Page 84 of Claimed By My Ex’s Brother

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she says, and she doesn’t raise her voice to say it.

“Maksim and I are back together.” The air goes out of the whole world at once.

She’s gone back to him.

Maksim’s mouth twitches, triumphant, and he slides his arm around her shoulders. “You heard her, brother,” he agrees smugly, tightening his arm around her.

My eyes lock onto his hand where it rests on her, his fingers ghosting over her curves.

“Take your hand off her before I paint the walls with your blood,” I say.

Maksim doesn’t move an inch, insisting she is done with me for good.

I want to hear it from her, so I take her wrist gently in my fingers. She frowns down at my hand with pure, vinegary disgust, and my heart freezes solid in my chest.

“You cannot go back to a man who tore you apart just because you are angry at me,” I say, and it feels like my heart is bleeding out onto the pavement between us.

“So I should go back to the other man who tore me apart instead?” she says, forehead creased, and looks down again at the place where I’m holding her.

My fingers lose all their strength around her wrist. Her disappointment cuts far deeper than any anger she could have thrown at me, because anger still expects something from a person, and disappointment has already stopped. She looked at me once like I was dangerous, fear and desire coursing through her, and said yes anyway. She doesn’t look at me like that now. The wound of it goes all the way through me and out the other side.

“This is exactly what you always do,” she admonishes. “You handed me a job I never asked for, shaped to your needs. You pulled me back upstairs. Now you want me home. Not once, in any of your decisions, did you ask me what I wanted.”

I want to promise her that I’ll change, that I’ll learn to ask instead of decide, and I know it would land as nothing more than one more order out of my mouth.

She is right about all of it. I built a job out of nothing to keep her close. I moved her desk against mine so she could not leave my sight. Holding her here now, dragging her back the way I dragged her everywhere else, would only prove her point for her in front of both of us.

I let go, and her wrist slips out of my palm. Emptiness drills straight down into the center of my chest.

“Let’s go,” she tells Maksim, and he leads her away from me. Their two backs shrink smaller and smaller down the long street, past trees as wide as four men.

I stand there with my heart tearing itself in half, and I finally understand exactly what it is to be abandoned by the one person you love.

27

LEV

Later, in the depth of the night after Delaney left, I made myself a promise I had never once made to anyone. I would not interfere with her choices, and the effort of it is the most unfamiliar thing I have ever done.

I’m good at keeping people. It’s the one bloodless skill I trust in myself completely. Contracts, debts, threats, bribes, a favor owed, a secret held, there is always a rope, and I have never yet met the person I could not tie to me with one of them.

But Delaney didn’t want a comfortable rope around her wrist, or a man who whispers I own you against her throat. She wanted to be wanted, touched, and cherished, not held. She wanted me to open my hand and let go, and that single demand runs against everything I’m made of.

So I watched Maksim instead of going to her, and I watch him still, unblinking. I don’t call her, and I don’t let anyone in my organization breathe her name to me, because in my world rumors spread like blood in water. I only watch, from a respectable distance she will never feel.

I tell myself I’m checking that my brother does his job at my behest and nothing more than that. The justification is thin and trivial, and I know it, and I keep using it anyway.

Maksim has truly changed these last weeks. He turns away the good-for-nothing men who used to drag him out drinking, and he splurges on the odd little cookies she likes and a tiny onesie without being asked. He sits through the prenatal appointments, hugging folders tightly, with a patience I didn’t know he had in him.

There are no clubs left in his life, no booze, no Vanessa waiting in the wings. Every one of them is out of the picture. The change is so total it unnerves me, and it should be exactly what I want to see.

Instead, there is a red-hot coal sitting behind my ribs that churns my gut and never fully cools. Every glimpse of the two of them together suffocates me by degrees, the air leaving my windpipe in a slow, ragged whistle.

I concede, on the worst nights, when I pace to the window of a penthouse full of ghosts, that Maksim might be the better choice for her if he can give her the stability I never once offered. The thought sits in me like a swallowed blade, and it makes my heart buckle.

I’m learning that letting go is not a single clean act, not after so many nights spent claiming her. It is a long, desperate withdrawal, and every single morning, with golden light spilling through the window, I have to make the same decision over again from the beginning.

A clean cut would be more merciful than this.