Page 74 of Twisted Fate

"You look beautiful," he says, pulling out my chair. He leans in to brush his mouth over mine, and I feel a jolt of desire, my chest tightening at the sensation. It doesn’t just feel like lust… it feels like something else, too. Like affection, the same thing I saw in his face. Like being glad that I’m here, at lunch, with him, and not anywhere else in the world.

"Thank you." I sit, arranging my dress carefully. "You clean up awfully well yourself.” I smile faintly at him, before looking around. “This place is lovely."

It really is. The deck that we’re sitting on is fairly large, with bistro-style tables scattered across it, intentionally spaced, the water stretching out around us on all sides. There’s a low hum of conversation, and the day is perfect—hot, of course, but with a breeze coming off the water and not a cloud in the sky.

"I thought you'd like it." He takes his seat across from me, signaling for the waiter. "The seafood here is exceptional."

“My favorite.” I order a glass of white wine when the waiter comes to get our drink order, and a Caesar salad to start. Twenty minutes later, our entrées come out—grilled salmon with honey miso glaze and wild rice for Konstantin, and scallops over risotto for me.

He looks up at me as he reaches for his water. “You seem distracted,” he comments, taking a sip. “Are you alright?”

I realize I haven’t said much. Konstantin filled me in on his surprisingly ordinary morning, and I think I nodded in all the right places, but I wasn’t as present as I usually make sure to be.

“Still thinking about last night,” I say with a smile, and it isn’t entirely a lie. “And this morning.”

Konstantin’s eyes darken, his lips curving into a smile that’s both satisfied and predatory all at once. “You like it when I do what I please with you.” It’s not a question—we both know the answer isyes. It’s evident in the way I respond to him, every time.

I can feel myself blushing. It’s a startling sensation. No one has ever made me blush before, but the memory of Konstantin’s hand beneath my skirt in the club, making me come on his fingers as we danced in the crowd of people?—

No one has ever done that to me before, either.

I nod, biting my lip. “I’m never going to be able to ride in that car again without getting turned on.”

He laughs, and it’s genuine—maybe more genuine than I’ve heard from him before. I wonder how often he really laughs like that. "I'll never be able to drive it without thinking of you bent over the hood."

My blush deepens. “Maybe we should do the same with all my cars,” he adds, a wicked gleam in his eye. “Or maybe all but one, just so I have an option if I don’t want to drive around permanently hard.”

“Konstantin!” I stifle a laugh, and his eyes gleam with mischief.

“What?” He shrugs, taking a bite of his fish. “I’m just being honest with my wife.”

Wife.The word hits me like a physical blow, in a way that it hasn’t before. I am his wife, legally at least. But everything about our marriage is built on lies. My name, my past, my intentions—all fabricated. The only real thing between us is the desire, the connection I never expected to feel.

“I’ve been thinking,” he continues, glancing up at me. “Since we came home, really.”

Home.I swallow hard. “About what?” I manage to keep my voice surprisingly neutral.

Konstantin pauses. “For years,” he begins finally, “I’ve tried to change my father’s mind, to make him see things the way I do. To get him to allow me to start carving a path toward the changes I want. It’s never worked. And I’d started thinking about making my own inroads, about trying to build something of my own, on my own—connections, business, whatever I can—that will be the foundation for what I want after he’s gone. Things he might not notice, but that I can build on later.”

I nod, my chest tightening as I look at him. There’s a gleam in his eyes, a passion, that I can’t help but be drawn to. This isa man who believes in what he’s saying. Whofeelsdeeply about what’s happening, and what he wants.

“I had these ideas already,” he continues. “But after we talked last night—I think that will be my focus, as much as I can manage. I’m done trying to change his mind, done trying to make him understand me.Youunderstand me. I can see it, and it made me realize what it feels like to have someone look at me and see what I’m trying to do. I’m going to build what I can—the new alongside the old, until the old is gone, and then I’ll branch off from there.” He pauses and reaches across the table, his fingers brushing mine. “I want to build something that will last, even more so than the Abramov family already has. Something I can be proud of. Something that makes me feel that I haven’t only caused pain in my life.”

He doesn’t need to say that this vision includes me. I can see it in his eyes, in the look on his face, the earnestness and pride and caring written there. It’s a look that’s dangerously close to a word that I’m too terrified of to even allow myself to think it, and I close myself off to it abruptly, like doors and windows slamming shut in my mind.

But shutting it down doesn’t change what he feels. What I feel. We don’t have to put a name to it or say it out loud for it to be true.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter.

I’m going to kill Konstantin Abramov, sooner or later.

I squeeze his hand, swallowing hard. “You can do it,” I tell him, lying through my teeth, because I know he won’t live to see his dream realized. “I believe you can.”

I’ve never thought of what I’m destroying before, when I kill someone. Of the hopes and dreams and plans and futures that all die with them. They’ve all been despicable men before, so I guess I never thought that any of that was worthwhile. It was better that it all died too.

But it feels like I’m killing more than just a man, now. I’m killing a future. Potential.

Maybe a dream of my own, too.

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