“Why don’t you fly to California and test that theory?” Ivan suggested, his expression turning thunderous. “Or is it easier to say these things when there are computer screens and whole continents to hide behind?”
“You would follow the rules, Vanya,” Nikolai said with a certain grim impatience. “You would fight fair, show mercy. This is who you are.” He shrugged, everything inside of him feeling too sharp, too jagged. “It will be your downfall.”
“Mercy isn’t weakness,” Ivan growled.
“Only good men, decent men, have the luxury of dispensing it,” Nikolai retorted, ignoring the way his brother stared at him. “I wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. You might put me on the ground, but I’d sink a knife in you on my way back up. You should remember that while you’re issuing threats. I don’t fight fair. I fight to survive.”
They stared at each other for an uncomfortable moment. Ivan settled back in his chair, crossing his strong arms over his massive chest, and Nikolai sat still and watchful, like the sentry he’d once been.
“Is this about your new woman?” Ivan asked. Nikolai didn’t betray his surprise by so much as a twitch of his eyelid, much less a reply. Ivan sighed. “I’ve seen the papers.”
“So I gather.”
Ivan studied him for another moment. “She’s not your usual type.”
“By which you mean vapid and/or mercenary, I presume,” Nikolai said coldly. He almost laughed. “No, she’s not. But you of all people should know better than to believe the things you read.”
Ivan’s gaze on his became curiously intent.
“Tabloid games don’t always lead where you think they will, brother. You know that.”
It was Nikolai’s turn to sigh. “And how is your favorite tabloid game gone wrong?” he asked. “Your wife now, if I’m not mistaken. Or so I read in the company newsletter.”
“Miranda is fine,” Ivan said shortly, and then looked uncomfortable, that guilty look flashing through his dark eyes again. “It was a very private ceremony. No one but the man who married us.”
“I understand completely,” Nikolai murmured smoothly. “It might have been awkward to have to explain why your only living family member, the acting CEO of your foundation, was not invited to a larger wedding. It might have tarnished your image, which, of course, would cost us all money. Can’t have that.”
“She’s my family, Kolya.” Ivan’s voice was a hard rumble, his jaw set in that belligerent way of his that meant he was ready to fight. Here and now.
And that really shouldn’t have felt like one of his brother’s trademark punches, a sledgehammer to the side of the head. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Ivan considered that woman his family when he’d so easily turned his back on his only actual blood relation. Or that he was prepared to fight Nikolai—again—to defend her.
And yet he felt leveled. Laid out flat, no air in his lungs.
“Congratulations,” he ground out. Dark and bitter. Painful. “I hope your new family proves less disappointing than the original version you were so happy to discard.”
Ivan wasn’t the only one who could land a blow.
Nikolai watched him look away from the screen, and rub one of his big hands over his hard face. He even heard the breath that Ivan took, then blew out, and knew his brother was struggling to remain calm. That should have felt like a victory.
“I know you feel that I abandoned you,” Ivan said after a moment, in his own, painful way. “That everyone did, but in my case, over and over, when you were the most vulnerable. I will always wish I could change that.”
Nikolai couldn’t take any more of this. Ice floes were cracking apart inside of him, turning into so much water and flooding him, drowning him—and he couldn’t allow this to happen. He didn’t know where it was heading, or what would be left of him when he melted completely. He only knew it wouldn’t be pretty. For anyone. He’d always known that. The closest he’d ever been to melted was drunk, and that had only ever ended in blood and regret.
“It’s only been two years, Ivan.” He tried to pull himself back together, to remember who he was, or at least pretend well enough to end this conversation. “I haven’t suddenly developed a host of tender emotions you need to concern yourself with trampling.”
“You have emotions, Nikolai. You just can’t handle them,” Ivan corrected him curtly, a knife sliding in neat and hard. Deep enough to hit bone. His eyes were black and intense, and they slammed into Nikolai from across the globe with all of his considerable power. “You never learned how to have them, much less process them, so your first response when you feel something is to attack. Always.”
“Apparently things have changed,” Nikolai shot back with icy fury. “I wasn’t aware you’d followed your wife’s example and become no better than a tabloid reporter, making up little fantasies and selling them as fact. I hope the tips of the trade you get in bed are worth the loss of self-respect.”
“Yes, Nikolai,” Ivan bit out, short and hard. “Exactly like that.”
Nikolai muttered dark things under his breath, fighting to keep that flood inside of him under control. Not wanting to think about what his brother had said, or why it seemed to echo in him, louder and louder. Why he had Alicia’s voice in his head again, talking about sex and comfort in that maddeningly intuitive way of hers, as if she knew, too, the ways he reacted when he didn’t know how to feel.
Did he ever know how to feel?
And Ivan only settled back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest, and watched Nikolai fall apart.
“I’m the thing that goes bump in the night,” Nikolai said through his teeth after a moment or two. “You know this. I’ve never pretended to be anything else.”
“Because our uncle told you so?” Ivan scoffed. “Surely you must realize by now that he was in love with our mother in his own sick way. He hated us both for representing the choice she made, but you—” He shook his head. “Your only sin was in resembling her more than I did.”
Nikolai couldn’t let that in. He couldn’t let it land. Because it was nothing but misdirection and psychological inference when he knew the truth. He’d learned it the hard way, hadn’t he?
“I know what I am,” he gritted out.
“You like it.” Ivan’s gaze was hard. No traces of any guilt now. “I think it comforts you to imagine you’re an irredeemable monster, unfit for any kind of decent life.”
You make it true, Alicia had told him, her dark eyes filled with soft, clear things he hadn’t known how to define. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“You think it yourself,” Nikolai reminded Ivan tightly. “Or did I misunderstand your parting words two years ago?”
“If I thought that,” Ivan rumbled at him, “I wouldn’t think you could do better than this, would I? But you don’t want to accept that, Nikolai, because if you did, you’d have to take responsibility for your actions.” He held Nikolai’s gaze. “Like a man.”
I only see a man, Alicia had told him, her dark gaze serious. I see you.
But that wasn’t what Nikolai saw. Not in the mirror, not in Alicia’s pretty eyes, not in his brother’s face now. He saw the past.
He saw the truth.
He’d been nine years old. Ivan had been off winning martial arts tournaments already, and Nikolai had borne the brunt of one of his uncle’s drunken rages, as usual.
He’d been lucky the teeth he’d lost were only the last of his milk teeth.
“I can see it in you,” his uncle had shouted at him, over and over again, fists flying. “It looks out of your eyes.”
He’d towered over Nikolai’s bed, Nikolai’s blood on his hands and splattered across his graying white shirt. That was the part Nikolai always remembered so vividly, even now—that spray of red that air and time had turned brown, set deep in the grun
gy shirt that his uncle had never bothered to throw out. That he’d worn for years afterward, like a promise.
His uncle had always kept his promises. Every last one, every time, until his nephews grew big enough to make a few of their own.
“Soon there’ll be nothing left,” his uncle had warned him, his blue eyes, so much like Nikolai’s, glittering. “That thing in you will be all you are.”
Ivan hadn’t come home for days. Nikolai had thought that his uncle had finally succeeded in killing him, that he’d been dying. By the time Ivan returned and had quietly, furiously, cleaned him up, Nikolai had changed.
He’d understood.
There was nothing good in him. If there had been, his uncle wouldn’t have had to beat him so viciously, so consistently, the way he had since Nikolai had come to live with him at five years old.
It was his fault his uncle had no choice but to beat the bad things out.
It was his fault, or someone would have rescued him.
It was his fault, or it would stop. But it wouldn’t stop, because that thing inside of him was a monster and eventually, he’d understood then, it would take him over. Wholly and completely.
And it had.
“Nikolai.”
Maybe Ivan had been right to sever this connection, he thought now. What did they have between them besides terrible memories of those dark, bloody years? Of course Ivan hadn’t protected him, no matter how Nikolai had prayed he might—he’d barely managed to protect himself.
And now he’d made himself a real family, without these shadows. Without all of that blood between them.
“Kolya—”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this brotherly talk,” Nikolai said, his tone arctic. Because it was the only way he knew to protect Ivan. And if Nikolai could give that to him, he would, for every bruise and cut and broken bone that Ivan had stoically tended to across the years. “I’ve missed this. Truly.”
And then he reached out and cut off the video connection before his brother could say another word. But not before he saw that same, familiar sadness in Ivan’s eyes. He’d seen it all his life.
He knew it hurt Ivan that this was who Nikolai was. That nothing had changed, and nothing ever would.
Ivan was wrong. Nikolai was changing, and it wasn’t for the better. It was a terrible thing, that flood inside him swelling and rising by the second, making all of that ice he’d wrapped himself in melt down much too quickly.
He was changing far more than he should.
Far more than was safe for anyone.
He knew he needed to stop it, he knew how, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to do it. At his core, he was nothing but that twisted, evil thing who had earned his uncle’s fists.
Because he wasn’t ready to give her up. He had a week left, a week of that marvelous smile and the way she frowned at him without a scrap of fear, a week of that wild heat he needed to sample one more time before he went without it forever. He wanted every last second of it.
Even if it damned them both.
* * *
Alicia stood in a stunning hotel suite high above the city of Prague, watching it glow in the last of the late-December afternoon, a storybook kingdom brought to life before her. Snow covered the picturesque red rooftops and clung to the spires atop churches and castles, while the ancient River Vltava curved like a sweet silver ribbon through the heart of it. She listened as bells tolled out joyful melodies from every side, and reminded herself—again—that she wasn’t the princess in this particular fairy tale, despite appearances to the contrary.
That Nikolai had told her the night he’d met her that it would end in teeth. And tears.
The charity Christmas ball was the following night, where he would have that conversation with his ex-wife at last, and after that it wouldn’t matter how perfect Prague looked, how achingly lovely its cobbled streets or its famous bridges bristling with Gothic saints. It didn’t matter how golden it seemed in the winter sunset, how fanciful, as if it belonged on a gilded page in an ancient manuscript. She would leave this city as she’d found it, and this agonizing charade would end. Nikolai would get what he wanted and she would get her life back.
She should want that, she knew. She should be thrilled.
If she stuck her head out her door she could hear the low rumble of Nikolai’s voice from somewhere else in the great, ornate hotel suite he’d chosen, all golds and reds and plush Bohemian extravagance. He was on a call, taking care of business in that ruthless way of his. Because he didn’t allow distractions—he’d told her so himself.
Not foreign cities that looked too enchanted to be real. Certainly not her.
And Alicia was in a room that was twice the size of her flat and a hundred times more lush, one deep breath away from losing herself completely to the things she was still afraid to let herself feel lest she simply explode across the floor like that bottle of wine, practicing her prettiest smile against the coming dark.
None of this was real, she reminded herself, tracing her finger across the cold glass of the window. None of this was hers.
In the end, none of it would matter.
The only thing that would remain of these strange weeks were the pictures in the tabloids, stuck on the internet forever like her very own scarlet letter. There would be no record of the way she ached for him. There would be no evidence that she’d ever felt her heart tear open, or that long after he’d left that night, she’d cried into her mountain of frilly pillows for a scared little boy with bright blue eyes who’d never been lucky or safe. And for the girl she’d been eight years ago, who only Nikolai had ever tried to defend from an attack she couldn’t even remember. No one would know if she healed or not, because no one would know she’d been hurt.
There would only be those pictures and the nonexistent relationship Nikolai had made sure they showed to the world, that she’d decided she no longer cared if her father knew about.
Let him think what he likes, she’d thought.
Alicia had taken the train out for his birthday dinner the previous week, and had sat with her sisters around the table in his favorite local restaurant, pretending everything was all right. The way she always pretended it was.
But not because she’d still been racked with shame, as she’d been for all those years. Instead, she’d realized as she’d watched her father not look at her and not acknowledge her and she understood at last what had actually happened to her, she’d been a great deal closer to furious.
“Will you have another drink, love?” her mother had asked her innocuously enough, but Alicia had been watching her father. She’d seen him wince at the very idea, as if another glass of wine would have Alicia doffing her clothes in the middle of the King’s Arms. And all of that fury and pain and all of those terrible years fused inside of her. She’d been as unable to keep quiet as she’d been when she’d told Nikolai about this mess in the first place.
“No need to worry, Dad,” she’d said brusquely. “I haven’t been anywhere close to drunk in years. Eight years to be precise. And would you like to know why?”
He’d stared at her, then looked around at the rest of the family, all of them gaping from him to Alicia and back.
“No need,” he’d said sharply. “I’m already aware.”
“I was so drunk I couldn’t walk,” she’d told him, finally. “I take full responsibility for that. My friends poured me into a taxi and it took me ages to make it up to the house from the lane. I didn’t want to wake anyone, so I went into the garden and lay down to sleep beneath the stars.”
“For God’s sake, Alicia!” her father had rumbled. “This isn’t the time or place to bring up this kind of—”
“I passed out,” she’d retorted, and she’d been perfectly calm. Focused. “I can’t remember a single thing about it because I was
unconscious. And yet when you saw Mr. Reddick helping himself to your comatose daughter, the conclusion you reached was that I was a whore.”
There’d been a long, highly charged silence.
“He tried it on with me, too,” her older sister had declared at last, thumping her drink down on the tabletop. “Vile pervert.”
“I always thought he wasn’t right,” her other sister had chimed in at almost the same moment. “Always staring up at our windows, peering through the hedge.”
“I had no idea,” her mother had said urgently then, reaching over and taking hold of Alicia’s hand, squeezing it tightly in hers. Then she’d frowned at her husband. “Bernard, you should be ashamed of yourself! Douglas Reddick was a menace to every woman in the village!”
And much later, after they’d all talked themselves blue and teary while her father had sat there quietly, and Douglas Reddick’s sins had been thoroughly documented, her father had hugged her goodbye for the first time in nearly a decade. His form of an apology, she supposed.
And much as she’d wanted to rail at him further, she hadn’t. Alicia had felt that great big knot she’d carried around inside of her begin to loosen, and she’d let it, because she’d wanted her father back more than she’d wanted to be angry.
She’d have that to carry with her out of her fake relationship. And surely that was something. Only she would know who had helped her stand up for herself eight years later. Only she would remember the things he’d changed in her when this was over. When the smoke cleared.
That was, if the smoke didn’t choke her first.
“It’s not even real,” Alicia had blurted out one night, after a quarter hour of listening to Rosie rhapsodize about what a wedding to a man like Nikolai Korovin might entail, all while sitting on the couch surrounded by her favorite romance novels and the remains of a box of chocolates.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s not real, Rosie. It’s for show.”
Alicia had regretted that she’d said anything the instant she’d said it. There’d been an odd, twisting thing inside of her that wanted to keep the sordid facts to herself. That hadn’t wanted anyone else to know that when it came down to it, Nikolai Korovin needed an ulterior motive and a list of requirements to consider taking her out on a fake date.
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