Chapter 158 158

Chapter 158 158
I nod once, sharply. “Thank you.”

As Jasmine’s footsteps fade down the hall, I turn to Feliks. “Get Pavel. Search the grounds. He can’t have gone far. And call Roza. I want to know exactly what kind of deletion program that is.”

“And you?”

I straighten my jacket, already moving toward the door. “I’m going to go watch my wife open presents and pretend this is still the happiest day of my life.”

Everything that was so perfect earlier is now cloying and wrong. The garden’s scent is overwhelming; the fairy lights are tacky, fake, fucking ridiculous. I look around at the rice still scattering the grass and wonder how we ever convinced ourselves that it was okay to be normal for a little while.

But I can’t show her that. I vowed to be darkness so she can be light, and I’ll defend that vow with my last fucking breath. Tonight, that means contorting my face into a smile as I step out of the villa.

Ariel’s laughter rings out—bright, trusting, wrong—and my teeth grind together. She’s perched on a wrought-iron chair, swollen belly brushing the edge of the gift table.

“Sasha, look!” She holds up a ridiculous lace lingerie set, laughing hysterically. “Gina knew exactly what size you’d be!”

I want to laugh. Fuck me, wouldn’t it be nice if I could laugh? But there will be no lingerie tonight. All of the plans I had for Ariel are gone now. Dust in the wind. If we’re lucky, we’ll survive. If we’re unlucky…

I won’t dwell on that yet.

Still chuckling, she sets the lingerie in her lap and picks up a small envelope. “From Uncle Kosti!” she announces, holding it aloft. She looks around for him and frowns. “Is he still peeing? My God, old man bladders are even worse than pregnant ladies’. Oh, well. I’m sure he’ll be back in a sec.”

No. My pulse jackhammers in my throat, but I can’t speak. Don’t open it. Don’t⁠—

Too late. The seal cracks under her thumbnail. The letter inside comes rustling out.

Ariel’s smile dies mid-sentence.

I see the exact moment the words sink in—the blood draining from her face, her knuckles whitening around the paper. Her lips move soundlessly, tracing some fresh horror.

Then she stands. The lingerie slides from her lap and lands with a plop in a patch of mud. Black earth staining the white. Sucking up the muck, the filth, the ugly reminder that nothing in my world can ever remain pure for long. Not even for one night.

The letter goes next. It flutters out of her hand like a dying bird and lands at her feet. I’m close enough to see the same handwriting on it as the words written on Kosti’s notepad.

No. Not like this. Not again.

Ariel’s eyes find mine. “Not again,” she whispers. “Not again.”

Then her horrified face gets hit with a lightning bolt of pain. She plummets to her knees with a hand pressed to her womb.

The scream she lets out shatters my world.

50

ARIEL

Koukla,

You’re reading this because I’m already gone. Don’t look for me. By the time your tears dry on this page, I’ll be halfway to a place where men like me don’t get to die old.

I’ve told you this before, but I was there the day you were born. I held you, pink and squalling, in my arms. As I did, I promised I would keep you safe. I swore it on the saints, even though we both know I stopped believing in anything but the weight of a gun years ago.

So you must believe me on this point: I tried.

Koukla, I swear to you I tried.

When Leander betrothed Jasmine to that Serbian dog, I thought, This is how it starts. The rot. The slow bleed. But I was a coward. Told myself it wasn’t my place to interfere. That the Makris girls were born to be bargaining chips, and who was I to question the currency of our world?

But it didn’t take long to show me how wrong the rules of our world truly are.

Your sister came to me once, in those ugly first weeks. Eyes bruised like overripe plums. I cleaned the blood from her split lip and thought, This is where loyalty gets us. This is the cost of silence. I tried to stop it. I told Leander that Dragan had a taste for cutting up girls who talked back.

Your father merely shrugged. “Jasmine knows her duty.”

Then he sent her back to the beast.

It was Sasha who came to tell us that Jasmine was dead. He said the Serbian brute had done what brutes like him do—gone too far. Put her in a grave she did not deserve. I beat myself senseless and I swore that, next time, if there was a next time, I would not sit by idly. I would act.

But, as you know, your sister wasn’t dead. For fifteen years, we thought she was. We were wrong.

Everything changed the night of your engagement party.

I’d been digging, Ariel—digging and hunting and searching, because something in my heart said the story did not add up. I was right! You cannot imagine how good it felt to learn that I was right. When I heard Jasmine’s voice… It was like she was born again. That she, like you, was once again a pink and happy baby in my arms.

She told me what Sasha had done. How he learned of her suffering and offered her a way out. How he snatched her from Dragan in the dead of the night, framed him for a “murder,” and gave her a new lease on life.

You might still think that’s what happened. You might still believe he saved her. My God, what a story it is! The noble Bratva prince, smuggling Jasmine to Marseille like some fairytale knight!

But then I learned otherwise.

You see, koukla, some knights raise the dragons they slay. Sasha didn’t merely discover Dragan’s cruelty—he cultivated it. He fed the man’s worst impulses during long nights playing chess and sipping rakija. Laughed when Dragan bragged about breaking his last woman’s ribs. “A man who can’t control his woman is no man at all,” Dragan would say, and Sasha would raise his glass. “To control.”

He needed the alliance to fracture. Needed your father desperate enough to hand you over next—because he knew that, when the time came, Sasha would be the one who received the Greek’s alliance. So he made sure Dragan’s hands were around Jasmine’s throat before he ever laid eyes on her.

Sasha did not save Jasmine from her marriage.

He condemned her to it.

At first, I wanted to kill him. To toy with the lives of innocents like that… it is beyond the pale. But as I sat with the thought, it occurred to me that killing Sasha would not be enough. As long as men like him exist—men like Dragan, men like your father—they will keep using the people around them as pawns. The only way to truly protect you both was to bring down the whole game. To set the kingpins at each other’s throats.

That is what I’ve done.

I know the price of what I’ve done is measured in blood. Perhaps I’m no better than them now. But I couldn’t watch another generation of Makris women be sacrificed on the altar of men’s ambitions.

The only thing that gave me pause was you, my darling. I know you think you love him. I’ve watched you twist yourself into knots trying to reconcile the monster with the man. But some stains don’t come out, no matter how hard you scrub. When I saw you glowing at that altar tonight, I knew I had to make my choice.

Either I burn this whole fucking world down, or I let him poison you, too.

I couldn’t do that. I made a promise the day you were born. This is what that promise looks like.

So forgive me. Or don’t. But above all, I beg of you this: don’t let him spin this into another pretty lie. The man you married didn’t change. He simply learned to hide his knife better.

Your uncle,

Kosti