Page 42 of Marrying My Ex's Brother
I try to move, but my legs won’t obey me. My breath catches. My hands are empty. I know what comes next, but I can’t stop it.
Then the shot cracks through the hallway.
Leonid falls, and the blood spreads toward my feet, dark and endless.
I look up.
The man stands at the far end of the corridor, half swallowed by shadow.
I can’t see him clearly. Only the gun. The coat. The flash of a scar. Dark eyes watching me like he has been watching for much longer than I know.
I should be afraid.
Iamafraid.
But the dream shifts. The hallway becomes quieter. Warmer. The music fades until all I hear is my breathing. The man steps closer, and the air changes with him.
Smoke. Cedar. Cold night air.
My pulse trips.
No.
I know that scent.
The scar comes into vision in the flickering light. The eyes become familiar. Not fully, not logically, but my body understands before my mind does.
Yaromir.
He says nothing. He only looks at me.
In the dream, I’m not wearing the black dress anymore. I’m in my wedding gown again, white silk dragging through blood. My veil hangs loose down my back. My hands tremble at my sides.
He comes close enough that I have to tilt my head back.
I should run. Instead, I stand there and let him look.
His gaze drops over me slowly, not polite, not soft. It moves over my throat, my mouth, the rise and fall of my chest. Wherever his eyes go, heat follows.
“You’re shaking,” he says. His voice is low, rough enough to brush against something inside me.
“I’m scared,” I whisper.
His hand lifts. I think he will touch my face, but he doesn’t. His fingers stop near my jaw, close enough that I feel the warmth of him without contact.
“Not only scared.”
The words go through me like a secret. My body reacts so strongly I almost whimper in the dream. Heat gathers low in my stomach, spreading between my thighs with a force that frightens me because I don’t know what to do with it.
I’ve never felt this way with Dmitri.
Not once.
Dmitri tried. A few times, in private, when he was impatient and I was embarrassed and both of us pretended it was romantic. His hands moved over me like he was searching for proof of something. I lay there trying to want it, trying to become the woman I was supposed to be, but all I felt was pressure, confusion, and the growing certainty that something in me was wrong.
I tried alone too. Once.
Then again, months later. Fingers under the sheets, face burning with shame, trying to chase the thing other women whispered about like it was easy. I never found it. I only felt silly and unfinished.
