Page 28 of Arranged Marriage to the Brutal Bratva King
Another lie. I know exactly why. This isn’t business. This isn’t coincidence. Dimitri Rudenko knows what I did four years ago, and he’s just maneuvered me into a position where I can’t avoid him.
Whatever this is, it’s deliberate.
I’m already trapped.
“You need to tell Marcus,” Diana says. “Tell him you have a conflict of interest, that you can’t work on this account.”
“Say what? That I had a brief relationship with the client four years ago and then published an anonymous exposé that nearly destroyed his empire? That’ll go over great.”
“Better than whatever he’s planning.”
She’s right. I know she’s right.
“I’ll handle it,” I say instead.
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Diana studies me for a long moment, then sighs. “Be careful. Men like him don’t forget, and they don’t forgive.”
She leaves, and I’m alone with my laptop and the contract notification and the crushing certainty that I’ve just walked straight back into the orbit of the only man who’s ever had the power to completely destroy me.
Chapter Eight - Dimitri
I didn’t expect her back.
Four years. Four years of searching for the ghost responsible for nearly dismantling everything I’d built, and she’s sitting in that boardroom like she owns the air in it.
She’s older, wearing professionalism like armor that doesn’t quite hide the woman underneath.
Janice Woods.
The name had appeared on the team roster Marcus sent over, and I’d stared at it for a full minute before my brain processed what I was seeing. It’s a common name. Could be a coincidence. Could be someone else entirely.
It wasn’t.
I knew the second I walked into that conference room and her eyes met mine. Recognition flashed across her face—shock, then fear, then something that looked like resignation. She recovered quickly, I’ll give her that. Smoothed her expression into careful neutrality and squared her shoulders like her entire world hadn’t just tilted sideways.
Mine had.
The meeting was supposed to be reconnaissance. Assess the firm, determine if they had the strategic capability to rebuild our public image after the exposé’s lingering damage. Standard business.
Then I saw her, and standard business became impossible.
She’s different. Not just older—though four years shows in the confidence of her posture, the way she holds herself without apology. Her body has filled out slightly, curves more pronounced in ways that make my hands ache with musclememory. The soft slope of her hips in that pencil skirt, the way her blouse pulls across her chest when she leans forward to take notes.
It’s more than physical. There’s a sharpness to her now, a guardedness that wasn’t there before. The girl who’d challenged me about gentrification with idealistic fervor has been replaced by a woman who understands exactly how the world works and has made peace with participating in it anyway.
It makes her more dangerous, not less.
I watch her throughout the meeting, cataloging every detail. The way she twists her pen when Marcus talks too long. The slight tension in her jaw when I address her directly. The careful neutrality of her expression that doesn’t quite mask the pulse hammering visibly at her throat.
She’s terrified. Good. She should be.
When she speaks—defending narrative construction with the same intelligence she’d once used to evaluate my development projects—something twists in my chest. Pride, maybe. Or recognition. She learned this from me, whether she wants to acknowledge it or not. Learned to see the gap between reality and perception, learned to navigate it strategically.
I taught her how the world works.
