Chapter 26
LEKS
I’m in a good mood, sue me.
Yuri smirks at me when I finally show up to a meeting to check in with the operations. I flash him a grin, and he rolls his eyes at me.
“Welcome back to the real world. Haven’t seen you in a week.”
His words are thick with implication.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Is half the port talking about it?” He gives a dark chuckle. “You know what the gossip in this place is like.”
I can’t bring myself to care.
Natalia is my wife, and if everyone at the docks knows that we’ve barely left the loft except to grab takeaways, well… They’re not wrong.
Yuri spins his chair to face me.
“Do you think you’re gonna be able to concentrate knowing that she’s just over there?”
I roll my eyes. “Of course I am.”
He runs me through the details of two recent drug busts but I barely listen, drumming my fingers against the desk and itching to get back home.
“Told you,” he crows when I head for the door, collecting his money from the unlucky people who bet against him on this one. The bastard probably made thousands from that exchange.
It’s not even that early, it’s practically lunchtime.
I check my watch as I head out. Okay, early lunchtime. Okay, it’s eleven in the morning by the time I get back to the loft.
Natalia’s not there. I try to hide my disappointment. I figure she’s back in the vault with the paintings. I gave her the codes so she could study the new shipments as they came in. There’s something annoying her about them, she said.
I settle on the couch, then pace over to the kitchen. I’ve never been good at sitting still. Dinner is already marinating in the fridge. Chicken marbella, Natalia’s favorite. Who would’ve fucking thought I could be so domestic? Natalia makes my ability to perform everyday chores feel like magic.
Now I feel like an idiot for coming home early. There’s nothing to do except wait for her to come home. What did I even do before she was here all the time? Can’t remember.
Some might say that’s a bad sign, an unhealthy obsession. Maybe those people just haven’t had what we have.
I walk upstairs to change out of my work clothes and hear a scratching noise coming from Natalia’s room.
Dasha is probably playing with a rat. We’ve made our peace with each other since I started bribing her with treats, but I don’t want Natalia to find a dead rat in her room.
She ignores me when I enter. Her wide yellow eyes are laser-focused on a black piece of plastic which she’s flicking between her paws.
Natalia has taken over half of the loft with elaborate cat toys and playpens, yet the cat prefers to play with a random piece of plastic.
It could be a hazard if she swallowed it.
Natalia is always worried about her choking, which is ridiculous given the amount of rats she eats.
Dasha freezes when she sees me, then pushes the black piece of plastic further under the bed.
Fucking cat.
“You’re really gonna make this hard for me?”
Dasha hisses as I flatten myself under the bed and reach for the plastic. Just when my hand closes around it, she swipes at my hand to scratch me.
“Ungrateful cat.”
The plastic looks like some kind of miniature electronic device. I’ve seen one somewhere before. I pocket it.
The cat hisses at me as if I’ve taken away her favorite toy and struts out of the room.
I can’t place why the plastic device looks familiar.
I’m almost about to give up and head back to work, in part because it will be satisfying to see Yuri handing the cash back to his unlucky employees, when I hear the clink of Natalia’s heels on the metal stairs.
Thank God.
I push open the door and watch her walk up the stairs. Today she’s wearing an off-the-shoulder floral dress, her curls loose down her back. She’s impeccably dressed, always is, but all I can think right now is that her outfit would look good on the floor.
“Thought you were spending the whole day catching up on work with Yuri?”
“Changed my mind.”
She gives a musical laugh, her eyes sparkling playfully.
As soon as she reaches the top of the stairs, I pull her against me.
“I thought I was going to have to come and get you from the vault,” I murmur against the hollow of her jaw before kissing my way to her mouth.
“Neither of us are ever going to get any work done again, are we?”
“There are more important things. Like this.”
I bring my mouth back to hers and she wraps her legs around my waist. I carry her inside, slamming the door shut behind us. She gives such sweet little moans just from kissing.
It was madness to think I’d be able to focus on anything other than Natalia for an eight-hour period of time. I don’t know how I used to do it.
I slide her dress down so that she’s half naked for me. Her full breasts spill over the neckline and I cup each one in my hands. Natalia arches her back, her breasts pressing into me.
God, she’s perfect.
“I’d rather look at this every day than those boring paintings in the vault, zolotse.”
“They’re not boring,” Natalia pulls back, her green eyes serious. “If you let me teach you, I think you could really develop an appreciation—”
I let out a chuckle that’s half-affection, half-sexual frustration. I love it when she gets excited about her art nerd shit, but not when I’m this fucking hard.
I shut her up by dropping my mouth to her cleavage and her protest turns to a moan.
“Paintings have never been this fucking sexy, trust me.”
I glide my hand down to her waist, pushing her dress down until it drops to the floor. Her white lacy panties barely cover her. I shove them aside and find her already aroused.
Natalia brings her hand to my hardness, rubbing against me.
“Already?”
She nods. “Please.”
When I unbelt my pants, the black piece of plastic drops to the floor, skittering across the concrete. Both our eyes follow it until it stops moving.
I know where I’ve seen that before…
Natalia’s face whitens like she’s just seen a ghost and I feel every muscle in her body tense against me.
“Leks—” she begins, then stops, like she doesn’t know what to say.
Doubt sinks from my throat into my stomach. That is a listening device. They were all over the place in Yulia’s office at the Ivanov Center. Someone’s bugged the apartment.
What makes no sense is why Natalia’s so upset about it. I’m surprised she even knows what it is.
I push her hair behind her ears and tilt her chin to meet my eyes. “Natalia, shhh. It’s okay. Do you know what it is?”
She nods, burying her face against my chest. On instinct, I wrap an arm around her, breathing in the roses and sugar scent of her golden hair.
I want to believe that she’s only anxious that someone has listened to our private conversations, but I’ve never seen her this distressed.
Something is wrong.
Really wrong.
Natalia is trembling, like she’s scared.
I stroke her back as she sobs, making apologies that are muffled by my chest.
“Natalia, Natalia, you need to speak slowly.”
I gently pull her away from me with my hands on her shoulders. She pulls her dress back up, taking a shaky breath. Her gaze drops to the floor and she takes a long pause.
I don’t say a word to fill it. The doubt in my stomach spreads into something like disappointment.
“That one’s not active, Leks, I promise. I didn’t put any in our apartment. I told him I wouldn’t.”
“Any of what, zolotse?”
Natalia fists her hands in my shirt, her shoulders heaving.
“The recording devices. My father asked me to plant them.”
Recording devices.
The illusion of our happy life here shatters into a thousand jagged pieces.
Natalia’s been lying to me.
I pull back but keep my hand tight around her wrist, my head spinning as I process what she’s done. As I try to think of a way to fix this that doesn’t make me look like an idiot who was too pussy-whipped to do security checks on his enemy’s daughter.
“Natalia. Tell me the truth right now and we can contain this. If you lie to me, though…”
Fuck, am I really threatening my wife?
A tear trails down her cheek. I clench my hands into fists at my sides as I fight the urge to wipe it away, to cradle her face and tell her that this is going to be okay.
“I know,” she nods, her voice barely audible. “I won’t lie.”
“How long?”
“Since that first visit home. I—”
I cut her off. I don’t want to hear her fucking excuses right now.
“How many?”
She chews her lip. God, she’s a bad liar. I can see it on her face as she considers telling me something else, but she sets her shoulders and looks me in the eye as she says it.
“Maybe a hundred,” she whispers.
One hundred of the fucking things.
No wonder Maksim’s been ahead of us. I fucking knew I shouldn’t have let her contact her family.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
After finding out about her brothers. After everything we’ve been through together.
The words come out harsher than I’d thought, a blunt accusation that makes Natalia flinch.
Her gaze drops to the floor. “I didn’t want you to be mad at me.”
“Even when Maksim tried to kill me. Even when you found out what happened to your brothers.”
That only makes her sob harder. It’s painful to watch. I let go of her wrist and Natalia turns and runs upstairs to her room.
I should be the monster she thinks I am. Then I wouldn’t be finding it so hard to do the right thing.
I take a seat at the table, running through it in my head. I should tell Yuri. We should find out exactly what Maksim knows, rearranging our plans to make sure he can’t do any damage with this information.
Instead, I just want this problem to disappear. I wish I’d never found the fucking thing. Everything was perfect this morning.
Because now I’ve hurt Natalia and for some reason, that’s more painful than the fact that she betrayed me. I don’t know why I want to reassure her. She doesn’t deserve comfort right now.
As if I needed any more proof that she’s become a weakness.
I push open the door to find her face down and sobbing on the velvet comforter.
I can’t hear her cry and not want to help her, to hold her in my arms and tell her it’s okay.
I know it’s not rational. The rational thing would be to march her down to Yuri’s office and let him handle the situation. Or to hire someone else to.
Deep in my core, I know that I’m never letting anyone else handle Natalia. No matter how much of a security issue she becomes.
I take a seat on her bed and pull her into my lap. “Promise me you’ll get rid of all of them?”
Natalia nods, her tear-streaked face somehow still perfect.
“All of them, Leks. I’m so sorry. I should have done it as soon as you told me the truth about what happened with Pyotr and Fyodor.”
A small voice in my head tells me this is stupid, that traitors don’t get second chances.
A much louder voice is screaming at me that Natalia loves me and wouldn’t work against me.
I harden my voice.
“Right now, Natalia. You’re going to draw a map of where these devices were planted and we’re going to collect them all.”