15. Milana
MILANA
There’s a knock on my cabin door. I’m not ready. I slept fitfully last night, only falling asleep after I sent Masha a message telling her I couldn’t talk for fear of someone eavesdropping, but desperately needed to hear her voice.
She called. It was a short conversation.
All’s fine.
I wasn’t followed.
I came back and the van is still parked exactly where it was when I left days ago.
She’s being watched. Photographed. Those images dropped by drones into Ivan’s compound.
Somehow, she managed to slip out unnoticed in the dead of night and escape to her parents’ hunting lodge and spend some time there, but after years of nobody showing any interest in Masha Baykova, she’s being watched.
It’s all my fault.
The knock comes again and then the doorknob turns, and with it my stomach. It’s locked.
“Milana,” Luca calls.
“Yes.”
“Open up. We need to talk.”
“I just—”
“I don’t wait, princess. Open the door.”
The tone in his voice says everything: he’ll break the door down without hesitating.
With a groan, I pad over, unlock the door, and swing it open. “I overslept and just got out of the shower.”
My wet hair still sticks to my shoulders, water dripping. I have a towel around my body, twisted tight above my breasts, and nothing else.
He takes in my face, scanning every feature presented without makeup, clocking the dark circles under my eyes. “I brought you some coffee. Breakfast is ready if you want any.”
“Thank you.” No word of last night’s mess. How rude I was to him.
I reach to take the small tray with the French press from him, but he walks inside without asking. My treacherous body makes space for him to come inside.
“I’m not dressed.”
“I noticed,” he says, putting the tray down at the foot of the bed.
As he straightens, his gaze hooks on me again, and this time, he does a top-to-toe inspection, like an airport body scanner. When his gaze slides up my legs, my heart stutters over a few beats as heat spreads in my core, flushing my skin. I hate that he makes me feel like this with a single look.
“Can I—”
“Your brother called.”
Unease zaps through me. “Ivan? Why?”
Luca shoves his hands in his pockets, fisting them. “Apparently, Gabriella is a stolen bride. Promised to another Russian when she was only thirteen. She’s been marked—branded in some way or another—and I need you to tell me everything you know about that type of shit that goes on in the Bratva.”
His words are so out of left field, I blink at him.
“Gabi? And a Russian? A stolen bride?” My legs register the shock first, because suddenly, I need to sit down. My fingers tremble when I reach for the towel to make sure it’s secure. “How? She was locked up in a convent for decades.”
Now I’m struck by Gabi’s words on that night that feels like ages ago when I realized she understood Russian. I learned Russian so I could play him…but it was just a phase.
The implications tumble through my head. I finally understand what they truly meant. She was promised in marriage to another Russian. A man who marked her. And in the Bratva world, there’s no such thing as a phase: you’re either in it, or you’re dead.
“That’s what we need to figure out,” Luca says, pumping his fists in his pants pockets, his eyes on me, on the line the wrapped towel makes from my breasts to mid-thigh and everything it hides.
It sinks in that he wants to rip it off and trace every inch of skin to see if I’ve been marked. Branded. Cursed.
The last thing I want is for him to see my naked body, inspect me like a corpse, preparing to dissect and find my secrets.
“Can I get dressed?” In private goes without saying, but he doesn’t move.
He is my husband. He has the right to my body. But not to my secrets.
Not yet. Hopefully never.
We just glare at each other as tension turns the air stifling. Gabi’s revelation twists together strings of questions that become thick enough to hang me.
“I’m not marked like that,” I whisper, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I’d rather check for myself.”
“I’d rather you not.”
He raises an eyebrow, so slowly, but the silent command is there in the strain in his jaw as he bites down on it, in those little muscles twitching, in the way he stares at me. His gaze is a drug I’m starting to dip into. Nobody has ever looked at me with such intensity before.
“Please, Luca,” I whisper, really not wanting to go there right now.
“Understand, princess, I need to know who I—who we, as Il Consiglio—are getting into bed with.”
I stop clutching the edge of the towel, but don’t unknot it.
I’m not ready for this. And they—the men—have made deals around my body.
Surely, they’ve done some research before entering into this agreement with Ivan.
I swallow down my fear, standing my ground as I re-grip the towel tight, ensuring it stays closed.
Nobody is getting into bed with anybody.
“Not today.”
Never.
He pulls his hands from his pockets and closes in on me.
“Don’t flinch,” he says as he comes to stand so close, I can see every amber fleck in his light brown eyes.
“Luca—” I break off. I physically can’t stop him from doing exactly as he wants. I’m powerless.
And as soon as he touches me, he’ll put flame to the spark of desire he’s already lit by just being here in my cabin with me. It’s even worse, what with me wearing only a towel.
As he lifts his hand slowly, I inhale, but don’t rear back as he slides his fingertips along my temple and curves them around my ear, gathering my wet hair away from where it clings to my neck and shoulder.
I stop breathing, goosebumps spreading over my body when a sole fingertip chases after a water droplet running down my neck, over the hillock of my collarbone, to my chest, where it pauses at the top of my cleavage.
God, I want him to go lower. Take me now and help me forget.
“Not today,” he murmurs as he leans in, the tip of his nose on my hairline, his body heat engulfing me with the fresh pine scent of his shower gel. “But soon.”
He drops his hand and skates it down my arm to my side where I’m clenching the towel shut, and with a last sweep of a thumb over my knuckles, he steps back.
“I’ll wait for you upstairs,” he says as he heads to the door, turning back at the last second to look at me. “We’ll be in Boston tonight. The party’s started, and we’re not there for it.”
I have no clue what he means by that, but Boston? Tonight? My next chance.
The door clicks closed, and I sink down on my bed, my heart hammering in my chest, my skin echoing with every soft line he drew on my body. Luca didn’t do what he could so easily have done, and I have no clue why. He says he isn’t the type of man who waits, but he’s waiting.
He told me not to flinch, then touched me so gently I could weep.
In my mind, there’s a ticking time bomb, my need to get out, away and back to Russia in a race against this man and him unravelling me.
As it is, I’m holding on by a thread. Ever since Luca Scalera said I do, it’s as if he got into a bulldozer and is plowing his way toward my inner world where he’s going to ram through my barriers and dig until he’s unearthed all my secrets.
I need to get away from him before he comes any closer and does more damage than I can cope with.