Page 42 of Beautiful Ruin

The full weight of that presses down on me through the phone, through the years filled with every debt I have ever owed him. For a moment, I cannot breathe around it.

“Okay,” I finally say.

I close my eyes once the line goes dead and lower the phone slowly into my lap. For several seconds, I don’t put it away. I hold it in my hand while my eyes drift out the windshield of the SUV, taking in the unmarked road that leads toward Moscow’s center districts.

Sofia’s voice is soft when it comes. “Was he mad?”

I almost laugh. That would be the thing she asks me. “No.”

Silence fills the car again, but it is different now. I put the SUV back into drive and pull it carefully onto the road. This time, Sofia keeps quiet as her hands fold firmly in her lap. She watches me from the rearview mirror, holding my gaze every time my eyes catch hers.

For the first time in my life, I have chosen something, someone, over the direct order of my Pakhan.

There is no undoing this.

I am now a man walking into forbidden territory with Sofia Kuznetsov beside me and a thousand consequences waiting for us when we get back home.

11

SOFIA

The coroner’s office had turned out to be a dead end.

Literally and figuratively.

There is probably a joke in there somewhere, something dry and horrible enough that Matteo would have whispered it under his breath if he were here, then immediately apologized when I stared at him too long.

Two metal slabs under harsh fluorescent lights had revealed the bodies of the two assailants, laid out for us like forgotten props in a play no one wanted to finish.

Their pale skin had been stitched closed with neat black thread, the brutality of their final moments turned tidy by trained hands. Neither of them had any hidden tattoos that could point us toward a specific gang affiliation or symbols tucked beneath hairlines. Rowan had checked them with a cold, practiced eye, his gloved hands moving with careful efficiency as the coroner hovered nearby looking as if he regretted every decision that brought him to this room.

But there had been nothing.

My mother’s own case was hardly any different.

The coroner had only able to recall the accident vaguely, and whatever reports he did still have a hard copy of that had been left to collect dust in his filing cabinet show the same inconclusive reports the police had already filed—ballistics consistent with a close-range attack, no fingerprints found on the weapon or inside the vehicle and no DNA hits in any database.

By the time we’d thanked the coroner and walked out the front doors, Rowan’s frustration had been rolling off him in waves, and I can’t say I feel differently. Disappointment sits heavily in my stomach, dense and sour. I wanted more, just like he did. I wanted the coroner to take one look at me and break open with confession after confession until I had a name and a person to blame.

Instead, we found the opposite.

A dead end.

Yet at the same time, I refuse to let that disappointment win. We are moving in some sort of direction. That at least is something. A month ago, my mother died in a car accident because everyone told me so. Now I have a file in my hands that says otherwise.

I collapse back into the passenger seat when we climb back into the SUV and hold back an audible sigh. The interior smells faintly of worn leather and Rowan. That last part irritates me because I notice it immediately. It has become stupidly familiar in such a short time, and I hate that sitting beside him now feels more stable than being alone in my own room at the estate does.

My eyes drop to my lap where my mother’s case file rests. My fingers trace the edge of the file before flipping it open, and I roam over the first page again and again.

Rowan had talked the coroner into giving it to us. Though, maybe “talking” is too generous a word. I suppose I should have been scared to see him intimidate and threaten an old man well past his retirement age into giving us such sensitive pieces of information. Maybe a better woman would have been. But all I had felt was a sense of fleeting excitement when the paperwork was passed over to me.

For most of my life, my mother’s death has been an enormous weight following me everywhere, its shadow stretching long enough to chase me across continents. Now it’s a case file sitting in my lap.

Rowan is quiet next to me. He sits behind the wheel with both hands resting there, not yet starting the engine. His profile is cut by the gray light filtering in through the windshield. Rowan’s silence at the estate is a wall meant to keep me from digging too deeply. Here, it feels like a door he is holding shut with both hands because he is desperate to not let me in to see what’s on the other side.

Instead of speaking, I shift the file into his lap and rearrange my limbs until my back is pressed up against the door. The file settles across his thighs, the pale yellow stark against the black of his pants.

His eyes snap away from the windshield to look at the file before finding mine. He holds me there for a long second, silently daring me to look away. I don’t, though. I want him to know I’m choosing to trust him with this.