Page 20 of Beautiful Ruin

My jaw tightens before I can stop it.

There it is again. That rotten, humiliating flare in my gut.

I am relieved he is home, grateful he is even breathing let alone standing on two feet. I have prepared myself to kill any man on this property who so much as looks too long at the strain carved into his features. Yet underneath all of my gratitude that those assassins failed in their mission, resentment boils from the way his gaze changes for her.

It is ridiculous, beneath me, to feel that way.

She moves quickly down the landing to get to us, enough that the guards surrounding the convoy straighten on instinct, their hands hovering near their weapons before they remember who she is. Her face changes when she finally sees him, relief at first, so bright and unguarded, it is almost painful to witness.

Then alarm follows. Sofia is much too intelligent to be soothed just by Ivan standing upright in front of her. She takes in what he would prefer hidden with those careful eyes—the stiffness in his movements, the way his hand hovers near his torso before he catches himself and lowers it, the bandage just visible at his collar where his shirt doesn’t sit quite right.

Instead, her gaze flickers once to me, then back to Ivan, reading what neither of us says out loud.

Ivan gives her a warm nod. “I see you’ve made it home safely. I hope my staff have been treating you well.”

Sofia does not throw herself at him the way I half-expect. Some part of me had braced for that, along with tears and the rush of panicked questions I’ve been trying to dodge for days. I had prepared myself to step in if I needed to, but to my surprise, she does none of that.

She stops just shy of him. I can see in the way her fingers flex at her sides that she wants to reach for him, but she doesn’t. Somehow, she understands that Ivan would not want to be handled gently in front of witnesses.

Reading situations as charged as this one is one of the things I have begun to respect about her.

She breathes in slowly, rolling her shoulders back. “You could have told me what happened.”

Ivan’s gaze rests on her for a long moment. I can see him weighing his response carefully. He loves her in whatever hard, possessive way my Pakhan understands how to, but even that affection passes through the machinery of control residing within him before it ever reaches his mouth.

He will not apologize fully. That is not the kind of man he is. Whether she accepts that fact and what he is capable of giving her in response will be up to her.

“It seemed unnecessary to worry you. I have been well taken care of, rest assured,” he says.

Her expression barely changes, but I can feel the disappointment and hurt boiling just under the surface. Not only at him but for every deflection, half-answer, and carefully sanitized lie she has been fed since the moment our soldiers ended her life in Italy. She’s too composed and far too aware of how public emotion can be used against a person in a house like this to make a spectacle. Though, I have no doubt she will resume this conversation once she and her uncle are behind closed doors.

Ivan takes his first step toward the house. I match him automatically, keeping myself one pace behind and just close enough to grab him if anything happens. Sofia falls into line by his side, careful not to touch him unless he asks.

At least she learns fast.

That should please me. What it really does is lock my jaw tight because watching her beside him twists something ugly in me.

I absolutely hate it.

6

SOFIA

The word home still tastes like ash on my tongue.

It’s been two weeks since leaving Italy, and every day this house feels like a museum exhibit of someone else’s life. Russia is where I was born, but birthplace and belonging are not the same thing. I’ve spent too many years collecting sunsets in Italy, too many nights laughing in languages that aren’t my native tongue, to walk these halls and feel anything but displacement.

Except when I’m with Ivan.

He’s confined to his bedroom suite per the hospital’s orders, though he grumbles about it like a caged wolf every chance he gets. The room smells faintly of antiseptic and the cedar cigar box he keeps on the nightstand even though he’s been forbidden to smoke. Today, the curtains are half-drawn from the windows, letting in warm light that turns the bandages across his chest a pale gold.

I sit cross-legged at the foot of his bed like I did when I was a small child. Ivan leans back against a mountain of pillows looking older than I remember. The silver at his temples is more pronounced, his skin drawn tightly over the sharp bones of his face. But his eyes are the same as they’ve always been in my memories, dark and unyielding, seeing everything.

He’s been telling me stories more often than not when I come around to his room to visit him after the medical staff leave. It has become our strange ritual over the past few days.

They aren’t the same polished anecdotes he used to write about in the birthday cards he’d send me every year. Those had always been fine-tuned and distant, written in his elegantly slanted handwriting, smelling faintly of expensive ink and whatever cologne clung to everything that came from him. He would mention my mother in those cards sometimes, but only briefly and usually only to remind me that she would have wanted me to study hard.

These stories are different.