One

      The beeping of the instruments measuring Anastasia Shepherd’s vitals quickened as she surfaced from her oppressive slumber.

      But she didn’t want to wake up. She preferred the horrors she faced in sleep over the nightmare her life had become after the attack that had ended her brother’s life, and left her struggling for hers.

      She squeezed her lids harder against the macabre images. The masked gunmen, the muted gunfire, the crimson blossoming over Alex’s white shirt as he collapsed beside her, bullets tearing into her own body.

      In her shock, she’d somehow known she wouldn’t die, not immediately. She’d also known one other thing. That she’d needed to protect her brother from further injury with whatever was left of her life. She’d thrown herself over Alex’s body as their attackers approached them like inescapable doom.

      But she’d only seen them fall. Like disposable opponents in a vicious video game at the hands of an expert player. It had made no sense. Until she’d seen him.

      Ivan.

      The man who’d walked away from her without a word seven years ago.

      He’d swooped down on her and Alex, and right before darkness had claimed her, she’d heard him say what she’d dreamed he’d come back one day and say.

      I’m here now.

      And he’d been with her ever since. Through the whole ordeal of the past three weeks. Always sitting beside her bed like a sentinel. Watching over her, catering to her every need. Answering none of her questions.

      “It isn’t a mercy anymore, Ivan.”

      The words she hadn’t intended to voice just came out, laden with all her agony and frustration, before she even opened her eyes.

      Ivan made no response, probably thinking she was talking in her sleep. But she felt him move closer, until he was standing over her.

      She finally forced her eyes open and was once again overwhelmed by his sheer beauty and physical presence.

      He’d always been the most incredible man she’d ever seen. The exact combination that had appealed to her every taste and enslaved her every sense. In the short time she’d known him, she hadn’t been able to tear her eyes and thoughts off of him. Not to mention her hands, lips and every inch of her. No man had ever compared to him, before or since; she’d given up before she’d even tried.

      But the thirty-three-year-old juggernaut she’d once known had been nothing compared to the forty-year-old god he’d become.

      Everything about him had been...magnified, intensified, until it choked her up just looking at him, just feeling him near. Any softness she hadn’t even realized he’d had had been chiseled away. What remained looked as if it had been carved from polished steel, perfect and impenetrable.

      If she didn’t feel like one raw, exposed nerve, she knew she would have found him even more attractive for it. But how could she possibly be more attracted to him now than she had been in the past? From that first glance, when her brother introduced him as a new friend and another expatriate from their motherland, Russia, she’d been helplessly drawn to him like iron filings were to a magnet.

      “Anastasia, are you awake?”

      It