Various business associates Ella remembered from her childhood had come, seemingly not to pay their dubious respects to a man who had ruled with an iron fist, but instead wanting to see the fabled prodigal grandson return, each wanting to know what her husband’s plans were for the company.
Ever since Célia had discovered Ella sobbing over a laptop open to a search about her husband—something she’d had neither the thought nor inclination to do during their time in France—she’d determinedly avoided any and all thoughts about Roman, Vladimir and that damned business. Célia’s reassurances that Ella had been both too busy and too worried about her grandmother did nothing to protect her from her own self-disgust at the shocking naivety with which she’d met and married a stranger.
A stranger who was reportedly not only uniquely ruthless in business—a fact she now well knew—but also thoroughly disreputable between the sheets. At first she had been shocked by the contrast of the almost idyllically respectful man she had married—the one who had wanted to preserve her innocence—and the notorious playboy he was proclaimed by the world’s press. It was then that she realised the true extent of his deception. That he really had only wanted one thing from her. Access to Vladimir.
And somehow that had hurt so much, so acutely that it had stolen her breath and stopped her tears.
Strangely, she had found no sympathy with her former guardian. Because there too she had done her research. The man had disowned his daughter, cutting her off both financially and emotionally, for not wanting to marry Nathaniel.
Ella shivered again at the actions of two men hell-bent on destroying each other…and her in the process. And now? All she wanted was to be free. From this, from him. From the memories of her own stupidity.
And worse, the hopes and dreams that had died that day. The ones that she had not realised she’d even had before Roman had conjured them from her like a magician. A childhood yearning for the things she had lost. And then he’d taken them away—the loss as real as if they had been solid things and not just the thin veils of heartfelt fantasies. And no matter how much she might want to erase her marriage to Roman, she knew she’d never be able to erase the mark he’d left on her heart.
And once again, as if a flame had touched the detonating cord of her anger, she was furious. Furious that Roman hadn’t come to the funeral today. Hadn’t bothered even to respond to the lawyers she had sent after him for a simple signature on the divorce papers she had had drawn up almost the moment she had been back in Célia’s little Parisian apartment. So this was how it was to be then. The hunted would become the hunter. Ella embraced her resentment and relished the thought of tracking Roman down. It was he who would soon know the feeling of regret. Because she was no longer the innocent he had claimed her to have been. No. Now she was a force to be reckoned with.
* * *
Roman took a conservative mouthful of ice-cold zubrowka, despite wanting to down the lot in one go. He knew himself well and, loath as he was to admit it, tonight—the day his grandfather went into the cold, hard ground—would be a trigger and he wanted his wits about him. He could feel it crackling in the air about him, as if a finger from the past had pressed against the back of his neck and burned an ice-cool trail down his spine.
As much as he’d wanted to see Vladimir laid to what he hoped would be unrest, a greater part of him didn’t want to see his wife. For somehow throughout the last eight months he had stopped viewing Ella’s fiancé as some separate part of himself and embraced the person chained, legally and bodily, to her as her husband.
Because Roman was unable to forget that kiss. It was, he’d decided, the moment the disguise had evaporated. It hadn’t been Ella’s fiancé who had stolen that impassioned, impulsive moment. No. It had been Roman himself. He’d wanted more. He still wanted more. He was not such a Neanderthal that he put the constant state of his frustration down to the fact he hadn’t spent time in a woman’s bed for nearly ten months now. He knew he could have had his pick ever since leaving Kolikov’s estate. But he hadn’t. It had struck him with a painful irony that some of Ella’s fiancé had rubbed off on him, and all the talk of the sanctity of marriage had somehow bled into him.
And it was that which was most threatening to him. That he had begun to believe his own lies. Begun to meld parts of the fiancé to parts of himself. In truth, it wasn’t just marital faithfulness that had wrapped around his conscience, but some unfathomable desire for something beyond revenge and vengeance. Some unnerving yearning for something he’d long thought himself not only incapable of, but utterly immune to. A craving that scratched at him from the inside, rolled around his chest, one that took effort to beat back down.
In its place he sought the safer familiarity of anger, the need for revenge, but even that had been infected, ruined by the near gut-churning agony of realising that he had never really got his vengeance. Roman’s deathbed promise to his mother had gone unfulfilled and he hated himself for it, whilst hating Vladimir more. But the one overriding question he couldn’t help voicing to himself in the deepest, darkest nights was whether Ella had known. Whether she had been playing him too. He knew it wouldn’t be answered until he looked her in the eye. Which
