Page 121 of Desperate Crimes
My stomach turns.
My throat tightens.
He’s always intense.
Obsessive. Unrelenting.
That’s the man I fell for.
The one who carved a castle for me out of shadows and silk, who made me feel like I was a queen even when I didn’t ask to be one.
But this?
This is business.
And I don’t know if I’m part of the plan or just the reason it works so well.
My eyes sting.
Don’t cry, Leanna. Not here. Not now.
I try to keep my breathing even, my expression calm.
The way my mother taught me when I was young, when she’d pin my hair back before a recital or big game and say, “Never show them you’re afraid, Lee-Lee. Be cool like ice.”
But even ice cracks under enough pressure.
My mother’s watching me now from her seat across the room, eyes glassy but proud.
Aunt Destiny leans in close, murmuring something. And Nico’s mother—Anna Fury—blesses me with a kind smile, soft and motherly, the kind I didn’t know I needed until it landed.
“Want to sit, sweetheart?” Anna asks gently.
I shake my head before I can think. “No, thank you. I’m okay.”
Liar.
I am not okay.
But I feel Nico’s hand in mine, warm, firm—like a tether.
He doesn’t know what I’m thinking.
Or maybe he does. Maybe that’s why his thumb strokes mine, slow and deliberate.
Maybe it’s why he hasn’t looked at me since he said merger.
I don’t know what this marriage is anymore.
And that terrifies me.
I thought I was falling in love with a man who saw me. Who wanted me.
Not the daughter of Adrik Volkov.
Not a pawn in some glittering corporate chess match.
My father is nodding now, asking more questions, probing numbers and projections, completely unaware that something inside me is breaking.
