The Russian Bratva Boss Told Her “Leave.” She Did. He Spent 8 Months Finding Her.

Sienna did not pull her hands away from his grip, letting his warm, calloused fingers encase hers as she looked deep into his eyes.

The silence that followed his outburst was heavy, thick with the unsaid confessions of two people who had spent eight months bleeding in different cities.

“I didn't hate you, Roman,” she whispered softly, her voice dropping into a register so tender it made his breath hitch painfully in his throat.

“I hated myself for sitting on that plane to Seattle and wondering what I had done wrong to make you stop loving me in the span of an hour.”

Roman let out a ragged, broken sigh, bowing his head until his forehead rested gently against the knuckles of her joined hands.

“I never stopped loving you, Sienna,” he confessed into her skin, the words torn from the deepest, most guarded vault of his soul.

“There was not a single second in the last two hundred and forty days where your face wasn't the only thing I saw when I closed my eyes.”

Sienna gently pulled one of her hands free from his grip, reaching up to touch the dark, stubble-covered skin of his jawline.

He leaned into her touch instantly, closing his eyes as her cool thumb brushed over the sharp angle of his cheekbone with forgotten familiarity.

“When I arrived here in November, I was completely empty,” Sienna said, her eyes tracing the exhaustion etched around his eyes.

“I took the job at the bookstore because the silence of the paper was the only thing that didn't remind me of the noise of your city.”

She paused, taking a deep, shuddering breath before revealing the secret she had guarded since the first snow had fallen in the mountains.

“And two weeks after I rented this cottage, I found out why I had been feeling so tired and dizzy during my last month in Chicago.”

Roman opened his eyes instantly, his body going completely rigid as he looked up at her, his analytical mind already jumping to the conclusion.

“Sienna,” he whispered, his voice trembling with a sudden, overwhelming terror that had nothing to do with Russian hitmen or gunfire. “What are you saying?”

“I lost it, Roman,” she said quietly, tears finally spilling over her lower lashes and tracing silver paths down her cheeks in the firelight.

“It was early, just ten weeks along, but the stress of the move, the grief, and the shock... my body simply couldn't hold onto it.”

The words struck Roman with the force of a physical bullet to his chest, shattering every remaining defense he had built around his heart.

He had sent her away to protect her from a sniper, and in doing so, he had forced her to suffer the loss of their child entirely alone in a strange city.

“My God,” Roman choked out, dropping to his knees on the stone hearth rug and burying his face into the curve of her neck.

His large hands wrapped around her waist, holding her with a desperate, crushing strength as silent, agonizing tears finally broke from the Bratva boss's eyes.