Part 2
Elena stopped three feet from Matteo Volkov.
Close enough to see the sleepless ruin beneath his eyes.
Close enough to see that his daughter’s little mouth had gone pale from crying.
Close enough to understand that every person on that private jet had already decided what Elena was doing was either brave, insane, or fatal.
Matteo looked up at her slowly.
His eyes were gray.
Not soft gray. Not storm gray. The kind of gray found in old steel, in gun barrels, in winter rivers where bodies disappeared and never came back.
“Sit down,” he said.
It was not loud.
It did not need to be.
The bodyguard closest to Elena shifted one inch forward. His hand did not reach for a weapon, but it did not have to. The message lived in his posture.
Elena’s mouth went dry.
The baby made another sound.
Not a cry now.
A whimper.
Thin. Broken. Fading.
Elena’s fear cracked down the middle.
“No,” she said.
The cabin became so silent she could hear the engines beneath the floor.
Matteo stared at her.
The flight attendant near the galley stopped breathing. One of the guards muttered something in Russian under his breath.
Elena swallowed and forced herself to keep her hands visible.
“She needs to eat.”
Matteo’s jaw flexed. “I know what my daughter needs.”
“No,” Elena said, softer this time. “You know she needs a bottle. But she doesn’t want the bottle. She is too hungry to keep fighting it, and if she tires out completely, she may not wake enough to feed.”
Something passed through Matteo’s expression.
A fracture.
Only for a second.
Then the stone came back.
“Who are you?”
“Elena Rossi.”
His eyes sharpened at her last name, as if he had opened a drawer in his mind and found a file there.
“Rossi,” he repeated. “From Boston?”
The question touched something cold in Elena’s spine.
She had booked this flight under her maiden name after the funeral. She had told herself she needed distance, needed air, needed an ocean between herself and the apartment where grief had learned the layout of every room.
She had not expected anyone to recognize her.
“Yes,” she said.
Matteo’s gaze dropped for one brief, brutal second to the damp circles spreading across her blouse.
Elena felt heat burn up her neck. Humiliation hit hard, but she did not move. She had been humiliated by worse things than being needed.
His voice lowered.
“You have milk.”
The words were not a question.
Elena forced herself not to flinch.
