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It’s Troy. It’s always men like Troy. They find a woman at their lowest and make sure she has nowhere else to go.

I look at Troy, bleeding in his chair, and I want to do the same thing to him. Only with a knife, making him scream with every finger he loses. Every piece I slice off him.

Cora takes a steadying breath, and when she speaks, it takes her visible effort to stay calm. “Your car. It’s parked in the garage downstairs. The keys are taped behind the painting in the bedroom.”

She’s offering me what she thinks I came for to soften an angry man. She’s trying to survive me, because that’s all she knows how to do. She’s been managing angry men her entire life, and knowing this makes me want to put them all through the wall, starting with Troy.

“I’m not interested in my car right now,” I say. I rest my cheek against her temple, reassuring us both that I have her. That she’s okay. “Do you know how I found out everything you’ve been hiding from me?”

Her shoulders go rigid. She’s doing that thing she does when she’s frightened, making herself very small and very still. Turning herself to stone.

“After you left me at that gas station, I called Dragan. I told him I’d lost the asset. He was not pleased. But he also told me something interesting. That Viktoriya Morozova doesn’t have a husband.”

I hear her breath catch sharply.

“No husband. Which made me question who exactly was paying six figures to retrieve her from that basement. Her father, it turns out. A proud man. Old. His eyesight isn’t what it was. I sent him a photograph and he confirmed it was his daughter.”

While Alexei drove, I took another look at Viktoriya Morozova’s social media, and I couldn’t believe I’d ever confused the two women. Beyond a passing resemblance, they’re nothing alike.

“So here we are, printsessa.” My arm tightens around her waist. The possessiveness is irrational, and I don’t care. “My reputation has taken a significant blow. I’m out a considerable sum of money. You lied to me, you made me break every rule I have, and then you drove away in my car and came back here.”

I gently brush the mark on her cheek with my knuckles.

“And he hit you.”

She chose him, and he still found a way to punish her for it.

Cora and Troy both lock their gazes on the gun resting on my knee.

“Please,” she whispers. “Please don’t kill me.”

I hear the fear in her voice that my cold, professional fury is what brought me here, but that receded long ago. I’ve thought about nothing but her for days, and I’m done pretending otherwise.

What brought me here is that she’s mine, and I don’t give up what’s mine.

“Kill you.” I caress her waist gently. “No, Cora. I’m not going to kill you.”

I look past her shoulder at Troy. At this cowardly, bleeding, sweating man who convinced a grieving girl he was her best option. Who hit her the moment she came back through the door.

I raise the gun and aim it between his eyes and watch with cold satisfaction as the last of the color drains from his face.

“I’m going to kill him. My wife can’t be married to another man.”

18

Cora

Idid not just hear that.

My wife.

I sit frozen on Zevran Komarov’s lap while those two words echo around my skull. He can’t possibly mean that, can he? This is the man who handcuffed me, strangled me, and treated me like cargo.

And yet…

My brain traitorously flashes through the wreckage of the last few days. The way his rough thumbs rolled up the cuffs of my sweats so I wouldn’t trip. The searing heat of his touch against my bare skin. The mind-blowing devastation of what he did to me upstairs at Lorenzo’s.

And that kiss in the moonlight, undeniably passionate and intimate, with more than a little possession in his gaze and the way he held me. Enough to send my heart racing and make me wish I believed in true love.