Page 160 of The Enforcer’s Pawn

His thumb moves over my knuckles, tender and warm. “I know.”

The simple answer hurts because he means it. He knows what it is to have the dead stay young in one memory and ruined in another.

I look down at our joined hands.

Dmitri’s thumb stops over my knuckles. “There’s something I kept.”

He reaches inside his coat slowly. When his hand comes out, dark red silk rests across his palm.

My scarf.

For a second, I’m back in Boston. White sheets. Hotel carpet. His side of the bed empty. The morning after. The stupid, sick certainty that I had imagined softness in a man who had never meant to stay.

I stare at the scarf until it blurs.

“You took it,” I say.

“You left it on the chair,” Dmitri says. “Hotel staff could have found it, and the hallway cameras already had enough. I took it because I didn’t want anyone tying you to me. That was what I told myself.”

His face is bare in a way I have never seen.

My fingers tremble when I touch the silk.

“And after?” I ask.

His throat moves. “After, I kept it because I couldn’t make myself let go.”

The winter garden goes quiet around us. My hand closes over the scarf and his fingers underneath it.

39

DMITRI

The winter garden is dim and warm.

Night presses against the glass panes, and Cara sits on the bench near the gazebo, wrapped in a gray coat, with her red scarf gathered in her hands and mine underneath it.

The orange trees stand in large clay tubs beside the stone path, glossy and green under the wall lights. They make the garden feel clean, and I want this moment to stay that way.

I reach into my coat pocket and look at her.

“Cara.”

She studies my face, then the hand I keep closed at my side. “You look like you’re about to say something dangerous,” she says, drawing her coat tighter.

“Maybe,” I say, and my fingers open.

The ring sits in my palm. Plain platinum. One small stone. No family crest, no Volkov mark, no old blood dragged into the setting. Maksim had it brought from his jeweler.

Cara’s hands fly to her mouth.

“Dmitri, I…”

“This belonged to no one before you,” I say.

Her eyes lift to mine, wet already.

“I want you by choice,” I say, keeping my hand open between us. “Every time. If you stay, it has to be yours.”