Chapter 3 #2
Just as quickly as he closed the distance between us to offer his assistance, he’s gone back to the threshold. His Glock is pointed at me again.
“Do it,” he bites out.
Heart pounding, I manage to get the zipper down. My tee is short. Too short for modesty, but I do my best to cover myself as I whip down my panties and jeans. When I sneak a glance in his direction, I see that he’s averted his gaze.
“What a gentleman,” I grumble to myself, mortified by the sound of myself peeing filling the air.
“If you would have behaved yourself, this wouldn’t have been necessary.”
His voice holds a note of lethal warning, but I don’t care as I finish up and flush. Turns out, this toilet doesn’t need any kind of handle-holding magic. It’s just good to go. Thank God. The sooner I get out of here, the better.
“If you wouldn’t have kidnapped me in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to worry about any of this,” I counter as I haul my jeans and panties back up my hips.
Because hell no, he’s not pinning this on me. He hijacked me off the street. Scared me senseless. And I still don’t even know why or if I’ll make it out of here alive. He expected compliance? If he did, he kidnapped the wrong woman.
I zip and leave the button. My fingers are still too DOA to function. Then I head to the sink. Thank God there’s soap. I grew up in a house of men and boys. Soap was a luxury, not a necessity. Until Svetlana came into our world, that is.
“If your stronzo brother wouldn’t have blown up one of our restaurants in broad daylight in the middle of the fucking city, I wouldn’t have touched you,” Andriani returns as I turn off the water and reach for the towel.
It’s black like his heart, and soft and luxurious. Expensive. Like the hot, angry Mafia kingpin breathing fire from the doorway, the towel doesn’t belong here. It must be his.
I turn back to him. “So that’s why you’re holding me hostage at gunpoint? Because Misha blew up some shitty restaurant of yours?”
That earns me a brutal scowl. Scorpion looks like he doesn’t know what he wants to do with me more, shoot me or strangle me. The feeling is mutual, zasranets.
“Nothing in the Andriani famiglia is shitty,” he snaps, “and that’s not all he’s done.”
I know very little about Misha’s dealings with the Mafia. I’ve been trying my best to focus on my career, praying that if I make it far enough, Misha’s pride will kick in, and I can leave the Bratva in the dust.
“So enlighten me, then,” I tell Andriani, leaning my hip against the counter and crossing my arms over my chest.
The action draws his attention to my tits. I watch his gaze dip and then linger, and I feel that same heat crawling through me, languid and forbidden. I don’t want this man, I tell myself, turning it into a litany in my head. I don’t want this man. I don’t want this man. I don’t—
“He handcuffed my brother’s woman to his bed, naked,” Andriani finishes, rubbing a hand along his jaw, which is even darker with stubble now.
“Misha slept with your brother’s girlfriend?” I ask, shocked at the prospect.
My eldest brother never shows so much as a hint of interest in anyone romantically. He’s aloof and glacier-cold. I don’t think he even sleeps with anyone. Dmitri used to joke that in Russia, Misha fucked the snowbanks because they suited his icy heart.
“He didn’t sleep with her,” Andriani snaps. “She’s got better taste than that. He had Dmitri shoot up our guards and break in to my brother’s penthouse. Isla was there, and she was handcuffed and threatened. He used her to get to us. I’m just returning the favor.”
“But I have nothing to do with Misha.”
“Just like Isla doesn’t have anything to do with Andriani business. She should have been off-limits.”
Even criminals have a code of honor. Women and children are supposed to be granted protected status when it comes to these kinds of wars. As much as I try to keep out of this life, I was born into it. I’m no stranger to the ways of the Mafia and Bratva.
“Is she okay?”
“As okay as she’s going to be.”
“Then let me go.”
His response is instant and damning. “No.”
“Andriani—”
“Come here,” he interrupts my protest.
“I’m good, thanks.”
“Don’t make me shoot you.”
“Go ahead and put me out of my misery.”
He joins me in the bathroom, and I instantly wish I hadn’t been so stubborn.
His proximity is alarming, and not because he threatened to shoot me, which I’m about seventy percent sure is a bluff anyway.
It’s for other reasons entirely. Like his scent, which is wrapping around me like the duct tape he wound about my wrists last night.
And the heat that seems to be radiating off him.
I woke up cold, but now I’m practically sweating, heart racing.
Not from fear either.
Fuck my life, my nipples are hard and my clit is pulsing.
It’s because I’ve been remiss. I’ve thrown myself into ballet, and I haven’t left time for anything else. It’s plain that I need to get laid more often.
He startles me by suddenly and completely invading my space, aligning our bodies and pinning me to the vanity at my back. He grips my nape with one hand and presses the cold barrel of the Glock under my chin with the other.
“That can be arranged if it’s what you want, hellcat.”
I swallow hard. Maybe I underestimated him. Maybe Andriani is a bigger psychopath than I gave him credit for. A grave miscalculation on my part.
I hold his stare, unflinching. “Do you think this is the first gun I’ve ever had pointed at me, Andriani?”
I’m the one who is bluffing here. I’ve never been held at gunpoint before. This is the closest I’ve ever been drawn into the web of Bratva danger. Dmitri was always careful to insulate me, to protect me and keep me safe. But all that changed when Misha returned and became Pakhan.
“Has anyone ever told you how fucking reckless you are?” Andriani asks me, slowly trailing the cold metal of the gun along my jaw.
I’m calculating my odds of getting the gun from him without getting shot.
Not good.
The barrel stops under my ear, cold and unrelenting, just like his eyes.
“Stop doing stupid shit,” he growls. “Now give me your fucking wrists. Slowly.”
“You’re going to cuff me again?” I hate the idea. My fingers are still tingling. “Please don’t. I promise I won’t throw anything at you.”
“Like I’d take the word of a Sidorov after everything your family has pulled.” His lip curls. “Wrists. Now. And if you want to stay alive, you’ll move slowly and avoid trying anything.”
I could knee him in the groin. He’s close enough that I might be able to inflict damage. Of course, there’s also the possibility that his finger will jump on the trigger and my brains wind up splattered on the cloudy mirror behind me.
So I concede defeat for now, offering him my wrists like he demanded.
He single-handedly claps the cuffs back on and steps away, leaving me leaning against the vanity and feeling strangely bereft. Some part of me liked the way it felt to have his hard body pressed against mine.
Maybe when the blood rushed back into my hands, it abandoned my brain.
“Come with me,” he orders gruffly, keeping his frigid gaze trained on me along with his pistol as he backs out of the bathroom.
“Are we going for a scenic walk?” I crack.
“Yeah, the kind you’re not going to come back from if you keep it up.”
He’s doing his best to scare me, but I also know that killing me would start a war that would be infinitely bigger and bloodier than Misha blowing up a restaurant and ordering a naked Andriani girlfriend to be cuffed to a bed.
I don’t fool myself into believing Misha loves me—like any true sociopath, he’s not capable of that.
But I am useful to him, and that counts for a hell of a lot more than love in our world.
I precede Andriani into the main living area, and for the first time, I take in the rugged decor. It’s like Bob Ross and a hunting outfitter vomited all over the walls, a comical mixture of landscape paintings and wildlife taxidermy.
“Nice,” I comment, taking in a deer that’s staring at me with lifeless eyes, as if to say run. “Planning to keep my head and mount it with the rest?”
“Maybe,” he says casually, like we’re talking about whether he wants cereal for breakfast instead of murder and severed heads.
“Did you kill all of these poor creatures?” I ask, feeling bad for the pheasant that is mounted on a branch, wings poised to take a flight that will never happen.
“They came with the cabin. A gift from the former owner.” He moves beside me and gestures to one of the vintage barstools pulled up to a mint-green, laminate-topped island. “Sit.”