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One eyebrow lifts in a subtle reprimand. “I find that hard to believe.”

My face flushes. “Why was I brought here?”

Sasha’s jaw tenses, just barely enough to notice, but I’m close enough to him that I see every twitch on his face, every subtle expression he emotes before he can smother it under that cool exterior.

“Your father believes I can keep you safe. That’s why you have been brought to me.” His eyes drop to my hands that still faintly tremble.

I force myself to meet his gaze. “Safe from whom, exactly?”

From the moment the question leaves my lips, I know I won’t get an answer. Sasha doesn’t move or blink. I doubt he’d ever be careless enough to let information that important slip even if there were a gun being held to his temple.

Instead, he asks quietly, “How are your wounds?”

It’s such a normal question, something a doctor or a friend might ask because they care. Coming from him, it gives me whiplash.

“Fine,” I say.

His eyes flicker. Something unreadable passes through them. A shadow. A memory. A warning? I don’t know what it is, only that it doesn’t fit with the image of the man I know him to be.

“Tell me why I’m here. Why that bomb went off at my University.”

“You should have been nowhere near that building,” he says quietly.

The sentence lands like a stone dropped into water, sending ripples of confusion refracting throughout every part of me. My brows knit before I can stop them.

Should have been nowhere near it?

The words echo in my head, loud, insistent, impossible to ignore.

Questions crash together all at once.

Why would he say that?Why would he care?Why warn me? Why help me?

Unless… he had been keeping tabs on me for far longer than I, or Papa, even realized.

The thought is absurd. Completely,absolutelyabsurd.

This man, this ruthless, violent, iron-spined Bratva monster doesn’t care about politics or students or innocent lives caught in the crossfire of whatever deals he makes. He doesn’t care about casualties, especially ones like me. The stories about him are the kind that parents use to scare their children into behaving. He is nothing more than a come-to-life boogeyman.

Sasha Sokolov doesn’t care about people. He doesn’t spare anyone who doesn’t fit with his agenda any time to go through that kind of trouble. He destroys them as he sits fit, uses people until they’re no longer useful, and then discards them accordingly.

And yet… he warned me.

He forced me out of the building and saved my life.

Why? To what end? To get me here? And if that’s the case… why?

None of this makes any sense.

My pulse stumbles as I study him more closely under the warm glow of the dining room lights. He’s not looking at me anymore. Instead, his attention is fixed on the glass of wine in front of him. He picks it up and swirls it, staring down into the liquid as if the answers he won’t give me are hiding somewhere inside the red hue.

He shouldn’t care. Hedoesn’tcare.

Someone like Sasha Sokolov is incapable of softness or mercy or feeling anything beyond the cold calculus of power he wields. He’s the kind of man who gives orders that bury people. The kind of man who commands rooms through silent demands alone. One who looks at the world as pieces on a board, each one meant to be sacrificed when necessary.

Caring about someone like me—the daughter of a politician—makes absolutely no sense at all.

I’m nothing to him.