LOGINHe was told to protect me and yet I want him to ruin me. “Zyran?” He didn’t turn. “What is it, Myra?” I took a shaky breath, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Our arrangement. I want to understand my part in it.” Finally he turned. His pale eyes gleamed in the dim light, his gaze fixed on me so intently, it felt like a predator tracking its prey. “Your part is to be my wife and mine to give you protection.” “But you are the only one giving. I want to give you something too.” “I’m tired of being just a painting on the wall,” I whispered, stepping closer to him, the air crackling with so much tension, I may have forgotten how to breathe. “You're my husband. In every way, so I want you to teach me.” A muscle ticked in his jaw, his eyes darkening with every word I said. “Teach you what?” “Pleasure.” I said, biting down on my lip out of sheer nervousness “Your kind of pleasure. Show me what you like. Let me learn how to touch you. Let me make you feel something…” I agreed to marry Zyran Theon because he was my brother’s best friend and by far the safest option. A year of cold indifference seemed better than a lifetime of horror. However I never expected to find a man shattered by his own psyche and a constant repression of his urges to claim me and even worse I never expected to want him too.
View More"He promised to corrupt me. Instead he taught me how to live again."MYRAOne year later.The nursery was painted a soft cream color that had taken me three weeks to choose and Zyran exactly four minutes to approve, which was the particular division of labor that had come to define us — me deliberating, him deciding, both of us arriving at the same place through completely different routes.She was three months old.Isla Rossi Theon, who had arrived in the world at two in the morning on a Tuesday with dark hair and her father's gray eyes and a temperament that swung between absolute calm and absolute fury with no discernible middle ground, which everyone agreed was entirely Zyran's fault.I stood in the doorway of the nursery and watched him.He didn't know I was there yet. He was standing over the crib with Isla against his chest, one large hand spanning her entire back, and he was doing the thing he did when he thought nobody was watching — talking to her quietly, low enough that I
"The things we hide the hardest are never hidden from the people who love us most. They're just waiting for us to be ready."MYRAIt happened two days after we came home.Not planned. Nothing about it was planned. We were all in the living room of the estate — my parents, Luca, Zyran, all of us in the same space for the first time since everything, the particular exhausted quiet of people who had been through something large and were still finding the edges of it.My mother had made tea. That was her response to most things — the ritual of making something warm and carrying it to people, the oldest form of care she knew. She'd been moving around us since we got back, touching my shoulder when she passed, smoothing my hair the way she'd done when I was small, making food none of us were eating properly.My father was in the armchair by the window. He'd aged in the last forty eight hours in a way I noticed and didn't comment on. The particular aging of a man who'd understood something a
"Some wars end with negotiations. Some end with fire. This one was always going to end with fire."ZYRANNikolai's location came through at four seventeen in the afternoon.A compound in the outer borough, one of Sokolov's properties held through three layers of shell companies that had taken the financial mapping ten days to penetrate. Large enough to hold people. Remote enough to have privacy. Close enough to the city that moving Myra further would have required the airport lockdown Cristian had already activated.They hadn't moved her far.That told me something. Either they were confident in the security of the location, or they wanted me to find it. Given what I knew about Sokolov's methodology, it was probably both.I looked at the floor plan Nikolai had sourced and spent eleven minutes building the approach in my head, the way I built everything — completely, accounting for variables, identifying the places where the plan would need to adapt in real time.Then I looked at the m
"Sometimes the evidence of love doesn't look like love at all. Sometimes it looks like obsession. And sometimes, if you look closer, it looks like grief."LUCAI found it by accident.That was the honest truth of it. I wasn't looking for anything specific when I went through the house — I was moving the way I moved when I needed to feel useful and didn't have enough information yet to be useful in any directed way. Nikolai was running data. Cristian was locking down exit points. Zyran was in the security room doing things I didn't have the access to do alongside him.So I moved through the house.Not searching for evidence. Just moving. The particular restless energy of a man whose sister had been taken and who had to do something with his hands or lose his mind entirely.I'd been through the main floor. The library, which still had her book open on the arm of the chair, a folded receipt marking her page. The kitchen, where Elena's morning preparations were still half-finished on the






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