Chapter 53 Ivan
IVAN
I rush down the corridor and to the stairs, forcing distance between us so I can digest and recalibrate, even if all I want is to shove someone against the wall and choke them until they croak out every last secret. I’ll find the weak spots—every man has them.
But this one…she’s a woman. And my wife.
My beautiful, sweet, delicate wife, who would break if I bend her at just the right angle.
My hot-as-hell, sexy wife who came on my hand, so fucking needy, almost making me come in my pants—again.
My gorgeous, heart-of-gold wife who I trusted with my girls, who I planned to make love to and not fuck the first time like I had Darya, just to get it over with. Break the ice.
I had plans for tonight, and none of them involved finding a piercing.
Fucking idiot, fantasizing that things could be different. Dreaming of an undeserved chance for more between us.
I drag my hands through my hair where her scent still clings like an intoxicating perfume, circling like a caged animal on the landing, cornered. A guard steps out of the shadows.
“Pakhan?”
Even I forget there are guards everywhere.
“Guard her door, Igor,” I bark my orders. “She doesn’t leave her room, and she doesn’t talk to anybody.”
I head down the stairs, looking a fucking picture with my dick still pressing against my pants, no shirt, no shoes.
Let Igor think what he wants; I just need to keep my cool here and look in fucking charge.
The last thing I can afford is to appear weak, least of all on the day I married into Il Consiglio.
Have they already bought some of my men?
If Gabriella has made it into my sanctuary, who has she turned on me?
I’m fucking neurotic, but in this game it’s hunt or be hunted, kill or be killed, and I’ve been prey for too long.
I thought I knew who Il Consiglio was in bed with, but for all my intel, they might have fucked around and have the proverbial Russian mistress in the mix.
As for Gabriella, I bet it’s all pretending. This not knowing who pierced her, who marked her as Russian territory.
It strikes me that a much wider criminal organization is behind all of this, because how the hell does a real Italian Mafia princess, who spent her life in a convent, get marked as a Bratva bride and then land in my bed?
Nothing here is coincidental. Someone has been playing a very long game of chess, and checkmate is breathing down my neck. Gabriella must be a spy at least, at most an assassin come to finish off Dimitri’s botched job.
But if she wanted me dead, she could have killed me a thousand times over since her arrival. In my fucking sleep.
And her brothers must know something, too, so eager to pawn off their little tampered-with sister to me.
As I reach the first floor, I pat down my pants’ pockets for my phone, but recall I’ve left it in my suit jacket which is on the floor of her room. Rage is sitting so shallow, I can’t walk back in there now and grab it.
Small-girl chatter comes from the direction of the kitchen, interspersed by Yuri’s low grunts as he converses with Irisha and Katya in Russian.
They’re the grandchildren he always wanted and never had.
He didn’t have his own kids, and given the life he’s led, it was a wise decision.
My girls’ safety is my biggest priority and headache.
I can’t face my daughters like this, but I will have to fill Yuri in at some point—with selective details, because fuck knows, the first time I came across the double-skull clit piercing, I didn’t think anything of it. But now… I need to find supporting evidence.
I head to my office where I fire up my computer, and after all the security checks, open the camera app and fast-forward through the footage recorded from her bathroom.
When I hit the section where she pulls a burner phone from a box of sanitary napkins, I drop back in my chair. Here it is. I slow the footage down and rewatch it at least three times. A random call she makes to who knows who.
My sweet little spy, despite all our searches and precautions, has managed to smuggle in a way to connect with the outside world. Spread word about our location, my girls, the state of my security—and lack thereof—all my vulnerable spots mapped out.
Fuck.
What a fucking joke. I took every feasible precaution with the wedding, keeping them guessing and making sure there was no way anybody could take me out…while I opened the door wide and let her walk straight into my most vulnerable position. It’s like a stab to the fucking heart.
I drag my hands down my face, tallying up the proof.
A piercing tying her to Chertnikov’s Bratva, because Darya had the exact same one.
A burner phone with secret phone calls. A fucking fake period to cover up the phone call.
And Yuri let me know she’s been unusually occupied with her Petrov-issued phone these past few days.
And then there’s the Bible, highlighted with weird random words. Code. Fucking code words to be used when she finally sells me out.
Fuck.
She didn’t come with much, barely a full suitcase of clothes and personal things that got checked by security, and yet here we are.
My hands are trembling, and the adrenaline of the past hour is poison in my blood. I’m not ready to face her. In fact, I don’t know how to face her.
We’re married, even if I can walk out now and annul our marriage because we haven’t consummated it. I had such high hopes for this one. Idiot, freaking besotted idiot, thinking it could be different with a young virgin in my bed.
With Darya, the slippery slope to rock-bottom was slow.
I was thirty-two, and she was older than Gabriella, twenty-six when we got married, sexually experienced, and her piercing didn’t surprise me.
Fuck, it turned me on. She had tattoos, too, other secret markings I expected because she was a real Bratva bride.
For all that she wore the evidence on her body, Darya was a closed book.
We never talked. She never had a breakdown like Gabriella had that night, opening up on how she got trafficked and what she’d witnessed in Mancuso’s cellar.
No, Darya drugged her trauma, keeping it at bay. Keeping her past a secret.
I was too blind to see it, too inexperienced and a fucking arrogant idiot. If Darya were still alive, I could have confirmed where she got her piercing, but she’s dead, indirectly by my hand. It’s a guessing game now, but whichever Bratva did this to Gabriella will be hunted down.
I save the salient clip to a separate file and send it to my phone and to Yuri, not having it in me right now to march upstairs, fling open the door, find the phone and see whose number she called, who she’s been texting. I shut down my computer, my whole body poised for a fight it can’t have.
There’s only one option here: the gym and the punching bag I can beat to shreds. It’s the only place I can let off steam without killing someone.