Page 69 of Bratva Bidder
I feel the slap before it lands.
Not physical.
Just words.
But they land all the same.
He narrows his eyes. “So? Who is he?”
“What?”
“The man you’re running to,” he says, louder now. “You think I’m blind? You’re so desperate to get away from me, fromthis, that you’d risk everything just to crawl into someone else’s bed?”
The blood drains from my face.
I open my mouth. Close it again. Then something inside me breaks.
“You think this is about a man?” I shout.
He says nothing, but the smug tension in his jaw answers for him.
I laugh bitterly. “You really think that low of me, don’t you?”
His fists are clenched. “I think you’re not telling me the truth.”
“I’m protecting my children!” I explode, and the words ricochet between us before I can stop them.
Konstantin’s face goes still. Completely blank.
“I didn’t have a choice,” I go on, the dam broken, my voice hoarse. “I did what I had to do to keep them safe. From you. From your world. From the kind of men who buy women like livestock and point guns at everything that moves. I didn’t tell you because I knew what you’d do.”
His jaw flexes, but his eyes—his eyes—they shift.
Not rage anymore. Confusion. Disbelief. A thousand unspoken questions crashing all at once. “What did you say?” he breathes.
I stare at him, heart hammering. “You heard me.”
He’s blinking, slow and uneven. “Children,” he says. “You have?—”
“Two,” I whisper. “Twins.”
And then, quieter still, like it costs me everything?—
“One of them is suffering. Because of you.”
The look on his face is everything. Rage. Confusion. And underneath it, a flicker of something I’ve never seen in Konstantin before.
Fear.
He takes a single step forward, like he’s about to speak, to demand something from me—but I shake my head once.
Just once.
And it’s enough. Because I see it in his eyes. The cracks.
The truth snapping into place behind his silence.
I turn before he can say another word.
