Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
LUKYAN VOLKOV
“Adog! A sheep! A fucking horse!”
Illayana pointed vigorously at her—excuse my French—piece of shit drawing on the whiteboard in the family room, getting more and more frustrated with every failed guessing attempt.
Sitting on one of the three-seater couches, Aleksandr chuckled, a smirk dancing on his lips as he took a sip of his drink.
Drea buried into his side to keep from laughing outright, and he winced at the movement, a hand flying to the ice pack sitting firmly on his crotch.
He cut me a scathing look—one filled with the promise of violence and retribution for his current circumstance.
He was still salty about that kick to the balls.
I ignored him, though, way too focused on the game.
“Come on, Lukyan. Are you serious?!” Illayana growled, pointing so hard the tip of her marker was disappearing into the barrel.
“Don’t blame me for this!” I exclaimed. “You’ve got a body, head, four legs, and a tail. That could be hundreds of fucking animals, and you expect me to guess them all? You’re out of your mind!”
“I thought you weren’t supposed to talk in Pictionary?” Autumn whispered in Father’s ear beside me.
Father snorted. “You’re not. But Illayana and Lukyan play by their own rules.”
“Illayana and Lukyan can hear you,” I snapped out of the side of my mouth. “Draw something more identifiable.”
Nikolai’s eyes were firmly on the stopwatch in his hands. “Fifteen seconds!”
“Come on! Hurry up!” I urged. My body was full of anxious, nervous energy as I began to pace up and down. “We’re gonna lose!”
“Then it’s your fault!” my sister snarled. “I can’t make this any bloody easier.” She drew another few lines that in no way helped me figure out what the image was supposed to be.
I started shouting out random animals, desperation filling me. “Frog! Cheetah! Lion! Rhinoceros—”
“Time!” Nikolai barked, jumping to his feet.
Illayana threw the marker at my head. I ducked. “You idiot. Rhinoceros?! What the fuck—it was a cat!”
My jaw dropped. “A. Cat?! Are you high? In what universe is that blob a cat?! If you want me to guess a cat, draw some fucking whiskers or something!”
“You. Are. Useless—”
“Alright, alright, enough.” Humor flashed in my father’s eyes. “Nikolai and Tatiana, your turn.”
Illayana and I plopped down onto the other three-seater couch at the same time. She shoved me with her shoulder. I pushed her back. She shoved me again. I thumped her lightly in the arm. She smacked me in return. The bitch fight started instantly, both of us slapping the shit out of each other.
“Next time, I’m getting Arturo to be my partner.” She grunted.
“Well, good luck to him. I hope he likes to lose because you’re a shit partner,” I spat.
“Don’t make me separate you two,” Father warned.
With a final push, we shoved away from each other. Of course, she couldn’t help getting the last hit in, punching me in the thigh with the side of her fist.
Fucking ow.
Arturo was meant to be her partner, but he got called away on some sort of business, so that meant I got stuck with her instead. In my opinion, it was a stitch up. Everyone knew we fought and bickered too much to be effective partners in any game.
Tatiana flicked her hands back and forth through the air. “Help me up.”
Nikolai handed the stopwatch to Drea and stood to clasp Tatiana’s hands. With a gentle pull, he guided her to her feet. He gave her belly a tender caress and kissed her cheek softly before switching places, sitting down in the seat she’d just vacated.
Tatiana waddled a few steps forward and plucked one of the Pictionary cards from the coffee table.
She glanced at it, placed it face-down, picked up another marker, and made her way to the board.
She wiped it clear of Illayana’s horrible attempt at drawing a cat, took the lid off her marker, and had it poised in the air, all set to take her turn.
“Ready…set…go.” Drea clicked the stopwatch.
Tatiana drew a curved line, almost like an oval, before adding in some jagged lines at the bottom—
“Umbrella,” Nikolai immediately guessed.
“Yes!” Tatiana cheered.
My mouth dropped open. I was on my feet before I even knew what was happening. “What?! Are you kidding me?! They cheated!”
Nikolai’s smirk was full of smugness. The prick. “How could we have possibly done that?”
“I don’t know, but I demand a redo.”
Nikolai shrugged. “Fine.” He leaned back, crossing his ankle over his knee, relaxed and casual. “Do another, love,” he said to Tatiana.
She went to the coffee table to pick up another card.
“Wait a second.” Eyes narrowed in suspicion, I swiped up the cards and gave them a big shuffle. “Okay. Go ahead.” I offered her the deck.
“It’s not going to make a difference,” Nikolai sang under his breath.
Tatiana picked up a card. Her lips puckered in thought. “Hmmm.” She went back to the board and stared at it for a moment before she began to draw.
“Shoes,” Nikolai said instantly.
She shrieked excitedly. “Yes!”
I shook my head. “Nope. No. No way. Bullshit. It’s a bunch of rectangular boxes all stacked up on top of each other. How the fuck did you get ‘shoes’ from that?”
“It was pretty obvious.”
“I did make it a little obvious, huh.” Tatiana laughed.
I felt like my face was turning red. “Gimme that.” I snatched the card out of her hand just to check it in case they were cheating.
They weren’t.
Mental note: Tatiana and Nikolai are not allowed to be partners in any of our family games. They were too in sync. Freakishly so.
“And you couldn’t even guess a cat,” Illayana mumbled under her breath as I sat back down, taking a not-so-subtle dig at me.
“Big talk for someone who can’t even draw a cat,” I fired back.
She glared at me.
“Our turn!” Drea passed the stopwatch back to Nikolai and turned to Aleksandr, her face the most serious and focused I’d ever seen it before. “We can do this.” She used her fingers to point at her eyes and then turned her hand to point at Aleksandr’s. “In sync, yeah? One mind.”
I snickered under my breath. Drea was just as competitive as I was.
Maybe even more so.
“This is ours for the win, baby. Focus. Teamwork. Head in the fucking game. We got this.”
Aleksandr smiled one of his rare, carefree smiles—the kind of smile only Drea could bring out of him. “We got this,” he repeated for her sake, not his.
It was easy to see the win didn’t matter to him as much as it did her, but that he was going to try his damndest to win it for her.
Drea took a deep, concentrated breath before getting to her feet. She cracked her neck left, then right, and shook out her body like a boxer preparing to start a fight.
“You can do this, Drea. You can do this. Let’s go. Let’s fucking go.”
Everyone snickered at her antics. She walked up to the coffee table and plucked a card from the stack.
They could not, in fact, do it. Turned out, Aleksandr and Drea were worse at Pictionary than Illayana and I were.
And it was absolutely hilarious to watch.
We played games for hours, going well into the night. UNO. Jenga. Monopoly—which resulted in Illayana flipping the table because she was losing. Nikolai and Tatiana tapped out first, heading off to bed sometime around 10 p.m. Father and Autumn followed an hour or so later. Then Drea and Aleksandr.
Illayana and I were the last ones standing.
We were finished playing games. Seven screaming matches and two fist fights were more than enough. We sat in comfortable silence, the odd crackle from the fireplace being the only sound to cut through the room.
Neither one of us felt the need to leave yet. I suspected it was because we both knew it would probably be our last opportunity to see each other for a while, since I was leaving for Russia the next day.
A thousand thoughts ran through my mind at once, and I lost myself to the silence. To the contentment. To the thoughts taking me over.
To one person.
To. One. Fucking. Person.
My eyes were locked on my phone—or, more specifically, my screensaver.
Yes, it was of her. My stalker. My little shadow.
No, I didn’t change it, because why the fuck would I? Not only was it the hottest thing I’d ever seen in my life, it was also ballsy as hell of her to sit on my bed while I was only feet away and pose for a photo virtually naked.
I traced my gaze over those sensual, luscious curves.
The rounds of her breasts. The long, slender column of her neck.
She knew exactly what she was doing, posing in that position, covering her nipples but also showing just enough to give me a little preview of what to expect. Teasing the absolute shit out of me—
“Lukyan!”
I flicked my eyes up from my phone to land on Illayana. She was sitting on the floor, back leaning against the chair behind her.
“Huh?”
“I’ve been trying to get your attention for ages. What’s so riveting on your phone that you’ve been able to flat-out ignore me for the last three minutes?” she asked, her tone light and playful.
It wasn’t a what. More of a who.
My stalker had been running through my mind all goddamn day, and I’d tried everything I could to kick her out of it. I tried preoccupying not only my mind, but my body, investing all my energy into the tag team match.
That didn’t work.
Then, I’d tried putting all my focus into the games at family night.
Didn’t work either.
Nothing did.
She was goddamn certifiable…and I fucking loved it. Her brand of crazy and impulsiveness should have been a giant red flag.
It wasn’t.
It turned me on.
Surprise, surprise, right?
The minute I’d realized what she’d done, I’d gotten harder than I’d ever been in my fucking life. So hard it hurt, and I’d had to relieve that pressure. Otherwise, I feared my cock would explode, and not in the good way.
So, I fucked my own hand and pretended it was hers.
What made the whole thing even hotter was that I knew she was watching me as I did it. There was no way she wasn’t. Her past behavior pretty much guaranteed I had an audience. I knew she’d want to see my reaction to her little stunt.
I imagined she was pleasuring herself right alongside me. Her fingers deep in her tight, wet pussy. Curling…twisting…stretching—
“Lukyan!”
“Fucking what?!”
“You spaced out again.” Fuck. I did, didn’t I? “Seriously, what is going on with you?”
I internally groaned. The mystery woman was fucking me up left, right, and bloody center, I swear.
I locked my phone and tucked it away so it was incapable of distracting me again. I couldn’t risk looking at her photo again, or I’d start spiraling down that rabbit hole, wondering what she felt like. Tasted like.
“What was your question again?” I asked, voice tight. Illayana had to have asked a question, right? She always got snappy when her questions went unanswered.
“Which one?”
“The first bloody one.” I almost snarled.
“Jeez Louise, someone’s moody.” Illayana rolled her eyes and crossed her feet at the ankles, taking a small sip from the glass in her hand.
The silence came back, and I waited. She’d speak eventually.
“There’s no talking you out of it, is there?” Illayana finally asked.
I didn’t need more information to know exactly what she was referring to.
“No,” I said strongly. Confidently. “This is my chance, Illayana.”
She frowned. “Chance for what?”
“To prove I’m not the idiot you all think I am.”
Compassion flashed across her face. “We don’t think that—”
“Yes, you do. Don’t insult my intelligence by saying something that’s not even remotely true.
I see it. The way you all look at me. Talk about me.
Crack jokes at my expense. ‘Oh, Lukyan can’t do it.
He’s untrustworthy’. ‘Don’t trust Lukyan with that important job, he’ll fuck it up’.
I’ve heard it for years, and I’m sick of it.
I’m sick of being made to feel like I’m just an accessory in this family.
This is my chance to show everyone that I can do the tough shit.
The serious shit. That I”—I pounded a closed fist into my chest—“can be relied on. I’m not going to give that up because you all think I’m not good enough to do the job—”
I didn’t realize I was on my feet until Illayana grabbed my hand to stop me from leaving.
“Stay. Don’t go. Please.” Her hand squeezed mine in earnest. “Don’t let this be our last conversation.”
I rolled my eyes and plopped back down, the fight evaporating out of me in an instant. “It won’t be. I’ll still text you. You’ll still send me daily annoying reels I won’t watch—”
“I knew you never watched them,” she mumbled under her breath.
“—because you’re my sister, and I love you,” I finished, giving her nothing but brutal honesty.
Her face softened. “I love you too.” She reached forward and hugged me. “And I swear to God, Lukyan, if you don’t come back alive, I will never forgive you.”