Page 80 of Savage Bratva King

I don’t dare argue with her. Olga in a foul mood could make Leonid resemble an angel in a white robe with a halo hovering above his head.

I spend hours sitting at the breakfast island in the kitchen, the dogs at my feet, and Leo’s tablet in front of me, scrolling through endless websites for a wedding gown. I haven’t seen anything I like, or at least I haven’t seen anything that I want to wear, and I’m panicking because I’m running out of time.

“At this rate, it might have to be the oversized T-shirt.” I peer down at Lucky who is balancing her front paws on Marvel’s chest so that she can get closer to me. “Maybe we could get matching T-shirts, huh? What do you think?”

“Are you asking me?”

I didn’t hear Tamara sneaking up behind me—I swear the woman flies in on an invisible broomstick—and I reflexively lock the tablet and turn it over so that she can’t see what I was doing.

“I was talking to the dogs.” I go to stand up, but she stops me by grabbing hold of my left hand. I try to wrench it free, but her grip is like metal.

“You’re wearing Grandmama’s ring.” She says this as though she has claimed Leo’s family for herself, and a jolt of something icy stabs at my heart.

“You knew about the ring?”

“Of course.” She releases my hand, climbs onto the next stool, and gestures for me to sit. “It was Elena’s before you came along.”

Elena?

“W-who’s Elena?” I feel numb. The question formed on my lips before I could stop myself. I don’t want to know who Elena is.

But it’s obvious from the casual smile on Tamara’s face that she can’t wait to tell me. “Elena was the pakhan’s fiancée. I’m not surprised that he hasn’t mentioned her. Everyone loved Elena.”

“I…” I swallow.

Leo didn’t think to mention that he was engaged to be married to someone else. Neither did his sister. It shouldn’t matter—it was before he met me—but the twisting, sickly feeling in my gut is telling me that this is important.

This is a big fucking deal.

This isn’t like my family arranging my marriage to Seamus. Leo loved another woman enough to propose to her. She probably sat right here with the sunlight glinting off the diamond on her finger, arranging her high-profile wedding to the man I love, and I never knew. I thought I was the first.

No, it isn’t even not being the first woman that Leo proposed to that’s eating away at me. I thought—no, I convinced myself—that he was somehow broken before we met. That he was married to the family business and that I’d woken up something inside him that, until now, had remained dormant.

I feel such an idiot, that my voice trembles when I ask, “What happened to Elena?”

Like Tamara might tell me that she changed her mind and went backpacking around Asia, or she got swallowed up by an earthquake, or she fell off the side of a mountain and her body was never found. Each hopeful scenario more brutal than the last.

“She left the pakhan when she discovered that he was cheating on her.”

And there it is, the bombshell that shatters my heart into a million tiny, bloody shards.

“I’m sure he learned his lesson though, and it won’t happen again.”

She’s still talking. Why is she still fucking talking? I look around for something to shove so far down her throat that they’ll have to pick the pieces out of her butthole when they find her. But a banana isn’t going to do the trick, and I don’t know where Olga keeps the rolling pin.

I climb off the stool, narrowly missing Lucky’s front paw with my foot, and bend down to pick her up when she lets out a heart-wrenching whine.

“I’m sorry, baby.” I nuzzle her face and kiss the top of her head. “I won’t hurt you.”

Whatever I’m feeling right now is nothing compared to how Marvel and Lucky must’ve felt when they were mistreated and left to die by the humans they trusted. It’s nothing compared to what Hope and the other women I met in the refuge experienced at the hands of their abusers.

I’m not Elena. Leo would never cheat on me; I feel it deep inside my chest whenever I’m with him. He isn’t an actor. No one could fake the way he is with me. It’s unfair for me to accept Tamara’s word that this is what happened without giving him the opportunity to explain.

That’s what I’ll do. I’ll try to suppress the kernel of simmering disquiet settling in the pit of my stomach until I’ve spoken to Leo. There are only two people who really know what happened between him and Elena, and one of them will be sharing his bed with me tonight.

“We meet at last.”

I don’t recognize the voice, or the face of the man it belongs to.

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