All his life, Dimitri had believed he was never meant for anything normal. A quiet home. A wife waiting at the door. Children who thought the world of him. That kind of life felt distant, unreal, like something meant for other people. Not him. Not someone raised the way he was.
In Russia, affection has been transactional. Women were never something you dreamed about. They were something you took. That was how his father lived. How his brothers lived. How Dimitri himself had lived, without question or hesitation. A wife would come one day, chosen not out of love but usefulness. A strategic decision. A business asset.
That was the life laid out for him. He had never questioned it.
Until something shifted.
He didn’t know when it happened. Or how. Only that somewhere along the way, he’d st
