Chapter 6Vasily
Vasily
I lean back against my bedroom door once I close it and give myself a moment to take a breath.
What the fuck am I doing here?
I don’t know how I expected this to go. I saw that picture of Ana at Consummate HQ, and reason popped right out of my brain, I swear. Ana fucking Lombardo is in my apartment. I ruined her once, and I’m going to ruin her again.
Maybe I didn’t, I tell myself. Maybe I opened her eyes to a whole new world, and she’s got her tits and ass plastered all over the internet now because it turns out the whole degradation porn really did it for her.
She could be thankful I agreed to her little game the first time, the unwitting puppet in her show, thinking he was the one pulling the strings the whole time .
Could be she got reckless with her kink, and that’s why she ended up with sex traffickers. Some princesses only need to be saved from themselves.
The problem is someone does have the answers to my questions.
Someone knows what Tony ultimately did with her once she was returned, what she’s been doing with her life.
Someone knows how she ended up getting nabbed by those traffickers, and that same someone should have had the common goddamn sense to stop it from happening, even if I did tell him not to interfere.
I mean, fuck, what did he think I meant by keeping tabs on her?
And why isn’t he answering his goddamn phone?
I snap mine out of my pocket, checking one more time to see if Dima has responded. Sometimes my signal goes out in the elevator, even when I’m only going three floors from my office to my condo.
But there’s still nothing. A dozen times over today, I’ve thought I’m going to fucking kill him, and every time, I mean it a little more. I am going to fucking kill the guy who used to be my best friend.
And I’m a goddamn coward. Yeah, I’m hungry.
Yeah, everything smelled delicious. Yeah, I heard the sizzle of the steak and thought man, I could fucking destroy that thing.
But the stupidest part of all this is I know Ana is desperate to get her memories back, and all the while, I’m the one being assaulted by them.
She made me ravioli from scratch once. I walked into my shitty apartment in Flagstaff and found her there at my kitchen island, quietly considering the striped, rounded, uniform pasta pillows before her, and she looked up at me with a hesitant but joyful smile and said, “I made ravioli. I really think I can cook. ”
That night, I told myself I couldn’t keep her and wouldn’t keep her, that the only reason settling her brother’s debt this way worked was because it wasn’t forever. I believed every lie I strung.
Seeing her standing in my kitchen once more? In my hoodie, swimming in it, so long it covers every curve of her thighs and leaves her with nothing but chicken legs? Not a stitch of makeup, splotchy cheeks, my kitchen a disaster?
Fuck if the sight of her didn’t worm right into my heart and fill it to bursting, no matter how much I fight it.
Fuck if seeing her in my kitchen yet again didn’t bring it all back, this time with the hindsight to know that, yes, I was fully in love with Ana and would be for the rest of my life.
I ate that fucking ravioli last time. Ate probably five servings of it because ravioli servings always seem child-sized.
I showed her how to make garlic bread, although she took my jury-rigged recipe of hot dog buns, margarine, and garlic powder and turned it into garlic herb focaccia a few days later. I loved every goddamn bite.
This time, I ran from her.
I strip out of the suit I’ve worn too many hours straight, pop a couple Xanax, and hop in the shower for the fastest jerk-off known to man, punishing my dick with a grip too firm for the motions when there’s still a piercing left, but it deserves it.
It’s been like a fucking divining rod pointing to Ana all day, and seeing her in my hoodie again? Yeah, it’s all fucked up.
I scrub myself dry, throw on some pajama pants, check my phone again.
Nothing. Four minutes since I last checked, definitely a world record in the shower and probably why my balls are already aching again, and nothing from Dima .
I flop onto my bed, face first.
It smells like her.
Fuck.
With a frustrated groan, I hop out of bed, throw open the door, and storm into the kitchen, ready to chew Ana out about rolling around in my bed even though it was already obvious she’s been in my room. She pulled my hoodie out of the closet, after all.
But then I see her sitting at the dining room table, two small but perfectly shaped portions of the meal she cooked laid out in front of her, the veggies sitting on a smear of red paste, the risotto garnished with green flakes, the plate dry beneath the steak like she took the time to sop up juices.
Everything is perfect on that plate, but she’s sitting there with her hands in her lap, frowning down at it until she realizes I’m watching her.
I don’t have anger issues. I kill the causes of my anger issues, and then I’m not angry anymore.
It’s a system that’s served me well— and led to rumors I killed the former pakhan, but honestly, I liked the guy and would have enjoyed a couple more years of focusing solely on my projects before taking over the Southwest. But there’s nothing for me to kill now, and I seem to have forgotten how to manage it in any other way because I bark out at her, “What, you gotta trash my kitchen, and then you don’t even like the food you made? ”
Her eyes go too wide. Her lips curl. Ana had a funny way of fighting, forever casting herself out and reeling herself in as she negotiated her idea of me with who I really am, a man who okay, yes, has a temper, but would never do anything except yell for a second to blow off steam before remembering myself.
She’ll tell me to piss off or point out that it’s her kitchen too and I pay plenty of money to someone else to clean any mess that’s made. I’m already feeling better. She’ll yell back, and then we can talk it out.
Only, no. Tears spring from her eyes as she lowers her attention back to the plate in front of her. “I don’t know!” she warbles. “I don’t know if I like the food, and I don’t know why I trashed the kitchen, and I don’t know where I am or what I’m supposed to do or anything!”
She takes flight then, standing so quickly the chair topples behind her as she sprints toward her room. But she has to run by me, and I jut out my arm to snag her by the waist and reel her into me.
It scratches some part of my brain that needed... not to break her, but needed her to break. Broken things rebuild. This is to help her.
She sobs against my bare chest, and I rub her back, making soothing sounds like this is what I’m meant to do. I don’t know, I’m never a comfort to anyone, only a thorn in everyone’s sides. I guess this is my chance to try something new.
I hold her for a long time. Eventually, her sobs subside and her breathing evens out.
The hand she rests on my chest squeezes and then relaxes but remains anchored there.
A quietude falls over her, and I could fall asleep on my feet, but I think she’s about to fall asleep here, too.
Only when she takes a big, raw sigh does she finally shift her weight from me.
“I should clean the kitchen,” she says softly.
My instincts— and the fact that she is my wife, whether that’s real or not— take over, and I kiss the top of her head before I loosen my hold on her waist. “You need to eat.”
“But the kitch—”
“The cleaners will be here tomorrow. They’ll take care of it. ”
The look she shoots me is genuine horror. “I can’t leave it until tomorrow!”
She attempts to squirm fully out of my hold, no doubt to start the dishes, so I use my foot to correct her chair and plop her down into it. “Eat. I will clean the kitchen.”
It works.
For thirty seconds.
And then I spin away from the sink I’ve just filled with pots, and there’s Ana, adding more food to one of the plates.
She grins up at me, her face still tear-streaked and blotchy but her eyes all for me. “For you. You must be hungry.”
She’s going to fuck up my heart all over again.
“You see here, how this surface has a ridge here?” Slug asks, pointing to one monitor before pointing to a second with a nearly identical image on it.
“And on this receiver, there’s this lip?
I printed these in Flagstaff. This is from one of the older printers, but that’s from the one we just set up last month.
And neither of these will work. Now check out this baby I printed here this morning. Eh? Eh?”
I nod despite not seeing much of a difference when the monitors are showing images taken by microscopes and so zoomed in I may as well be looking at glittering rose gold molecules.
This isn’t my area of expertise. When the idea of ghost guns first popped up, I had no idea what they were or how they could possibly be legal.
I held eighty percent of a gun in my hand, and the thing had no registration number on it, and there was no way this was something I could just casually carry around in my hand while strolling through the local grocery store, but it was .
It’s all about the lower receiver, what’s currently under the microscope and on the screen.
Thanks to the Second Amendment and all the mediocre white men who think they’re entitled to literally every single thing in the world however they can get it, the US government says this thing being churned out layer by layer is the only thing that really makes a gun.
And it’s manufactured from filament we buy off Amazon.