57
CORA
My head is encased in cement. Eyes sealed shut. Mouth stuffed with cotton.
I’m not awake, but I’m also not in a dream. I’m in some sluggish middle ground, trapped in my own body.
Then I feel a hand around mine.
Ivan.
His name rises through the muddy waters of my mind before I realize the hand is smooth and small. Nothing like the work-roughened, large hands I know.
Not Ivan, then.
“Cora?” a soft voice says.
Anya.
I struggle against my heavy lids.
“You’re okay,” she reassures me. “You’re okay. Just take your time.”
I lie back and let myself come awake piece by piece. I shake my feet and hands. I take stock of my breathing with deep inhales and exhales to ease the nervous fluttering of my heart.
Finally, I peel my eyes open.
I hiss like a vampire when a beam of light stabs me directly in the eyeballs.
“Oh, shit!” Anya yelps. “Sorry about the window.”
She drops my hand and scurries away and, a second later, the room is dark again.
I try to say something, but my throat is raw.
“Oh, here.” She grabs a water bottle from the bedside table and holds the straw to my lips. “It’s water. No poison. I already checked.” I frown, and she ducks her head. “Sorry. That wasn’t funny. Too soon, probably.”
I gulp water. Drop by drop, I start to return to the land of the living. When I’ve had enough. I hand it back to her. “Wh…what happened?”
She blows a strand of hair off of her forehead. “I’ll give you the short version: don’t drink or eat anything while in public that hasn’t been checked by someone on the security team.”
I clear the hoarseness from my throat. “Maybe give me the slightly longer version?”
“You were drugged. Ivan found you on the bathroom floor of the bakery and carried you outside, but he was stopped by a man with a gun.”
Bits of my dream come back to me. The smell of gunpowder. A bang. Ivan—
“Is he okay?” I rasp.
Anya presses a hand to my shoulder and eases me back into the bed. I didn’t even realize I sat up.
“He’s fine. He was grazed, but it was nothing. The shooter was going after you, not him.” She pulls the blanket over my legs.
As soon as she’s done, I shove the blanket back down and stare at my legs. My bare legs. At the threadbare t-shirt that barely covers the tops of my thighs. “Where did I get this shirt? And—” I look around at the oddly familiar room. It looks so much like mine, but in reverse. “Is this Ivan’s room?”
The furnishings are moodier. Dark blue wallpaper, velvet curtains, and walnut. It suits him.
“And Ivan’s shirt.” Anya nods. “He brought you here so you wouldn’t be alone.”
I fight the urge to bring the comforter to my nose and take a deep breath. “I could be ‘not alone’ in my room.”
“He wanted you close. Very close.” She gives me a warm smile.
I pull the blanket back over my bare legs and cross my arms over my chest. “Did you dress me?”
“Not exactly…” She winces.
“Then who exactly did, Anya?”
She laughs and runs fingers through her hair. “For someone who just woke up from being drugged, you’re surprisingly coherent. I didn’t think I’d be answering so many questions.”
“Anya.”
She holds up her hands. “It was Ivan. But it wasn’t like that. He just didn’t want you to wake up in bloody clothes and he didn’t trust anyone else to do it.”
“You! You could have done it.”
“I wasn’t here yet. Your options were Ivan, Yasha, or Niles. Take your pick.”
I mull it over for all of three seconds before I realize there was no better option. I’d have to go into witness protection if Niles ever saw me naked and Yasha can’t be trusted with that kind of information. He’d tease me about it for the rest of…well, the rest of however long I know him.
I sink down in the blankets, knowing full well Ivan has already seen me naked multiple times. That isn’t even the problem; I don’t care that he saw me naked.
I care that him taking care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself feels far too intimate for this game we’re playing.
“It’s sweet, isn’t it?” I look over to see Anya has stars in her eyes. “I’ve never seen him so protective of someone before. He made me swear I wouldn’t leave you alone before he left.”
“He left? Where did he go?”
If my dream is to be believed, the man who came at us with the gun killed himself. I blink and see him raising the gun to his chin. I hear the shot echo on the bricks.
I shiver.
Anya shrugs. “He didn’t say. But he made me promise to stay here with you. He looked… Well, I’ve never seen him so shaken. Yasha called and told me what happened and he said the same thing. He said that this was different. That you were different.”
Her words poke at the dried-up husk of hope in my chest.
“I just think…” Anya perches on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap. “I think this thing between the two of you is real. More real than either of you will admit.”
I hear whispers in my ear. Gentle words of comfort and care. I feel his arms banded around me, protecting me.
All of that was real. But a future? A life together?
That can’t be.
When I look up, Anya is watching me. Her expression is guarded. Then, as if deciding something, she takes a deep breath. “You know, I was promised in marriage to the heir to a tech fortune. Millionaires on their way to billionaires.”
“Lev?” I ask.
She busts out laughing. “God. No. Lev is…” She smiles, her cheeks glowing pink. “Lev worked for my father, actually. He was on the security team. Lowest level clearance. He couldn’t even buzz himself through our front gate. The guards on duty had to let him in any time he came to see me. Which made it hard to keep our rendezvous secret from my father and my fiancé. As you can imagine, Daddy wasn’t pleased.”
“You cheated?”
She wavers back and forth, a shy smile on her face. “I’d argue that it’s impossible to cheat on someone you never chose to be in a relationship with. I barely knew the guy, let alone loved him. But I loved Lev.”
“Did your dad know that when he set up the engagement?”
She snorts. “Oh, hell yeah, he knew it. My relationship with Lev is why he set up the engagement in the first place. He wanted to force us apart. He actually fired Lev, but Ivan hired him for his personal security team.”
“Why?”
“Because unlike my father, my brother just wanted me to be happy.” Her eyes go glassy, but she quickly blinks the emotion away. “Anyway, that stirred up a whole big brouhaha. My fiancé was threatening to pull out of the engagement and my dad was seriously considering murdering Lev.”
I can’t tell if she’s exaggerating or not, but I have a feeling she isn’t. Based on the little I know of him, Boris Pushkin seems more than capable of senseless murder.
Anya sags, seemingly exhausted by the memory of it all. “Everything was falling apart and I was about to end things with Lev just to protect him. To try to keep him alive and my family from splitting apart at the seams.”
I’m on the edge of my seat now. A happy ending? In this family? Surely not.
“What happened?”
She smiles. “Ivan happened. I went to my father’s office to tell him I was going to break up with Lev and marry the boring billionaire, but Ivan was already there. They were finalizing the details of a new plan. A bargain. Ivan swore that he would take on my burden and marry well for the family if it meant I could marry the man I loved.”
I don’t think I’m breathing. “You’re joking.”
“Dead serious. He made that deal and made my father swear that I would never be disowned. He couldn’t cut me out of the will or pull security from me and Lev. Ivan staked my entire life on one promise: that he would marry someone my father approved of in my stead.”
My stomach hollows out. I hear Boris Pushkin’s sneering voice. Am I supposed to believe both my children have a fetish for the lower classes?
“Ivan never told me that.”
He told me this was all pretend. He told me we would never work. He told me the outcome, but he never explained the reasoning.
“He’d be mad I told you,” she admits. “He doesn’t want to talk about it, but this is my story. This is what I can tell you, even if he would hate that you know.”
“Why would he care that I know?”
If anything, this is an easy out for him. This information makes sense of so many things between us. It’s his ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card—not that he needs one.
“Ivan cares more than anyone knows. More than he shows.” She lays a hand over mine, squeezing gently. “If he reveals even a drop of emotion to you, there’s an ocean of feeling where that came from.”
I’m on an emotional carousel, circling around and around the same thoughts again and again.
But it all comes back to the same place.
My eyes well with tears. Frowning, Anya leans in close. “What’s wrong, honey?”
Before I can answer, the door swings open. Ivan is in the doorway, silhouetted against the hallway light like an avenging angel. He’s as beautiful as he was in any of my dreams with his crown of dark hair and burnished gold eyes.
“You can go, Anya,” he says firmly, never taking his eyes off of me. “Cora needs to rest.”
Without another word, Anya stands up. She pats her brother’s shoulder softly before she closes the door and leaves us alone.