Page 213 of Mile High Ruin

I turn on Vadim. “What did you do?”

His face remains infuriatingly calm. “Relax.”

The word detonates something inside me.

“Don’t tell me to relax while strangers drug my brother and roll him out of his room.”

“He is safe.”

“You don’t know what safe means.”

His jaw tightens. I barely notice because everything I’ve wanted to say to him for months begins coming out at once, all of it dragged loose by the sight of Ethan unconscious while men I don’t know move him toward the corridor.

“You think you can just appear and start making decisions because that’s what you do with everyone else, but he’s not one of your men, Vadim, and he’s not one of your fucking businesses, and you don’t get to decide what happens to him just because you’ve decided you know better than everyone around you.”

“Sloane.”

“No.” I pull against his hand. “You already took away my choices once. You kept me in your house, you decided when I could leave, you decided what I was allowed to know, and now you come here and start doing the same thing to him because apparently everybody becomes property the moment you decide you care about them.”

His fingers tighten slightly around my arm, not enough to hurt, but enough that I notice.

I stare at his hand. Then at him.

“Maybe this is what you do when people become inconvenient. Maybe Camille was easier because you could just shoot her, and maybe I should be grateful you haven’t decided I’m inconvenient enough yet.”

Something moves through his face—a mix of anger and pain. Both gone too quickly for me to be certain.

He leans closer. “It’s good that you finally see me for the monster I really am.”

The words are quiet enough that nobody else hears them.

I know what he’s capable of. I know the things he has done. I know how easily violence fits into his hands.

And I still love him.

That’s the part I accepted only after I left.

Somewhere between hiding in unfamiliar hotel rooms and sitting beside Ethan’s hospital bed at three in the morning, I stopped trying to convince myself that what I felt for Vadim had been fear or obsession or some temporary madness created by proximity.

It was love.

When I found out I was pregnant, I was terrified. I cried until I could barely breathe because I knew exactly who the father was and exactly how impossible it would be to tell him.

But underneath the fear, buried somewhere I felt ashamed to admit existed, there was happiness too. A selfish, private happiness that even if I never saw Vadim again, some part of him would remain with me.

Abortion never entered my mind as a choice I could make. The baby became the one piece of him nobody could take away.

And now he stands in front of me telling me he’s a monster as though I haven’t spent months loving him anyway.

My hand moves before I think. The slap cracks across his face.

Everything around us seems to stop for half a second.

Vadim’s head turns slightly. When he looks back at me, his eyes are furious.

I’ve seen that expression destroy men.

He does nothing. His hand drops from my arm. “Your brother has been taken to the top floor.”