Page 13 of Bratva and Betrayal: Kirill

Drago slows just enough to let me take the lead. I angle toward a vantage point that gives us a clear line of sight into a courtyard without exposing us.

A set of glass doors for the spa ahead slides open with a whoosh, and then she steps through them.

She’s right fucking there, and my world narrows to her slender frame. She’s not a memory. This is not a hallucination. And I’m not dreaming. I’m gawking at the physical body of my wife.

My heart starts to pound so fucking hard I might collapse. Everything around me has been stripped away, and I’m left with only this single point of focus.

Sandrine.

She’s smaller than I remember. Or maybe my angry memory built her up to be too large and untouchable. A monster that could never quite be real again. Her hair falls differently now. It’s shorter. She said she didn’t like how she looked with short hair.

Yet she cut it to look different and lived with a hairstyle she hates to get away from me.

From…

I can’t even say it. It will make me throw up.

Long hair or short, that’s my Sandrine. I see it so clearly now.

I know the line of her neck, the tilt of her head as she speaks, the way her hand lifts absently to brush a strand of loose hair behind her ear. That small, unconscious gesture hits me harder than anything else, because it’s the same, exactly the same as I remember. She’s unchanged by time or distance or whatever lies she has wrapped herself in.

I fucking found you.

The impending confrontation weighs heavy on my heart.

My chest tightens and twists so sharp, so violent, it leaves me breathless. I never thought she was dead. I would have felt it. And Ares Zervas confirmed she was alive by telling me he had her, but that I would never see her again. Being married to Sandrine’s sister is a mess I’m sure he didn’t know he was stepping into.

My original plan blew up spectacularly in my face. Lourdes’s first husband was supposed to give her to me. But he ended up dead. Next, Lourdes married Ares fucking Zervas.

I’ll deal with him next. The only question is: do I wait for my next trip to Winterhall, my gambling club in Manhattan, or do I just drop a fucking bomb on Zervas’s Wall Street office tower?

Something fun to plan later.

“Who is that woman beside her?” I ask Drago, pointing to a brunette walking with Sandrine.

He snaps a photo. “Sending to the team for facial recognition.”

The woman with dark hair steps close enough to Sandrine for their arms to brush. They carry a familiarity and a look of comfort with each other. The brunette says something to Sandrine, and my wife tilts her head to listen, and then she smiles.

She smiles.

But it’s not the wide, reckless curve I remember when she’d see me. I worked hard to make sure everyone in the Midwest was afraid of me. Everyone except Sandrine.

That smile, that warmth I can feel from fucking over here should not exist in a woman who disappeared from me without a word.

“Who is that other woman?” I scrape out, my voice low and wrecked.

“Working on it,” Drago replies, talking on his phone.

The women move further along the path, the sunlight catching in Sandrine’s bright blonde hair. My chest goes tight watching the familiar rhythm to her steps. Then she hesitates. She’s holding on to the brunette’s arm, carefully testing the ground beneath her feet before committing to it.

It’s subtle. Anyone else would miss it. I don’t. She’s having trouble walking.

Marlowe Rehab… Did she get physically hurt?

A fury builds behind my eyes when a man steps into their path. He acts casually, as if he knows them. Both or just Sandrine? Has she known another man all this time?

Jesus fucking Christ, I didn’t even consider that. I am ready to commit mass murder.