…” he said, but she held up a hand, as if she couldn’t bear it, and for a moment her lovely face crumpled in on itself. He thought it might kill him. But he knew better than to move toward her, to hold her.
“I shouldn’t be surprised.” Her voice was small, but it didn’t shake. She looked at Nikolai briefly, then her gaze slammed into Ivan’s. “I’m not surprised, as a matter of fact. It makes perfect sense that you would do exactly this. It’s who you are, isn’t it? You decimate your opponents. You never lose.”
“Miranda,” he began again. He hated that tone in her voice, that stunned sort of pain. “Please.”
“And I suppose I owe it to you,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. She was standing so straight, so perfectly straight and unbearably fragile, and he had the sudden notion that she might shatter into pieces if she so much as breathed. “I’ve learned that, if nothing else. I was wrong about you, and I regret it.” She swallowed, hard, her gaze nothing but black as she stared at him. “But I can’t take it back. I can’t change it. So if you have to do this thing—if you have to humiliate me in public, here …” She stopped for a moment, then sucked in a ragged-sounding breath. “If that’s what you need, Ivan, I’ll do it.”
“This is not what I need,” he said furiously, painfully. “This is not what I want.”
“It’s your plan,” she said, so simply, so quietly, it broke his heart.
Her eyes were glazed with what he knew were tears, but she didn’t cry. She only waited. For him to tell her what to do—how best to participate in her own downfall. He saw the tiniest hint of a tremor move over her, but she repressed it almost at once, and he wondered what it cost her to stand there like this—for him.
He wanted to pull her into his arms. He wanted to be the man who saved her, who protected her—not the man who hurt her. He wanted to be the man he imagined he was when she smiled at him. The kind of man who would never make her feel the way she did right now. The man he’d always thought he was, not the man she’d believed him to be all these years. He wanted to kill his own brother for putting that terrible look on her precious face. And himself for letting it happen.
“No,” he said, his voice hoarse, barely a thread of sound. “It’s done. There is no plan anymore.”
He heard Nikolai’s muttered curse in Russian, but all of his attention was on Miranda. His beautiful Miranda. She nodded once, jerkily. Then she shifted back on her heels, and he saw the way she bit her lip.
“Your brother is right,” she said, her voice scratchy, as if the tears she fought back clawed at her throat. “The damage is done. You got your revenge. Congratulations.”
“This is not over—”
“It is.” She shook her head when he moved, almost involuntarily, and he froze. “It’s finished. This was the agreement, wasn’t it? This was always our last night.” She started to turn, but then she looked back at him, and her dark eyes, nearly black with the pain she wasn’t letting show, not completely, slapped at him. Shamed him. “Don’t follow me, Ivan. Please.”
And then she really did turn, and she walked away from him, head held high, as if he hadn’t seen the misery he felt raging inside of him written all over her.
As if she was already well on her way to surviving this intact. Ivan couldn’t say the same.
He forced a breath. Then another.
But he still wanted to rip his brother limb from limb when he turned.
Nikolai’s face was shut down. Hard and blank. But Ivan knew what he hid behind it. What howled in him, tearing him to pieces from within. Tonight, he didn’t care as much as he should.
“Don’t forget, Vanya. I am trained to do the things others don’t. Or won’t.” Nikolai’s frosty blue eyes met his. Held. “And I always keep my promises.”
Ivan knew that should have pierced him to the core. Two weeks ago, it would have swamped him with that same old guilt. But tonight he only looked at his brother and pitied him—pitied both of them. And it was nothing next to the rage he felt that Miranda was caught up in this old family mess. That it had tainted her, too.
No more. It’s not your fault, she’d told him, and it had changed everything. Perhaps he hadn’t understood how much until now. He rubbed his hands over his face.
“If you feel you have to fight me,” Nikolai continued, sounding hauntingly like the little brother Ivan remembered from a world away, a lifetime ago, “I don’t mind. If it helps you remember who you are.”
“Kolya,” he said finally, fiercely, using the family name he hadn’t dared speak aloud in too many years to count.
Nikolai jerked in surprise, and for the first time, there was something other than ice in his gaze. There was a glimmer again of the brother Ivan remembered.
“You are my brother, my only family, my blood. I wish I could have protected you. I wish I could have protected myself. But you need to go and fix your life before you disappear completely. And before you destroy whatever love I have for you.”
He held Nikolai’s gaze, and didn’t drop it when his brother’s face flushed slightly, as if he’d hit him. For the first time in years, Nikolai looked uncertain. Even lost. But it was too late.
“And I don’t want to see you again until you do.”
ELEGANT and sophisticated, Miranda reminded herself fiercely as she jerkily removed her makeup in front of the huge bathroom mirror in Ivan’s master suite, meant there would be no tears. No tears, no sobs, no crumpling into the fetal position on the bathroom floor and rocking herself for a while.
And if a tear or two leaked out while she scooped up water in her palms and washed her face, well, no one ever had to know that but her.
She was starting on her hair when Ivan appeared in the mirror behind her. She didn’t hear his approach. He wasn’t there, she blinked, and then he was leaning in the doorway, his black gaze hard and hurt and some kind of hungry. Her heart kicked against her ribs, hard, then seemed to drop straight down to her bare toes.
Miranda’s arms dropped to her sides, letting the few pins she’d already pulled free clatter onto the granite countertop beside the sleek vertical basin of his sink. She wanted to ignore him, to bustle along with her departure, efficient and matter-of-fact, and be gone before the party was over. She’d already packed her bag. She looked almost like herself again now, in very old, very comfortable jeans that felt as close to that fetal position on the floor as she was going to get tonight, and the faded college T-shirt she slept in when she was alone. All she had to do was get her hair out of this dramatic style, slip on her shoes and leave. Simple.
But she couldn’t seem to look away from Ivan’s reflection.
And worse, she couldn’t seem to move.
The silence seemed too large between them, too painful, and she wished she didn’t love him as hopelessly and helplessly as she did. She wished she didn’t notice the pain in his eyes, the way his hard mouth
