All Chapters of The Mafia Boss’s Silent Bride: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Nikolai’s POV Yuri came to my office three days later with a folder under his arm and an expression I didn’t like the shape of at all. He’d worked for my family long enough to have seen most things this business could throw at a man, and he wasn’t someone who rattled easily. Watching him hesitate in my doorway told me more before he’d even opened his mouth than most reports told me after an hour of reading. “You said to move fast,” he said, setting the folder down on my desk without preamble. “I moved fast. I’m not entirely sure I like what I found.” I opened it without responding, scanning the first page, a timeline of the intercepted shipments cross-referenced against internal schedules, exactly what I’d asked for. Nothing in the first few pages surprised me. The pattern was clear enough once someone actually laid it out properly, three people with access to the relevant timing, two of whom I trusted completely and one of whom I’d never had particular reason to trust or distrust

Nikolai’s POV I was attending a business dinner with Dominic Vasquez, a man I needed to close a deal with, and his wife happened to be deaf, which meant I needed an interpreter for the evening. I went to Amber’s agency and booked her specifically, rather than letting them assign whoever happened to be available. I told myself there was a practical reason for it. I needed someone reliable, someone I trusted not to repeat anything she heard in that room, and Amber was already familiar with the kind of discretion this world required, even if she didn’t fully understand why. Going through the agency kept the booking clean, professional, nothing that would draw questions if anyone ever looked too closely at the paperwork. That was the reason I gave myself, anyway, sitting in my office typing out the request instead of simply calling her, and I didn’t examine too closely why some part of me had wanted the distance of a formal booking instead of asking my own wife directly to stand beside

Nikolai’s POV I was still sitting on the edge of her bed when the sun came up, and I honestly couldn’t tell you the exact moment I stopped telling myself it was just about the fever. At first it had been simple enough. Her temperature was high, high enough to worry about, and someone needed to sit with her in case it climbed further. That was the reasoning I gave myself around midnight, and it held up fine for an hour or two. But her fever broke sometime after two, her breathing evened out, and I found myself still sitting there anyway, watching the rise and fall of her shoulders, her hand curled loosely around my sleeve where it had landed sometime in her sleep without either of us deciding it should happen. I could have moved it. I could have gotten up and let her rest properly, alone, the way I’d left her every other night since this marriage started. Instead I just sat there until the room went from black to gray to something close to gold outside the window, and somewhere in th

Nikolai’s POV I was in my study when she knocked, which surprised me almost as much as the knock itself, since Amber had never once come looking for me in the weeks since I’d told her to stay in her own business. I’d gotten used to the shape of our silence by then, the careful choreography of two people avoiding each other in a house too large to make that avoidance feel deliberate. I set down the report I hadn’t actually been reading and told her to come in, and she did, closing the door behind her with a quiet, deliberate click that told me this wasn’t going to be a short conversation. She stood there for a moment, arms crossed loosely, not quite defensive but not exactly open either, and I found myself studying her the way I studied anyone I couldn’t immediately read, searching for whatever had finally pushed her through that door after weeks of careful distance. She’d changed out of whatever she’d been wearing earlier into something plainer, more comfortable, and I got the sense

Amber’s POV Denise texted me on a Wednesday morning with a booking that made my stomach drop the second I read the name. Petrov again, she wrote. He specifically asked for you. Said you did excellent work last time. I stood in my kitchen holding my phone, trying to decide what to type back. I hadn’t told Denise anything about what actually happened in that meeting. I hadn’t told anyone. And now the same man was asking for me by name again, which meant either he genuinely thought I was good at my job, or he wanted me back in that room for reasons that had nothing to do with interpreting at all. When, I typed. Tomorrow afternoon. Same building. A pause before the next message came through. You okay? Your texts seem off today. I’m fine, I wrote back. I’ll take it. I told myself several things after I hung up. I told myself Petrov had no reason to hurt me, that whatever he wanted from me the first time, information, leverage, some piece of Nikolai’s life he could use against him, h