44. Dimitri
44
DIMITRI
I clench my fists by my sides, fighting the urge to return to the guesthouse.
I want nothing more than to have her pinned to the bed and screaming my name. Maybe then the light in her eyes will return.
Seeing the tears in her beautiful eyes broke me.
I was prepared for the worst, but nothing could have prepared me for her tears. Nothing could have prepared me for the way this girl could demolish me with a single blink of her sorrowful eyes.
When I enter the main house, I find Pavel at the home bar with a bottle of vodka next to him. He’s grinning at something on his phone.
When he sees me approaching, he glances up at me. The smile fades from his lips.
“How’d it go with the girl?” he asks.
“About as well as you would expect,” I say, sitting on the stool beside him. He grabs a chilled glass and pours some vodka into it.
“I’m sure she’ll come around,” he says, handing me the drink. “You won her over the second time. It won’t be hard to do it again.”
I take a sip of the vodka. I don’t want to think about any of this tonight, but at the same time, I know I need to make sense of what I’m feeling.
“I wanted this,” I tell Pavel. “I wanted her to hate me. It would have been easier for her to stay away if she did. But now that I got exactly what I wanted, why do I feel so miserable?”
“Because it wasn’t what your heart wanted,” he says.
I sigh. “I never meant for it to get so complicated.”
“When do we ever?”
We drink in silence for a few minutes, both of us lost in our own thoughts.
I don’t know if it’s the vodka going straight to my head, but suddenly, I feel like I’ve made a huge mistake.
After the shooting in Paris, I convinced myself that she was better off without me. Safer.
I never stopped to ask myself if she would be happier without me.
“All I know is that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if something happened to her because of me,” I confess.
I would normally keep these words in my head. I don’t like showing weakness in front of other people. But tonight, I need a confidant. I need someone to talk to.
And now that I’ve said my biggest fear out loud, I realize how silly it really is.
Briar didn’t come from a healthy and functional family. She came from a broken home. She has a psychopath for a mother and lived in fear all her life. And I was put in her life to protect her from anything else that might cause her harm. I exist to make sure that she’ll never have to worry about a single thing ever again.
“I was so afraid of losing her, but I lost her anyway,” I say.
Pavel pours more vodka into my glass. “She’s still on the island. You can still talk to her.”
“It’s not that simple, Pavel,” I say.
“It is that simple,” he says. “You’re just making it complicated because you’re not used to this.”
“Used to what?” I ask him.
“Being vulnerable with someone,” he says.
I turn toward him, looking at my second-in-command. He’s much more experienced than me when it comes to love. He’s been happily married to his high school sweetheart, Anoushka, for over a decade.
“How is Anoushka, by the way?” I ask.
Pavel grins and unlocks his phone. On the screen, there’s a photograph of a newborn baby. I remember that he was smiling at his phone before I sat down next to him. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own problems that I forgot to ask him about his life.
“My daughter was born an hour ago,” he says, his smile widening. “Both the mother and the baby are healthy. There were no complications either.”
I feel something close to happiness for the first time this week.
“ Pozdravleniya ,” I say, congratulating him in Russian.
“Thank you, Pakhan ,” he says.
I raise my glass. We drink to the health of his newborn baby.
“You should go visit them, Pavel,” I say, looking at him. “Take a few days off.”
His face grows somber.
“I’ll go when all of this is over.”
“Are you sure?”
He nods. He knows this might take a while, but he’s willing to make sacrifices for the Bratva. All of my men are. They left their families and their lives behind for me. It’s expected of them, but I don’t want to take any of it for granted.
A second ago, it felt like the end of the world. It still feels like that, but I know I can’t drag my men down with me.
They’ve sacrificed too much for me. I can’t let myself forget that just because I’m having an emotional crisis.
“I should get back to work,” I say.
“You should sleep,” he says.
“I won’t be able to sleep tonight, anyway.”
“Fine, I’ll come with you,” Pavel says.
“I need to be alone for a few hours,” I tell him.
He purses his lips, clearly not liking the idea of me being on my own tonight. But he knows me. He knows that I like to process things in solitude.
“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says. “Try to get some sleep.”
I’m overcome by a surge of affection for this man.
I pat his shoulder.
“I don’t say this enough, but you’re one of my finest men, Pavel,” I say. “This Bratva wouldn’t be where it is today without your contribution."
He looks surprised to hear this, but he bows his head in respect.
"Also, tell Anoushka that I send her my best," I say.
“Thank you, Pakhan ,” he says.
I take the stairs, walking alone to my private office. This is the one where nobody else disturbs me. It’s where I come to get away when I need pockets of solitude throughout the day. It’s where I come to think.
I head to the dual computer monitors.
When I first brought Briar to the island, she asked me if the guesthouse was bugged with secret cameras.
She wasn’t wrong to assume that.
I’m watching over my girl at all times.
I stare at her bedroom’s live security footage. I had two cameras installed in her bedroom, each one showing me a different angle of her.
Briar is laid out on her bed, flipping through the pages of a diary. She keeps lifting her hand to wipe the tears from her cheeks. The sight of her crying breaks something inside me.
I switchto the other camera. This one shows me the full image of her laid out on her stomach.
My cock hardens when I see that she’s wearing a pair of lacy pink panties. Her ass is round and unmarred, begging for a spanking. When she ran from me, I wanted nothing more than to pin her to the ground. I wanted to bury my cock inside her until she knew that I would never let her get away from me.
The vodka in my veins makes my blood burn for her.
Before I can talk myself into doing something stupid, I switch back to the first camera.
She has shifted on the bed, and I now have a perfect view of her breasts. Just to make things harder for me, she’s not wearing a bra. I bet I could make her forget why she was even mad at me if I wrapped my lips around her rosy nipples.
Maybe if I sucked her pretty tits for long enough, she would forgive me.
Desire hits my loins like a bolt of lightning.
To distract myself, I zoom in on the diary she’s reading.
It’s all in Briar’s handwriting. It takes me a while to understand the messy cursive, but I pause when I see my name in the book. And once I see it, I see it over and over again. She must have kept a diary while she was seeing me.
My heart starts pounding in my rib cage.
Those pages hold everything about our time together. A few days ago, I would have wanted nothing more than for her to read it. But now, I know that her reading those words will only remind her of how I broke her heart the first time.
I drag the zoomed-in image on the screen until I’m staring at her lips. They’re slightly parted as she reads.
I feel a surge of possessiveness inside me.
Everything about this girl is made to drive me past the point of obsession and madness. Everything about her is made just for me.
As I stare at her kissable lips, a random thought forms in my head.
I switch off my computer screen and head to the home theater.
The ambient lights flicker to life as I enter. It has a state-of-the-art surround sound system with over a hundred speakers built into the walls. I turn on the projector screen and select the image I want it to display.
It’s the photograph that’s been haunting me for days now—the one of Malorie Thorne and her family standing in front of their plantation home. It’s the one that was taken days before the fire.
I have absolutely no reason to believe that I’ll find the answers I’m searching for in this photograph.But that doesn’t stop me from coming back to it time and time again.
Chills travel down my spine as I look at the image on the big screen. Except for Malorie, everyone in that photograph is dead now. But somehow, I feel like they’re all with me right now. And they’re trying to tell me something.
I try something I never tried before.
I zoom into the photograph. Instead of looking at the faces of the people in the middle, I start with the background this time. My screen shows zoomed-in images of the trees, the clouds, and the mansion.
When we met the detective in Paris, he mentioned seeing something in the background. I painstakingly go through every millimeter of the photograph, looking for something that’s not obvious to the naked eye. Something that blends into the background.
After a while, everything starts to look the same. My eyes start to blur. My mind starts to wander. My body wants to fidget.
I ignore all of it.
I owe it to Briar to find the truth about her mother. I owe it to my men to work harder to solve this once and for all.
I’m now going through each of the tall pillars on the front porch. I’m about to move to the next section of the photograph when I see something that makes me pause.
An eye.