Page 169 of Marrying the Savage

Even the staff near the door have gone quiet. I look down the table at them and realize Irina has said what the others have been too careful to say.

They don’t understand why Sofia matters this much. They don’t know what it cost me to watch that footage. They don’t know what I keep seeing when I close my eyes.

“You are asking the wrong question,” I say.

Irina’s brows draw together. “What question should I ask?”

“Not what happens if we don’t find her.” I look down the table, at every face turned toward me with varying degrees of caution. “Ask what happens to the men who took her when we do.”

No one speaks.

That answer is easier for them to understand.

It’s easier for me too. Violence has rules. A man takes what belongs to me, I find him. He runs, I close the road. He hides, I burn the room around him. He begs, I decide whether the begging interests me. And this time—the punishment for taking Sofia—is only death.

“I know what it looks like when a man starts losing himself,” she says quietly. “This house has seen it before.”

Elena.

She doesn’t say the name. She doesn’t have to.

My jaw tightens.

Grigori notices. “Enough.”

Irina lowers her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

I sit there for a moment, looking at her, then at the rest of the table.

She is not wrong. That’s the problem. For three days, everything else has stopped mattering. I didn’t choose that logically. I didn’t sit down and decide she had earned this much of me. It happened before I understood it.

Maybe at the restaurant, when she looked at Dmitri like she wanted to stab him with a fork.

Maybe at the wedding, when she agreed to marry me because it was the only way to stop more blood.

Maybe when she stood in my house wearing my ring on black thread and still argued with me like I was only a man, not someone she should fear.

Maybe when she took my hand while the doctor stitched me and pretended it meant nothing.

I don’t know the exact moment. I only know that now she is gone, and the house feels wrong without her in it.

I push my chair back and stand.

Grigori rises halfway. “Damir.”

I look at him. “Stay with your family.”

He stops.

I leave the dining room. I need a minute without people watching me like I’m about to give an execution order. I go to the smaller sitting room near the terrace. It’s quiet there. The fire is low. Maksim’s wooden horse is on the floor near the chair, beside a small soldier with one arm missing.

Sofia played with him here.

Grigori told me Maksim keeps asking when she will come back because they didn’t finish their game.

I pick up the horse and turn it in my hand. It’s just a child’s toy. Scratched wood. Bad paint. One leg chipped. Still, Maksim carries it everywhere.

A few minutes later, Grigori comes in with Maksim asleep against his shoulder. The boy’s fist is twisted in Grigori’s shirt. His face is soft with sleep, his cheek pressed to his father’s collarbone.