‘So this is the man you have married?’ he demanded as he stepped into the room. The Russian words were harsh against her heart in comparison to the month spent with the softer, warmer French of her grandmother.
‘Yes,’ she said, looking back at her husband, hoping to have him stand by her side, but feeling an unbreachable distance between them across the room. ‘Please let me introduce Roman Black. My husband.’
‘Black?’ queried her guardian. ‘Not a surname I’m familiar with.’
Vladimir’s gaze bored into Roman’s unrelentingly. And Ella wondered why the man who had charmed her, who had eased her grandmother’s concerns aside with smooth words and confidences, was not now attempting to do the same with her guardian. Instead, he appeared as if carved from stone, holding fast against the battering winds being thrown in his direction by Vladimir Kolikov.
It was as if the temperature in the room had dropped, a hostility she had never before felt covering her skin in goose bumps.
‘I would like a moment with your new husband, Ella.’
The dismissal was perhaps not unusual, but most unexpected. She was about to protest, but one quick glare from Vladimir cut the words before they could form. Roman had yet to take his eyes from her guardian and Ella felt as if she were at sea, being pushed and pulled by invisible currents that she let carry her from the room.
But she refused to be so easily dismissed and instead paused in the hallway, leaving the door ever so slightly ajar.
‘You said you would be back.’
Ella frowned from where she stood, hidden in the shadows beside the door. Roman knew her guardian?
‘I did,’ Roman replied, his voice almost unrecognisable.
‘And you have married my ward.’
‘I have.’
‘To what end?’
‘That is entirely dependent on you, Kolikov.’
Ella struggled to understand what was going on. The words she could hear as easily as if had she been in the room, but the meaning? It was completely lost on her. The shifting sand beneath her feet made her feel nauseous as she struggled to wrap her head around the conversation taking place through the door. Her heart beat fiercely against the invisible threat that hovered above her like a sword.
‘Why Black?’
‘What?’
‘The name. Why Black?’
‘It was the colour my heart turned when you kicked me off your property. It was the depth of the darkness my heart became when she died.’
‘I see you are just as fanciful as that girl.’
‘That girl was your daughter!’ Roman raged and in that moment an overwhelming force of horror struck Ella hard and fast. Roman was Vladimir’s grandson?
‘She stopped being my daughter the day she chose you over me,’ the old man spat.
‘Well, now this is your choice. Your reckoning.’
‘Really? Pray tell.’
‘I have what you value most in this world. I wouldn’t say love, because clearly you are not capable of such a thing. Or perhaps that is reserved only for your company. Either way, now you must choose. You can hand over control and ownership of Kolikov Holdings and I will let her go. The marriage will be annulled. Or—’ Roman paused, as if ensuring he had the man’s complete attention ‘—I will leave Ella Riding ruined and destitute, just like my mother was.’
Ella’s legs buckled as she pressed a hand to her mouth to stifle the moan that threatened to escape her lips. It had all been lies? Every touch, every kiss, every word… Her heart severed from its moorings, cut through with a knife so sharp she felt flayed. Her husband was threatening to ruin her. The man she had fallen in love with, the man she had naively entrusted her future to. Bile rose in the back of her throat as she see-sawed between feeling devastating betrayal and hoping against hope that her guardian would come to her rescue. Would somehow defeat the beast that she had unwittingly married.
Later she would wonder whether she should have gone, fled the estate then. But if she had she would never have known. Never have realised the true depths of the two men who had been supposed to love her the most, but had revealed themselves to have betrayed her in the greatest of ways.
* * *
Roman stood before his foe, using the old man’s silence to take in the changes in his grandfather over the last eighteen years. He searched Vladimir’s face, hating the strange similarities between him and his mother. Between Vladimir and himself.
An almost dizzying sense of satisfaction roared through him as he finally held Vladimir in the palm of his hand. And the urge to squeeze, to destroy, to remove the man from the face of this earth was overwhelming. Until Vladimir laughed.
‘So cocky. So arrogant. And so convinced that you have everything you want. But you are wrong. All these years I knew that you would want your revenge. I saw it in your eyes that day. And if you hadn’t been the bastard son of my disowned daughter I might have even respected you for it, recognised you as part of my own flesh and blood.’
Roman worked hard to keep his face impassive. Unease stirred in his breast for the first time as he began to feel the steel traps close around him—but, like all prey, still vainly hoping that he was wrong.
‘Did you know that your mother was to be married to Nathaniel Riding? That all I ever wanted was to secure our business partnership with an unbreakable bond of family? When instead she chose that carpenter it nearly destroyed the business, ruining everything that I had worked for years to achieve. Nathaniel soon got over the
