the second a threat. Both point to possibilities that present an opportunity to take something from me now that I’ve finally admitted to myself that she is mine in ways I never intended but refuse to double back on.
I breathe in slowly, tucking the phone into my pocket. I take a final moment to look at her, to memorize the quiet curve of her lips and the softness of her expression that she will never show me awake, and leave quietly.
Downstairs, Bashir is the one who finds me first.
He rounds the corner into the foyer with a pace far too quick to suggest he’d happened to walk by at that exact moment.
The moment he sees me, his face twists to irritation first, then relief, then back to irritation all over again from being reminded that I’ve been MIA since we arrived back at the estate.
“Where the hell have you been?” he snaps.
On any other day, I would reprimand him for it.
Forgetting his place long enough to speak to me like someone who assumes I owe them an explanation is the exact kind of insubordination I do not tolerate from any of my men.
A tone like that from anyone else would earn a correction he’d remember for months.
Today, I ignore it completely.
“Do you have a handle on all our accounts today?” I ask, already moving past the irritation vibrating in his posture.
He blinks, confusion breaking through his annoyance for a second. “Yes, but—”
I nod once. “Good. You’re in charge of them until further notice.”
He blinks again, harder this time, as if trying to confirm whether he actually heard me correctly or not. His mouth parts, disbelief overtaking the earlier irritation altogether. “Pakhan—wait. What? What do you mean until further notice?”
His tone edges toward mild panic, but I don’t slow as I step around him and head for my office.
For the first time in years, the Bratva will have to run on autopilot for a few hours because I have more pressing matters to attend to that involve a wife who may or may not be feeding sensitive information beyond my walls.
I seal myself inside my office, twisting the simple lock that no one in this house would ever dare attempt to pick unless they had a death wish. The click echoes quietly in the room, punctuating the shift in me as I cross the room toward my desk.
This space is the only place in the estate where I allow myself to think like a true beast instead of a human being.
It takes time to break into it.
Not much, but enough to tell me someone tried to be careful about whatever contents are on the device. The phone is locked down well enough to deter an ordinary snoop, but not well enough to stop someone like me.
Methodical patience has served me better than brute force many times in the past before now. The world assumes violence solves everything, and while that is true in most cases, the art of skill is usually forgotten as a very real secondary option.
When it finally yields, the screen flickers to life.
I scroll through the only text thread on the device, my jaw hardening with each message as I start from the very first one and work my way to the present. Detailed notes, painstakingly thorough, fill the screen.