Page 44

“Are you kidding me? What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted.

Ivan only ignored me, speeding onto the highway and heading toward the hills. I was furious and kept trying to get him to stop and listen to me, or at least look at me, but my brother was furious too and refused to stop.

We were both red-faced when we pulled through the gates to his mansion.

I was still hollering, and he was still as silent as a tomb.

If I weren’t so riled up, I would have been scared that was where I was headed.

I had seen all of my brothers mad before, many of those times had been directed at me for some foolishness, some of it even deserved.

This was next level, and steam was practically coming out of his ears.

And why, exactly, when he’d understand everything was fine if he gave me two seconds to explain? Instead, he slammed the car into park and raced around to jerk my door open.

“Get out,” he snapped.

“Excuse me?” I asked, crossing my arms. He slowly narrowed his eyes at me, and the front door flew open behind him.

Oh, good, it was his wife, Daria. Finally, a voice of reason. “Did you find her?” she called, face tense with worry.

“I’m fine,” I shouted past Ivan.

Then I scurried around him and ran for her.

She had grown up with one of the most ruthless brothers imaginable.

He made my bossy siblings seem like newborn kittens, so surely she would understand that the way Ivan was treating me was wrong.

And he would listen to her because he was wrapped around her little finger.

Instead of a warm smile and a hug, I got a cold, disappointed look. “I can see that you’re fine,” she said.

“Yes,” I sighed. “Now, can you please make him see reason and just—”

“I’m staying out of it,” she said, retreating up the stairs as soon as we were all inside.

“What? Daria, please—”

“You’re lucky you’re just facing my wrath,” Ivan said, dipping his chin to his chest and pointing at the top of his head. “Look.”

I stood on my tiptoes but couldn’t see any cuts. “What am I looking at?”

“My gray hairs,” he shouted. “From you and all the sleepless nights you caused. All while you were perfectly fine the whole time. And where, exactly? Or were you really gallivanting around all those places we got intel about?”

I cringed inwardly. Apparently, that was how Arkadi kept my location a secret, sending them on wild goose chases. It wasn’t ideal, and I did feel bad about it.

“I can hardly see them,” I said, rolling my eyes at him, trying to play it off as a joke.

He was far from joking, though, and it seemed best to stay quiet about Arkadi for the moment. As if he read my mind, Ivan brought him up anyway, making my heart sink.

“I get if you wanted some time on your own, but how could you be so cavalier when our main rival is still on the loose?” Before I could think of something to say that wasn’t an outright lie, Ivan took my moment of silence as confusion.

“Arkadi Mikhailov?” he needlessly reminded me.

“The one who nearly burned us to the ground a few months ago? The one who’s plotting attacks against us right now? ”

“Bullshit,” I said, stunned at that new information.

He blew out some pent-up air and paced away from me, heading toward the kitchen, where he poured us each a glass of ice water. “Not that you deserve it,” he muttered.

I was about to bring up the Geneva Conventions, but the mere memory of my early days with Arkadi gave me a little tremor.

There was no way that what Ivan said about attacks against us being underway was true.

Yes, Arkadi wanted his properties back, but eventually, through diplomacy. Or so I had thought.

I was already reeling with guilt over the pain I had caused my family.

Daria was barely speaking to me, which meant my other sisters-in-law were probably similarly pissed off.

I loved them so much, happy to have other females to team up with after a lifetime of living in a male-dominated family, and now I might have completely ruined our close friendships.

Ivan had gray hair, for goodness’ sake, and he was as steady as a rock. If I had caused him sleepless nights, my other brothers had probably been making themselves sick with worry, and all this time, I was living in a dream world.

A dream world I completely made up in my head. But no, there was no way Arkadi was going behind my back. If only Ivan would calm down enough to listen to me, I could explain to him that our family was no longer in any danger from the Mikhailov organization.

“The intel must be bad,” I said after he’d had a sip of water and seemed a bit calmer. “Do you even know where Arkadi is right now?”

“Not precisely, but we know every last man who still works for him,” he said. I shook my head, still not believing.

Ivan pulled out his phone and stepped to my side, showing me some pretty sound evidence that there were indeed attacks about to be underway. Every organization had spies, and even if they were low-level grunts and not allowed into any big meetings, things always ended up leaking eventually.

“We only just got this,” he said. “Another day or two, and we would have been completely taken by surprise.”

I grabbed his phone and peered at the surveillance photos more closely, scrutinizing the messages from the man they had on the inside. It seemed legit, much too legit to keep arguing over.

What a damn fool I had been, beginning to trust Arkadi enough to blithely give him the extra time he asked for. The time he was using to once again try to bring my family down. Was anything he said to me real? Did I mean anything to him at all?

It didn’t really matter in the end, did it? I had to put a stop to it.

“You’ve got to let me go,” I said urgently.

“Not likely,” he scoffed.

“I can stop it all.” I grabbed his arm and squeezed, making water slosh out of his glass.

He put it down on the counter with an incredulous look. How could little Mila ever stop a war? I shook him, but he was immovable. A stubborn, scornful rock.

“You know I’m good at negotiating,” I said. “Let me talk to someone in charge on that side.”

“Jesus, Mila, are you the one who’s fucking kidding now? Not when Arkadi’s probably in town.”

“He won’t hurt me,” I said, too quickly. No matter what else I believed, I would bet everything that was true. But how to make Ivan understand without spilling the beans that I’d been with him all this time and he hadn’t harmed a hair on my head.

On the contrary, he rescued me twice and showed me some of the best times of my life in the interim. Yeah, there was no way I could tell Ivan any of that, not when he was glaring at me like he was about to lock me up in one of his torture sheds.

“Can you please listen to me for once,” I said in my most reasonable voice. “I can put a stop to the attacks if you let me go and talk—”

“Enough,” he interrupted harshly. “Just enough. Even if I thought it was a good idea, which I don’t, Aleks would never agree to it. Stay out of it and let the grown-ups do their thing.”

He turned away, leaving the kitchen. He got on his phone like I wasn’t even there. A guard slid into place in the doorway, and I knew the grounds well enough to know I wouldn’t make it past the swimming pool before I was dragged back inside.

Once again, I was a prisoner, but that wasn’t what had my blood boiling in my veins. He had dismissed me, cut me off, and refused to even entertain the idea that I might be able to do what I said I could.

It was a stark contrast to how Arkadi treated me.

How he had treated me since the beginning of our bizarre relationship.

Oh, he was a tyrant at times. Yes, he was bossy and controlling a lot, but he believed I was capable.

Of that, I had no doubt. There were too many instances where he had proved it.

Maybe if I hadn’t gotten so mad and gone silent last night, I could have made him see reason and prevented all of this.

Instead, I went behind his back, and now I was being pushed to the side.

By the same token, I couldn’t exactly expect Ivan to take me seriously when I was hiding so much pertinent information from him.

I was stuck anyway, so I decided to spill the beans. Everything. I gave the guard a look and ducked under his outstretched arm, running after Ivan.

“We’re married,” I blurted. He gave me a blank look. Of course, he couldn’t comprehend who I was talking about. No one in my family would put Arkadi Mikhailov as their first guess. “Arkadi and I are married.”

His face went pale, and he put his hand over his mouth. To keep from screaming? Or throwing up? “That’s not funny,” he said from behind his hand.

“It’s not a joke. It’s true,” I continued. “And he hasn’t been horrible. I’m fine. You can see he hasn’t hurt me. Let me go and meet up with him. I can get it all figured out.”

“You’ve got Stockholm syndrome,” he snapped, turning away from me and going back to his phone call.

It was probably Aleks on the line, so I tried to talk into it. “Tell him to let me go so I can fix this.”

Ivan made a big show of ending the call as he pushed me into the library and pointed toward a chair. “Make yourself comfortable. You’re not going anywhere. And Arkadi’s not getting within a hundred yards of you ever again.”

“You can’t end our marriage,” I snapped. I was still pissed as hell at Arkadi, but willing to hear him out, unlike Ivan.

“Like hell, I can’t.” He turned and started toward the door

“He’ll never allow a divorce,” I said, on the verge of tears but too angry to let them flow.

“Then you’ll end up a widow.” The door slammed behind him, leaving me alone.

I slumped into the nearest armchair. No matter what I said, no matter how hard I tried, my brothers refused to believe I could stop another war.

I swiped away the useless tears, not even sure why I was crying.

So many emotions assailed me that I couldn’t settle on one, but it all boiled down to regret.

Regret so strong it left a bitter taste in my mouth. I wished with all my being that I had never called Ivan, but then I would have been inadvertently complicit in the upcoming attacks. The knowledge of those attacks drilled painfully into my heart, settling like a sharp burr I couldn’t dislodge.

There was no way Arkadi had been plotting all that behind my back.

He had proven in so many ways that he cared for me.

Even when I was little more than a prisoner, fighting him at every turn, he still figured out the perfect date.

Most men would have laughed their asses off if I was the one suggesting going to a designer showroom to do some shopping, but Arkadi arranged it and even asked for a tour.

All I ever wanted was to be understood, listened to, and he did both.

He made me believe that he wanted the kind of marriage that I wanted. No, demanded.

He could have already had his damn empire back if he used me for ransom the moment he first snatched me away from that auction, so why was he going to so much trouble to tear it all down now?

Why make me believe something that wasn’t true?

If he wasn’t being honest, then we had nothing.

Maybe we never had anything to begin with, and it was all a silly dream.

I heard Ivan crashing back and forth outside the door, making plans for a counterattack. Another war that would surely end lives, maybe even his own. Maybe even Arkadi’s.

It took all my effort not to break down while I was held captive in my pigheaded brother’s house, but inside, my heart was breaking into a million pieces.