Page 82 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

“That night made you see clearly whom you actually worry about,” she says. “You would’ve kept wavering forever otherwise, and you know it. We all do what we have to in order to survive, Lev.”

“You believe you were helping me.” I pad over to her, and her eyes start darting toward the door behind her.

“I was helping us. I was helping you finally see your own heart.” Her voice shakes, insistent.

“You did make me see clearly,” I say, cold. A small glimmer of hope lights her eyes at the words, and she tilts her head toward me.

For twenty years I thought love was supposed to be habit and obligation, a thing you guarded out of instinct because you always had. I checked her heart and her breathing three times a day, rushed to soothe every flutter, and called that devotion. I mistook the protection, and the guilt tangled all the way through it, for love itself. It was never love. It was a boy in a hellhole of a basement still grateful to the one person who came down the stairs for him, keeping the debt paid for the rest of his life.

I believed the gentle girl in my memory was the same woman standing in front of me now, a fallen angel of the worst kind, and I was wrong about both of them.

Then I think of Delaney arguing with me, slapping me across the face with a stinging palm in my own office without flinching. She’s the one who ever made me stop and ask what love actually is.

Even now, the memory of her sinking clenches something in my chest that will not let go. The feeling is undeniable, exquisite and terrible, and it belongs to her.

“The person I love is Delaney,” I say, and I don’t hold back. “Not you.” The whole office goes silent around my declaration.

“You are lying to me,” Yelena says. “The marriage you were ready to offer me. The women you kept away from yourself. The way you cared for me in that hospital.” The color has drained out of her face, leaving her dazed.

“I loved a version of you that doesn’t exist,” I say.

She reddens and steps back in open disbelief, wincing as if slapped.

“The gentle girl I remembered was never really you at all.”

“You cannot erase twenty years over one accident,” she says, her chest heaving, agitated.

I no longer care about her fragile heart. I’ve spent two decades arranging my whole life around the fear of stopping it, and I see it now for the thing it always was, a piece of leverage she used to dangle in front of me and keep my attention fixed on her and nowhere else. Every time it fluttered, I came running like one of her dogs. She learned that young, and she never stopped using it.

“None of it was an accident,” I say, and my calm holds down a rage that wants to burst straight through it. “The spilled water, the broken necklace, the disastrous shove over the rail, you chose every single one of them with your own two hands.”

I back her against the door with a thump. “Did you know she was pregnant when you did it?” I demand to know.

Yelena’s eyes go wide again.

“She’s carrying my child,” I say, nearly shouting it, and I slam my fist into the door beside her head.

She flinches hard.

“You screwed me over, and you almost killed both of them out there, and you did it smiling.”

“I swear to you, I didn’t know,” Yelena says breathlessly.

“That doesn’t make any of it one degree lighter.”

She is trembling now, and this time it is real, not one of her performances. The fear in her has finally stopped being a costume, and I watch it coalesce into something raw.

I think about forcing her to her knees to kneel and confess it all aloud, and then the whole idea strikes me as purposeless. Delaney is not here to hear it. My child is not here.

The worse sin is mine, in the end, and I will not pretend otherwise. I enabled every bit of this and compromised everything I claimed to protect. I gave Yelena my computer and my benefit of the doubt and twenty years of unquestioning trust, and I never once firmly chose Delaney when the choosing actually counted for anything. Yelena only walked through the door I left open for her.

“Get out of my sight,” I tell her, and my tone brooks no argument.

She presses back against the door, confused, unmoving.

“I will not kill an unarmed woman,” I say, and let that false hope settle over her for a single second. Then I keep going. “All cooperation between the Volkovs and the Lebedevs ends tonight. I’m going to take apart the dynasty your father built, brick by brick, syndicates and all.”

“He knows nothing about any of this,” she cries, nearly sinking to the ground, the tears real now. “Please, don’t go after my father and my family for what I alone did.”