Page 45 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

“I didn’t leave the way you think.” She sets her thin hands in her lap. “I went to become someone worthy of standing beside him. There’s a difference between leaving and preparing yourself.”

“You seem to know his life very well,” I say, and I hate how badly I want her answer.

“I should know it.” Her chin lifts. “We grew up together. Our families go back generations. I was there for his first broken bone. His first drink. The years that very nearly ended him.”

Something twists under my ribs, because those are versions of him I’ve never once met. Not the commander who empties a room by walking into it. Not the man in my bed who calls me his. A younger, wounded boy, before he learned to lock every feeling he owned behind cold steel.

She had all of that. She had the raw version, the one who could still be hurt out loud, and she’s standing here telling me she owns him down to the roots while I only ever got the branches.

She reaches out and traces one finger along my shoulder, drawing a slow line, as though she is marking the border between her world and mine. “So stop imagining that he feels anything at all for you.”

She’s named the exact thought I’ve been trying hardest to bury, and I set the glass down before my hand decides to throw it.

“If I had not gone abroad to study,” she adds, “you would not even be sitting in this chair.”

The scattered pieces finally slide together. “You are his ex,” I say.

“I’m the one he’s been waiting for.” She doesn’t bother to deny the first part.

The air goes thin, and something heavy settles down over me. But underneath it a small, stubborn fire refuses to go out.

She’s an ex. An ex who left and came crawling back the moment it suited her.

I don’t understand why I’m supposed to feel guilty over a story that ended long before I ever arrived in it. Whatever the two of them had, she’s the one who put it down and walked away from it. I’ve been the one showing up every single day, copying his ledgers until two in the morning, learning the temperature of his coffee. If showing up counts for nothing against a pretty memory, then I never had a chance to begin with, and I would rather know it now.

“You came back to check whether your spot was still warm,” I say. “That is all this really is.”

Her expression freezes for the first time.

“Whatever you were to him, that’s all past tense now.” My voice stays steadier than I feel inside. “You left, and I stayed.”

She recovers with a small, cold snort. “I only have to crook one finger and he comes back to me. You saw it for yourself, the day I walked in. Do you remember how pathetic you looked standing there?”

The words tear the scab clean off a wound that had barely closed, and the icy way he threw me out of that room comes rushing back, and my lungs ache with the memory of it.

“Then say all of this to his face,” I tell her. I’m bluffing, and I know that I’m bluffing. If he reached for her right in front of me, every word out of my mouth would become a joke. But I’m done backing down from her.

Her face darkens for the first time.

Then I hear it. Footsteps in the hall, even and unhurried. I would know that measured walk anywhere, and Yelena hears it coming too.

Her whole face changes in a single blink. She wipes the venom clean off it and floods her eyes with tears, and before I understand what she’s doing she snatches the glass off the desk.

She throws the water over her own chest, soaking the front of her white dress, and shoves the empty glass straight into my hand.

It happens far too fast to stop any of it. She drops into the chair and cries out that it’s hot, that it burns, tears already streaming down her face on command, and I stand there holding the empty glass like the murder weapon she has just pressed into my hand.

The door opens and Lev is there, and I have no idea at all what he believes he is walking into. I only know how it must look from the doorway. A soaked woman weeping in a chair, and me above her with the glass.

My first feeling is not panic. It’s plain disbelief. The trick’s so old it’s almost insulting. She must truly think the two of us are complete fools.

“Lev,” she gasps, struggling up out of the chair, gripping the armrest, swaying on her feet. “Lev, it hurts so much.”

He crosses the room straight past me and drops down to her side. “What happened here? Are you hurt?”

He doesn’t look at me even once.

He checks her over, the soaked dress, a patch of red blooming across her forearm, and then his eyes flick to the empty glass in my hand. I cannot begin to understand how lukewarm water left marks that look like a burn on her skin.