Chapter 8Vasily
Vasily
I tell myself not to lose my shit when I walk into the apartment and Ana is gone but my bug-out bag is on my bed, opened, the money on display. She hasn’t taken all of it, but she’s taken some, and I don’t know where she’s gone.
This is straight out of her playbook. I bet if I get the security feed from the hallway, I’ll see her taking two steps out, changing her mind, and attempting to go back in, only to realize the door is locked.
But when I call down to security to see if they have footage of which direction she went, they say she never left.
So she’s in my office.
I roll my eyes, trying to decide what trouble she’s gotten into.
I was told that she was rescued with nothing on her person except a tank top and panties.
She may have arrived without her memory or a single belonging, but according to the notes the medical staff provided, it’s likely just a matter of time before it returns.
What will happen then? A lot has changed in the past six years; she might happily con me out of any information that would help Tony.
I need to shower. I’m sooty. I’m sure I reek of smoke, but so much of it went up my nose I can’t smell anything.
But she might have already gotten her memory back and be raiding my office right now.
Benedetti said Tony was sending a mole in. It’s insane to think this thing with Ana was staged, but I’ve been accused of insanity once already today.
I storm off my private elevator with the intention of grabbing her and forcing her to empty whatever pockets she has and locking her up in the apartment until I can figure out what to do with her, but she’s sitting at my desk, looking as sunk and sad as ever, tiny in the chair built for a man twice her size.
Laid out before her is a collection of guns.
My ghost guns. Four of them are operational; three are currently loaded.
At least one has a bullet in the chamber.
Despite the stern lectures I’ve given my heart, it catches at the thought she may have accidentally shot herself.
I have to be cautious with her and protect my own self-interests.
It is possible she’s Tony’s pawn, but I’d rather not return her to him in a casket if I can avoid it.
Yeah, don’t like that thought at all.
And I don’t like the fact that what seems to be the critical item on the desk isn’t the guns. It’s the box of condoms.
“Mind telling me what you’re doing in my office?” I ask gruffly, the gravel in my voice from the smoke inhalation doing most of the heavy lifting. If nothing else, now is the time for me to make it clear she’s not welcome in here, just in case her memories do come back .
Her scowl deepens, and that gives me a perverse joy. I was completely blindsided by her crumbling yesterday. I’m prepared for this.
“I’m trying to figure out who I am, and apparently I need to figure out who you are too,” she says with the most peevish tone, like I couldn’t just throw her over my leg and spank her for that bad attitude.
She’s pouting, and with her make-up done and her lipstick a dark shade that’s somewhere in between red and purple, richer than I would have picked for her but highlighting her sinfully plush lips, I just want to give her something to pout about.
“I’m your husband,” I lie, but I can’t help my boasting tone.
It’s not nearly so outlandish as it seems on the surface.
We once had a fantasy of a life together, but that fantasy was of running off and leaving the organized crime world behind.
What if I’d simply forced her to be a Bratva wife after Artyom was murdered and I could no longer leave?
It’s what Tony wanted. He’d have happily sold her to me for whatever favor it would curry.
He probably would have rewritten the sale of his sister from a transaction to cover a debt into an arranged marriage.
This would have been her life if I hadn’t sent her back in hopes that, if she could not find happiness, she could at least escape my family’s fate.
Wasn’t her biggest lamentation the fact that when her virginity was sold to me, her value went down and she would no longer get the wealthiest, most powerful husband possible? Well, here I am.
She reaches ahead, and I suppose that yes, she could grab one of the loaded guns and fire a single shot that would end me here and now in Los Angeles, California, but it’s not just my firm belief that I’m going to die in Flagstaff that has me unsurprised that she reaches for the box of condoms instead .
“Then why do you have these?” she asks.
“Because I enjoy practicing safe sex,” I drawl, approaching her then, preferring to have this conversation up close.
I do reconsider when she grabs the box in her fist and, for just a moment, looks as though she’s seriously contemplating chucking it at me. Not that I think I’d be hurt, but I’d rather not get pelted by a 6-pack of Trojans.
“You’re cheating on me,” she says as she crushes the box in her hand.
“That’s a bold assumption.”
“I went through your nightstand. There was lube but no condoms.”
I sit on the corner of my desk, the way Benedetti does when she’s flirting with me.
I let Ana’s words hang in the air as I study her for effect.
Am I trying to come up with an explanation?
Yes. Am I going to do my best to make the pause seem deliberate, like I’m just playing a game with her?
Yes. And as much as both first impressions of her have been clean-faced, six years ago with her still in a bathing suit from a morning at the pool and again at the Consummate headquarters, I do like how she’s done her makeup.
Her complexion smoothed into a soft glow, her eyelids with a faint shimmer and a natural contour, her long lashes making her chocolate eyes gigantic, and those fuckable lips?
She might be in trouble.
“We don’t fuck in my bedroom,” I tell her.
“Then what are you doing with the lube in there?”
I hope my smirk comes off as intriguing and only a little asshole-ish as I make a universal gesture with my hand. I don’t bring women back to my penthouse, so yeah, that is exactly what the lube is for.
She crinkles her nose. “So our sex life sucks. Cool.”
Ouch.
“No, baby,” I murmur, feeling my stride, for the first time realizing exactly what I want from her, what I’ve always wanted from her.
Even the first time fucking her, with her blindfolded and her brother watching, with me high as fuck and pissed at the world because, despite everything that happened that day, there’s nothing in the world I find more revolting than a rapist, burying my cock in her put me in another plane of existence.
And I know something she doesn’t know. I know all about Ana. I was her sexual awakening. What she’s done with that in the last six years, fuck all if I know. She may have been living like a nun this entire time. But I know who she really is.
I lean over my desk, take her by the chin, tilt her so she has no choice except to meet my eyes. “You just like an audience.”
Her eyes go big as saucers, and yeah, she attempts to look away from me, but I’m too close. She’s not looking at my eyes, but she’s looking at my hand, my nose, my lips. I don’t think she means to do it, but I see her lips turn in and I can feel in my hand that her tongue is sliding over that seam.
I feel her throat bob as she considers how to respond, but then her nose crinkles. “Why do you smell like smoke? Is that soot...?” She actually licks her thumb like she’s about to rub the gray from my cheek.
I grab both her wrists. I should have showered before I hunted her down, but I needed to make sure she hadn’t gotten herself into too much trouble. “Print shop burned down. No big deal. And I’m not cheating on you.”
She shakes her head in disbelief, but her Mafia princess instincts must kick in because she doesn’t even get hung up on the fire part. “ I don’t understand how there would be an audience here but not in the apartment. Do... do people come in here? Your employees...?”
Fuck if her pupils don’t blow out and her cheeks don’t flush, the pigment only a whisper beneath the light makeup she wears. She doesn’t hate the idea, not at all. Oh, she’s going to fight it, that’s clear enough, but she’s intrigued.
It’s early still, just past lunch, on a Tuesday. I nod to the window. “Go look outside, Ana.”
She hesitates before giving in and strolling away from me. She’s dressed the same as yesterday, my hoodie over leggings. She’s added sandals.
Last time she tried to run away from me, she threw on as many layers as she could but didn’t even try to find cash.
It was right in the front closet then, not nearly as big a stash as now but just as easy to find.
This time, she’s not even dressed warmly enough to go to the café across the street.
It’s LA, but it’s February. I don’t think it hit 60 today.
I watch her pad delicately across the rug, the hoodie far too loose to show her figure, but she’s still slim. Still delicate.
I still want her.
She looks out the window, but she’s tilted her head down, to the street below.
“No, Ana. Look straight across. Do you see them?”
She leans close to the glass, squinting. I’ve stared mindlessly out that window enough times to know they’ll eventually be visible.
Her breath catches. Not startled. It’s only logical that what she’d see through the polarized windows of the skyscraper across the street is people working at computers.
Some of them are in offices. Some share desks.
There are a couple meeting rooms that I’ve caught evening presentations at.
I can see people from about seven floors, depending on how close they are to those windows, and three floors must be the same company because the break rooms are all in the same spot.
It’s not unusual for me to see someone staring right back at me as they snack on chips or make their coffee.
Ana lifts her hand to touch the glass but pulls back before she leaves a print. “Can they see me?” In her reflection, I see her scowl toying at a return. “You’re making this up. They’d be able to see me just as well from the apartment.”
“It faces the wrong way.”
It’s harder to prove a lie when there’s an immediate answer for everything, but she keeps going. “Why the condoms if we’re married?”
“You’re determined to prove me wrong, aren’t you?”
She does stop to think then. The way her face contorts, I’ve seen it many times already since she arrived.
I don’t recall that expression from Flagstaff, but six years can be an eternity and a blink of an eye at the same time.
Bereft of her memories, she’s still the same Ana, but even without the additional six years of memories, she’s a whole different woman.
But as determined as ever.
“How long have we been married, Vasily?”
“Six years.”
“How old was I when we got married?”
“Nineteen.”
“I was young.”
“Not so young in your world,” I point out before I can hold back my tongue. Legal age is sixteen in Arizona with custodial consent, and I know for a fact the Mafia there is happy to give that consent .
“My world?” she repeats, her tone scathing.
I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t open up this can of worms, but I can’t help feeling all the anger I felt in Flagstaff for the girl whose virginity— but not her safety, not her future— was sold to a stranger.
The girl who then felt so hopeless she tricked that stranger into defiling her for the entire world to see, in the hopes that it would devalue her enough she’d be free.
“Yes, Ana, your world.” I grip the edge of my desk to keep my ass in place, but I’m seething internally.
“I saved you, got it? Your family would have sold you to a man with four young dead wives or a man three times your age or a man who used his fists to make sure he never came home to the mess I came home to yesterday, and I saved you from that. So I don’t know why you suddenly think I’m the villain here, but—”
“Because you have at least seven guns!” she cries out, taking steps toward me, clearly with the intention of getting in my face, probably waving one of those guns around recklessly. “And they’re all super weird—”
“Stop!” I bellow, putting my weight back on my feet. That alone is enough to stop her in her tracks. “March your ass back to the window.”
She pouts like a brat but does it.
“Now take your clothes off.”
She gasps in all the outrage her five-foot frame can muster. If she shot the middle finger at me and stomped to the elevator to return home, I’d be fine with unlocking the door for her, but she screams, “You can’t tell me what to do!”
Even as she grips the bottom of my hoodie in her tiny fists.
“If you don’t strip right now, Analiese Baranov, I will lay you over my thighs and spank you until you can’t sit right for a week. ”
That gets her pupils blowing out again. She doesn’t move at first, but she glares at me and takes gusty breaths like an overworked mare.
She very quietly says, “I think I hate you, Vasily Baranov.”
But she lifts the hoodie off as she says it.
She’s wearing a loose tank top and a tight sports bra, both in cool, neutral tones, like every woman I see coming out of the café in the morning, iced cappuccino in one hand and stroller in the other.
I keep thinking she’s going back to Phoenix.
Either her memories will come back or Tony will come rooting around for her, that I’ll use her as a bargaining chip.
But I’m also toying with the idea of watching out the window for her to leave that café and make her way back across the street, then flipping to a security camera to make sure she gets in the elevator that will take her directly to my office so I can fuck her against the window while the drones in the office across the street watch.
Or, she doesn’t come directly to my office because she does have a stroller she’s pushing in front of her, with a baby in it that needs to be returned to his crib before she can come back down for us to work on making a little sister for him.
Fuck me, that’s not the fantasy. I’m dead. I’m not seeing any of that. But the thoughts have me rock fucking hard.
“You’ve always hated me. But you love my cock more. Now finish undressing.”