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“I’ll take care of it.”

“You’d better,” Kingsley said. “Because if this goes any further, I won’t be the only one who falls.”

The line went dead. I set the phone down slowly.

And took a deep breath.

Things had just gotten a whole lot more complicated.

Not because Sloane was going to try to run. I’d expected that. Hell, I would’ve been disappointed if she hadn’t. She was intelligent, cunning, hungry for control. She was never going to go quietly and just slip into the role of wife like it was a silk-lined cradle. She fought because she needed to. That was who she was.

But now her name was in mouths it didn’t belong in.

Thatwas the problem.

When I took her, it had been personal. When I claimed her, it had been calculated. But now? Now it was public. Now men with too much money and too little spine were whispering her name behind closed doors.

That made thiswar.

The second her name left their mouths, it had stopped being just hers. It had become mine. Sloane Kingsley was no longer a girl with a smart mouth and a bad habit of getting into trouble. She was the future wife of a Morozov, and the city needed to understand what that meant.

It meant she was protected. It meant she was off limits. It meant you didn’t touch her. You didn’t speak her name unless it was with admiration or regret.

I paced slowly across my office, the screens dim behind me, her message to Ghost still burned into the back of my mind.

He thinks he owns me.

No, Sloane.

I knew I did.

And that was exactly why I was going to protect her from herself. From the wolves in this city who smelled weakness and blood and legacy. From her father’s rivals. From every man who saw her fire and thought they could bottle it because they didn’t know what she was. They didn’t know her like I did.

If they came for her—if they dared to make her collateral in some backroom campaign—then they weren’t just insulting her. They were insulting me and threatening what I’d already mademine.

They didn’t realize that I would burn the entire city to the ground before I let anyone use her against me. If they wanted a reminder of who they were playing with, fine. I’d give them one. The Morozovs hadn’t survived Moscow just to be pushed around in Boston.

We’d lost everything once. My parents had died in a car bombing that ripped apart half a street and all of our lives. My mother’s body had been found in pieces. My father’s had been barely recognizable. We were exiled by blood. Marked. Hunted. But we rebuilt. We bled. We earned our place, brick by brick, brother by brother.

Iwould notlose again. Not this city. Not this power. And sure as hell not her. So let her try to run. Let her think she had control. The truth was, when she walked down that aisle wrapped in white silk as she took my name, the whole damn city was going to see her and know she wasn’t a pawn. She wasn’t a scandal. She was a Morozov.

And you didn’t fuckingtoucha Morozov’s wife.

CHAPTER 27

The next day…

Sloane

I expected another quiet day locked in the penthouse.

More surveillance. Another carefully plated breakfast and another tall security guard watching every move I made while Nikolai did whatever Bratva kings did when they weren’t calling you baby girl and taking you apart piece by piece with their bare hands.

I didn’t expect him to toss a navy coat across the bed and say, “Put this on. We’re going out.”

I sat up slowly, rubbing sleep from my eyes. “Where?”

He gave me a look.