Chapter 12 - Anton #2
What other word is there for the way she shows up at the door of the library now?
Jesus fucking Christ. The skimpy, ice-blue silk she comes swathed in, trimmed in ivory lace that brushes the middle of her thighs—a nightmare dressed like a fucking daydream—is nothing short of cruel.
She walks in and traverses an unwilling path to the shelves, but it doesn’t fool me.
She can act like she isn’t aware of my presence, or maybe that she’s above caring about it.
I know better. The time when she pretended I had no impact on her body is well and truly gone now.
If I weren’t so attached to not being a lascivious asshole, I’d throw her up against that very shelf and pound into her until she told me the truth.
The urge alone—the fact of its existence—is why I don’t move, not a muscle. No other movements allowed besides the needs-must, adjusting my reading spectacles and reading the sentence a twelfth time.
My skin prickles with awareness of her proximity.
Of the fact that I’ve seen this woman in couture gowns at galas and prissy little blouses paired with slacks around the Yuri estate, and elegant dresses here and there.
I’ve had her undressed, her skin feverish beneath my palms. And this, still, is the most deviant she’s ever looked; she is walking temptation, and air feels hard to come by.
I can try to peel my eyes off her all I want. I’m still a fucking liar because I notice how she parses through shelves and a handful of volumes before she settles on a book of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry instead.
It’s a testament to how entranced I am by the awesome vessel of her body that it takes sinking into the chair opposite me to realize her feet are bare.
For some reason, it feels illegal to see her tiny toes, painted a vivid strawberry red.
But I still stare, watching them curl against the rug like she’s digging for warmth.
When she finally does speak, it’s to demand, “Light a fire for me.”
She commands me, like she’s made to do it.
And my limbs, anything but impervious to her spell, comply as if fucking hypnotized.
Without a word, I open the flue and lay a crumpled fire-starter at the base of the grate.
I stack kindling loosely over the paper in the shape of a tent, like I’ve read you ought to.
Like I go around building my own fires instead of having one of the staff do it.
With the flick of the long-barreled lighter, I set a piece of paper aflame, watching kindling catch fire and start burning, before I stack logs from the heap onto the pile.
I don’t look back. But I don’t have to. I feel Darya’s eyes on me, as tangibly as the poker I adjust the fire with.
The fire snaps and crackles. And I can’t look back at her.
“You have a lot of military history and political theory in your shelves,” she says apropos of nothing, and I dig, curl my hands into fists. Even this, I can’t do without thinking about the crescent moons she’d dug into her palms last night, when I’d edged her until she cried.
I clear my throat. “Yes?”
Without permission, my gaze flits to her anyway. I’m rewarded by her own eyes, stubbornly fixed on whatever it is Akhmatova has to say. It’s to the page she says, “It’s too expected. A man in power who likes to read about other men in power? Are you really that unimaginative?”
Despite myself, my lips fight a grin. She sounds so disgruntled by the idea.
I let her sit with it a second, then challenge it, “‘Memory of sun ebbs from the heart. Grass fades early. Wind blows the first snowflakes. Barely, barely... Freezing water can’t flow along these narrow channels. Nothing happens here, oh—nothing can happen.’”
The dent between her brows looks tender and aching. “What?”
I gesture with a nod of my head at the book between her hands. “Anna Akhmatova. That was part of a poem. It should be in the first half of the book you’re holding.”
She rolls her eyes at me. “I know,” she bites out. “I’m—”
“Impressed?” I can’t help but tease her.
“I thought we established last night that I’m not easily impressed, Anton.”
My brow cocks up at her. I’d like to believe I’m above typical male pride, but that’s what coats my words. “I thought we established that I can make you come harder than you ever have?”
“You think a lot of yourself.”
“Sometimes,” I admit, lifting a shoulder in a half-shrug. “Occupational hazard, I suppose.”
She doesn’t appear to be disarmed by my candor so much as she is pensive. To inspire it in her is enough, at least, for me to finally move on to the next sentence. I get three more in before she says, “Do you see being the wife of a Pakhan as an occupation, too?”
Not with a gun to my head could I have guessed that would be her line of thinking. Out of shock alone, I don’t pause to think. I just blurt, “Of course not.”
It swiftly becomes clear that that’s the wrong answer.
“Do you?” I ask, mystified.
“I’ve never given it thought before,” she sighs.
Before? I think. Before what?
And then, just like that, the pieces click into place for me.
“It took my mama a day to give you an existential crisis, did it?” I’m not trying to rub it in, but that’s how it comes out sounding. It’s already too late to take it back.
Already, Darya shoots me an unamused look.
“No. She expanded my perspective,” she argues.
“I’ve spent no time thinking about what the life of a political housewife would be.
It’s possible my own mother was one, but that’s nothing she and I’ve ever discussed.
She’s in Moscow; we’re here. My sisters-in-law all have careers.
My sister is the closest thing to a political wife, and she can’t keep a plant alive. But Galina...”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say automatically, though I’ve distantly known the Yuri brood has no real elders.
Their father was an only child who died in a gang war in Moscow when Trifon was a teenager.
He took on the throne young, with no guidance from watching, and then whatever he learned on the job.
Despite how often we’ve been butting heads in our attempts to work together to weed out this fucking mole, I respect him for what he’s turned his Bratva into.
Darya exhales a terse laugh. “It isn’t one. She was a stranger to me. But I appreciate the sentiment. I’m just saying your mother is more interesting than I gave her credit for.”
“Interesting how?” I question.
Darya seems to mull that over. “She’s more self-aware than I expected.”
“She’s had to be,” I point out.
“Because of your father?”
“Because of her whole life. But yeah, Sergei did a real number on her. She didn’t expect him to love her, but she expected him to honor their marriage. Or, at the very least, not publicly embarrass her. Instead, he brought his whore’s child home and told her to raise him,” I say.
It doesn’t matter if I don’t mean to sound harsh.
My tone grows abrasive of its own accord as I broach the subject.
Still, I don’t take the words back. This is her family, too, now.
And it isn’t as if it hasn’t occurred to me that Darya could be using a relationship with Galina as a bargaining chip against me later.
It’s as much sharing as it is a warning, telling her all of this.
“Is that why you hate Viktor?” she asks, undeterred by my tone, like I more or less expected her to be.
“Did I say I hate Viktor?” I challenge.
Darya blinks at me. “Your eyes do.”
“I resent,” I pointedly correct, “that he made my mother’s life hell despite the sacrifice she made, calling him her own. And then he kept his own mother on the side the entire time.”
For a long moment, Darya says nothing at all.
When she finally does speak, her voice sounds almost pained, divulging, “She’s just as protective of you, you know that?”
All my curiosity about her takes a backseat to that one note of pain in her voice, like my world has been narrowed down to it. I find that it makes me ache, like I’ve got a pinched nerve.
“It’s interesting that you say that, because I’ve always been a little jealous of the bond you share with your siblings,” I admit before I’ve made the conscious choice to.
Anything, apparently, to get that tender, bleak look off her face.
“That’s why I got so annoyed with you the first time you came up to talk to me at that fucking party.
You likened mine and Viktor’s relationship to what you share with your siblings—but the truth is that you’d die for each other.
It used to fucking kill me that it couldn’t be like that with my brother.
If there’s anything I hate him for, it’s probably that he’s made that impossible. ”
She cherry-picks her words with a great deal of evident care. “Is that why you’re typically so closed off? After—Irina?”
Every muscle in my body seems to freeze. I’m not unaware that the news of my first marriage is well-known. It’s almost as well-known as the fact that I don’t like to talk about it. Her. Irina. Hers is a name no one brings up to me, for fear of risking my ire.
Yet ire is not what courses through me at the wary look on Darya’s face. “I don’t like to talk about her,” I sigh. “But yes, that’s why. That’s a big part of why.”
Oh, her wide-eyed gaze says. It takes a beat for her lips to shape around the same sound. In the face of it, for some reason, I find myself smiling through my own raw confession.