The phrasing catches in my throat. “Us?”
“You’re tied to me now, Mila.” His voice drops lower, darker. “That makes you valuable. And vulnerable.”
I should be alarmed. I should hear that as a threat.
Instead, it lands like a promise.
“Aleksander knows,” I say, testing his reaction. “About us. I think Igor too.”
Yakov doesn’t flinch. “Aleksander understands mess. He understands what it means to climb out of your own wreckage.”
“Because of what he’s lived through?”
His hand shifts closer to mine on the stone, fingers almost brushing. “Possibly. Does it worry you that they know?”
“It should,” I admit. “Professionally. Ethically. Practically. It’s catastrophic.”
He turns fully, angling his body toward mine. The air shifts between us.
“And yet?”
And yet.
“I can’t bring myself to regret it.” The words come quiet, but unflinching. I’ve said harder truths in smaller rooms. But none that felt like this.
His gaze locks on mine, searching, not for weakness but for permission. Whatever he finds softens his expression in a way only I’ve seen.
“You’ve changed me,” he says quietly, “in ways I didn’t anticipate.”
My breath catches. “How?”
“Before you, there was only revenge. Making the families pay for Ana.” His hand finds mine on the stone, fingers gently threading through mine. “Now there’s possibility I thought I’d buried with her.”
I barely breathe. “Possibility?”
His eyes never leave mine. “A future.”
Just one word. But it unravels everything.
My heart hammers against my ribs. One word, and every wall I’ve built crumbles. This isn’t infatuation. It’s not just desire. This is a connection that could destroy me. Something that could level me completely if I let it grow.
“You’ve changed me too,” I admit, the words pulled from a place I haven’t dared to acknowledge until now. “You’ve made me question boundaries I thought were nonnegotiable. Made me want to question my choices.”
His thumb strokes a slow, knowing line across my palm. Every pass sends a current straight through me.
“And what do you want now, Mila?”
The question hovers between us, hot, loaded, forbidden. My professional self screams in protest.
But out here, with the night pressing close and his hand holding mine, ethics feels like a language I no longer speak.
“You,” I say, soft but certain. “Tonight.”
His pupils flare, the tension between us snapping taut. “Aleksander’s shifted the security coverage.”
“I’ve studied the rotation,” I interrupt. “Midnight shift change leaves a three-minute blind spot in the west corridor. Second-floor cameras loop footage between 12:05 and 12:08.”
His expression sharpens, not with surprise but recognition. “You noticed the guard pivot at 12:10.”
