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“Does Alina know?” I ask unsteadily. “That it was self-defense? That you didn’t do it just to avenge your mother?”

His black lashes lower, veiling his tiger eyes. “I don’t know. We’ve never really talked about that night. What would it change? I was twenty-five to his fifty-seven, faster and stronger. I could’ve wrestled the knife away and pinned him down—I didn’t have to murder him.”

“Did you not?” I can see the scene as clearly as if it had happened in front of my eyes, can picture the older version of Nikolai I saw in newspaper photos, fit and strong despite his age… dangerous even without being hopped up on blood and coke. And I can see a twenty-five-year-old Nikolai, thrust into that nightmare of a scene, stunned by his mother’s gruesome death and terrified for his unconscious, bleeding sister.

What would’ve happened if he hadn’t gotten a hold of his father’s lethal knife?

Would his blood have also stained that blade, his body joining his mother’s and sister’s in an unmarked grave in some Russian forest?

“What are you saying?” Nikolai’s voice tightens, his eyes glittering fiercely as his mask slips, revealing the raw, festering wound underneath. “I killed him. My own father. Who cares whether it was in self-defense or not? I wanted him dead for what he did to her. I wanted his blood—my blood—on my hands, and I’m not sorry I have it. Because you see, zaychik, Alina’s right: I am like him. In every way that counts, I am my father.”

My heart feels like it’s being ripped to pieces, his anguish slicing at me as brutally as any knife. How has he been able to contain all this pain inside him? How has it not torn him apart? “No,” I say, my voice steadier with each word. “You’re not your father. And I’m not your mother. Their fate won’t be ours—not if we don’t let it.”

I don’t know when it was during his tale that I understood what drives him, at what point I realized that Nikolai branded himself a monster six and a half years ago—and has since done his best to live up to what he thinks is his nature, to the Molotov blood he views as his curse. Not that there isn’t some truth to his belief. My new family is dark and ruthless, a throwback to the times when violence and might made right. Their relationships merit their own chapter in a book on broken family dynamics, and my husband is a product of that upbringing, his character shaped as much by the tragedy of his parents’ slowly unraveling relationship as its explosive, gruesome end.

Still, he’s not his father. Far from it. And I’m not his mother. She didn’t know her husband’s nature when she married him, wasn’t prepared for a life with a man so violent and ruthless. Whereas I, thanks to my biological father, have been through living hell, and while I can’t say I wasn’t fazed by seeing Nikolai kill the two assassins, finding out what he’s capable of hasn’t changed my feelings—much to my initial dismay.

Merciless killer or not, he is and always will be my lover and protector.

“No?” He grips my upper arms, his fingers like bands of steel. “How will we escape their fate? You already hate me on some level, don’t you? For killing those men in front of you and bringing you back when you begged me to let you go? For forcing you to marry me?”

I hold his fiercely golden gaze, refusing to flinch at the volcanic turmoil I see there, at all the long-repressed emotions that threaten to spill out in a tsunami, wrecking everything in their way. “No, Nikolai.” My voice is soft and steady despite the uneven pounding of my pulse. “I told you, I love you. I don’t hate you. I never could, so I never did—and I never will.”

His fingers tighten, biting deeper into my flesh. “How can you be so sure? You’ve seen what I’m capable of, what I’m like… how I am with you. How exactly am I different from him?”

I fight the urge to shrink away from the pain and rage bleeding into his words. Instead, I ask softly, “Did your father love you and your siblings the way you love Slava? Did he truly love anyone except himself? And I don’t mean his violent fixation on your mother.”

His expression doesn’t change, but I can feel the answer in the subtle slackening of his grip on me, so I press on. “Maybe you are like him in some ways, but not all ways. Not the ones that count. For instance, would you ever hurt me? Really hurt me? I’m talking fists and knives, not being rough in bed.”

He recoils, yanking his hands away. “I’d sooner gut myself.”

“What about Slava? Would you ever come at him with a knife… say, while high or drunk?”