I couldn't believe it. Couldn't fucking fathom it.
"I'm right and you know it," Olga said from where she sat in the chair across my desk. She had made a habit of barging into my office lately, ever since she became convinced that my missing wife was back.
My fingers tightened around my glass. Whiskey scorched down my throat, a heat that did nothing to cut through the cold knot in my chest.
She's not my wife. Couldn't be.
She was just a woman who looked like her. Moved like her. Lost her temper like her.
Because Lara had been...different. Gentle. Quiet. With a grief tucked behind her eyes that I recognized the moment I saw her. Three weeks wasn't long, no, but my soul had known her long before that. At least, that was what it felt like.
Isolda Ricci wasn't her. She couldn't be. Even if everything else lined up too neatly.
"Have the lab run the DNA again," I said, setting the glass down with controlled force. "Lara was an ordinary woman. She worked in a bar, for fuck's sake."
"Tri nedeli — eto nichego," Olga shot back. Three weeks is nothing. She switched to English and exhaled hard. "You barely knew her, Alex."
My jaw locked.
I used to be the sensible one. The logical brother. The one who calculated instead of reacted. That was how I had survived when the others didn't. Why, despite being the youngest of three, I was the last one standing.
But ever since that night at the bar, all those years ago, Lara...she was the first person who broke through every rule I lived by. She didn't just bend logic, she shattered it. She made everything I thought I knew about myself slip through my fingers like water.
I thought that part of me had died when she disappeared. That I'd buried it for good.
Until Isolda showed up wearing her face...moving just like her...pulling all these reactions out of me that I had no business feeling.
"Your contacts said she was in an accident," Olga reminded me, her voice slicing clean through the fog in my head. "Memory loss. Vsyo skhoditsya, if you bother to think about it."
I pressed my lips into a hard line and tipped back the rest of my drink. Dawn was bleeding into the sky outside the windows, a dull grey spreading over the estate. I hadn't slept. Instead, I'd wandered into my office around three, finishing the last of the overnight reports, trying to settle my mind with work.
Olga had appeared the same way she always did. Quiet and steady, after her usual morning prayers. She'd been the one who dragged me out of Russia all those years ago. The only reason I was still alive. The closest thing I had to a mother.
And that was why this conversation was dangerous. Because she knew how to see straight through me. She always had.
"Be nice to her, Alexandre," Olga said as she rose from her chair, wood scraping softly against the floor. "You'll regret it if you don't."
"I am nice to her." I turned, just as she reached for the door. Her hair was pulled into is usual severe bun, gray strands catching the thin morning light. Black blouse, long skirt, her usual uniform of discipline.
She lifted a brow. A single gesture that told me that she didn't believe a damn word.
"Not enough, and you know it. I raised you better. Let her warm to you, and maybe you'll stop being so chertovski upryami."
I opened my mouth, ready to tell her I wasn't "fucking stubborn", but the door clicked shut before I could even get a syllable out. So I let out a long breath instead, crossing over to the minibar, and refilled my empty glass from the decanter.
The whiskey burned less this time. But maybe it was just because I was getting used to the heat.
I dropped to my chair, watching as they sky climb from charcoal to silver. I didn't want the light. Didn't want the day to come so soon. Darkness gave me space to think. Daylight only forced decisions I wasn't really ready to make.
My fingers tapped on the space bar, as I loaded the footage of her room on my screen. I wondered what she was up to. If she had waken up. Lara wasn't a morning person. I wondered if she was like her in that same way too. Even if they were the same, I needed to study her first. The kind of person she is, how different she was from Lara.
But the moment the footage sharpened into view, the breath froze in my throat.
I leaned in, too close. Like a teenager looking at porn for the first time. Fuck.
She was doing things to me.
On the screen, she was still asleep. Her dark brown hair spilling across her pillow like a chaotic halo. The white chemise, one of Lara's old pieces, fitting her better than I expected. The white silk clinging to the curve of her waist, slipping over her hips and had ridden high on her thighs as she kicked those sheets away.
She shifted, rolling onto her stomach, still deep in sleep.
But I still could see everything.
The slow grind of her hips against the mattress. Her fingers, long and elegant, tightening on the sheets beside her. Her breath, catching in soft, unconscious pants.
My jaw clenched.
She was dreaming about something. Someone. Possibly me.
A slow, corrosive heat crawled up my spine.
My fingers tightened around the armrest. The small muscle in my jaw ticked. I should have shut the feed off, forced myself back to work, but my body refused to obey. Instead, I found myself standing, crossing the office with a deliberate calm that did nothing to steady the pulse hammering in my throat.
I pressed my palm against the nondescript dark wooden panel on the wall, identical to the rest. A soft click answered me, and the panel slid inside, revealing the narrow, private passageway I had installed years ago. For safety reasons. But no one knew about it. Not even the woman who had just walked out of this room after lecturing me about kindness.
One step inside, and the temperature dropped. Narrow concrete walls. Automatic emergency lights. Silence that hugged too close.
I descended the short staircase until the second hidden door came into view. This one opened directly into the empty walk-in closet adjoining her room. Behind it stood the back of her dresser. A piece custom-built with a removable panel I could slide open without making a sound.
I pressed my head against the wood, forcing myself to breathe evenly before finally unlocking the small interior latch and eased the panel back an inch.
There she was. Closer now. No longer boxed in by security footage.
Her breath hitched again as she shifted on the bed. Her fingers knotting the sheets, her thighs pressed tight together. She's wet. I didn't have to dive my finger between her legs to know. The hem of the chemise already barely covered her lower half.
A sharp, unwelcome sensation twisted through my chest. Possessive. Hunger. Something uglier threaded between the two.
She didn't even know I was here. She didn't know she was undoing me with every unconscious roll of her hips. She didn't know that I was already far past the point of walking away. That the more she pushed, the more she fought, the deeper she dragged me in.
And for the first time since she arrived, the truth settled against my ribs like a vow.
I would have her again. Completely.
And this time, she wouldn't be able to run.