20. Artem
Artem
The penthouse is quiet.
It's almost eerie as Katya and I walk inside. Her heels clicking on the wooden floor echo loudly.
"I'm going to bed." She says it like a declaration, challenging me.
I lift a brow, smirking. "You want to go to bed already?"
She sneers at me. "I'm going alone, Artem." She turns, giving me her back, but she doesn't move further into the penthouse.
Her reflection shows in the glass of the window. I can see the tension in her jaw, the way her hands are fisted at her sides, knuckles pale.
"We haven't consummated the marriage, Katya."
She breathes out slowly.
Her voice is flat. Controlled. "I'd like to skip that particular tradition."
"That's not how this works. I told you you would be my wife in all ways."
She turns then, and her cheeks are flushed with anger.
Her hazel eyes sparkle in the moonlight, and I know it's because I am pressing the issue.
If I were a better man, I wouldn't. After all, I got what I wanted.
But I've come to accept that I am not a good man, and it is important to ensure that this marriage is solidified in all ways.
Consummation is part of the legal requirement of marriage.
"Tell me, Artem. How does this work? I walk into a bedroom and simply — what? Perform? Because you order me to?"
"Katya." I close my eyes slightly, pressing my fingers to my temples. "Must we argue?"
"Don't." The word cracks like a shot. She turns, pointing her finger at me with fire and anger. "Don't say my name like that. Like you know me. Like you have any right to?—"
She breaks off. Looks away, and I can see a shininess in her eyes. She blinks several times before reaching behind herself.
"Katya—" I reach for her, but she brushes me away, and I'm standing there, watching her, holding my breath.
Her arm strains, and it takes a moment, but eventually she finds the zipper at the back of her gown. She tears it down in one savage motion. The silk pools at her feet, and she steps out of it without ceremony, without grace, and hurls the whole tangled mass of lace and beauty directly at my chest.
It hits me in the face. I allow it.
"There." Her chest is heaving. She's in nothing but white lingerie now, and she's magnificent, and she doesn't know it, and my mouth waters at the thought of having her. Because I am a fucking monster.
"You want it consummated? Fine. You want to own me completely? Then do it. Stop pretending you're giving me a choice. Stop pretending any of this was ever a choice."
Her voice breaks on the last word.
Not in weakness. In fury. There's a difference, and I know it because I know her, which is a problem in and of itself.
I set the dress aside carefully. Cross the remaining distance between us. She holds her ground, chin up, eyes blazing, hands shaking slightly with the effort of maintaining the rage. I reach out and cup her face in both hands.
She goes very still.
"I'm not going to take anything you don't give me." My voice comes out rough, and I squeeze, just slightly. "You can pretend that I have, but we both know I haven't done anything you haven't wanted."
She sneers at me. "I hate you. I want you to know that. I hate you for all of it."
"I know." I cup her cheek, softening my fingers.
"You took everything." She stops again. Something shifts in her eyes. Something she won't let herself say. "Tell yourself whatever you want, but if I can't lie, neither can you."
She leans into my touch, just slightly. The smallest betrayal of her own body.
Then she's crying.
Not delicately. Not the way women cry in films, a single artful tear.
Katya cries like she dances, with everything, all of it, nothing held back.
Her hands fist in the front of my jacket, and she presses her forehead to my chest. Her body is shaking, and so I do the only thing I can think to do. I hold her.
My arms come around her. My chin drops to the top of her head.
"I hate you," she says into my chest. Muffled. Miserable.
"I know, solnyshko."
She cries harder.
I hold her tighter, pressing her fully into my body.
I don't speak. I don't offer platitudes or justifications. I've lied to her enough. And right now, I don't have any left in me anyway. I'm tired of lying. I'm tired of the careful distance I've maintained, the tactical warmth I've deployed like a weapon.
I push her back gently after a long time. Tilt her face up. She looks wrecked, mascara tracked down her cheeks, eyes red and swollen, the armor of tonight completely stripped away.
"Katya."
"Don't say something kind." Her voice is hoarse. "I can't stand it when you're kind."
"Then I won't say anything."
I kiss her instead.
She doesn't fight it. That's the thing. She never fights it, and that's what she hates most, that her body recognizes mine regardless of what her mind knows. Her hands come up and grip my lapels, and she kisses me back with all the anger she has nowhere else to put. I allow it, giving her that.
I pick her up and carry her to my bedroom.
I lay her down like she's fragile, delicate. I catch my breath as I look at her, and it takes me a moment to pull those feelings, those emotions she stirs up in me, into a box.
This is a means to an end. We can enjoy it, but that doesn't mean it needs to be something more.
I strip off my jacket. My tie. I take my time, watch her watching me, and the fury hasn't left her eyes but it's layered now, complicated, threaded through with something that looks like want and feels like grief. When I settle over her, she makes a sound low in her throat that I feel in my spine.
"I hate you," she whispers.
"You keep saying that." I drop my mouth to her jaw. Her throat. The hollow of her collarbone. "I'm starting to wonder who you're trying to convince."
She grabs my hair and pulls me up to face her. Her eyes are fierce. "Don't be smug."
"Never."
"Artem—"
"I have you, Katya. Don't worry." The words come out wrong. Too honest.
Something fractures in her expression. She looks away first. Then she pulls me down so that I am on top of her.
This isn't like the last time, when we fucked angrily.
The first time had its own complications, its own weight, the careful tenderness I deployed with surgical precision, the way I catalogued her responses like data. I was present but separate.
Observing.
There's no separation now.
She's angry and she's grieving and she wants me anyway, and I am furious at myself for every move that brought us here, and I want her anyway, and the combination of all of it strips something from both of us.
There's no performance left. No calculation.
Just this, her hands pulling me closer when her better sense says push him away, my mouth finding hers in the dark like there's nowhere else it knows to go.
She says my name twice. Just my name, nothing else, but the way she says it?—
I shake the thoughts off.
This is fucking, and it's to ensure that she can't annul the marriage. I repeat that in my mind as I push inside her.
"Fuck," I mutter, as she arches against me.
She whispers something in Russian she doesn't know she's saying, some fragment of endearment she must have learned from her grandmother, and every wall I've constructed over the last decade develops a crack I'm going to have to spend a long time pretending isn't there.
Afterward, she lies on her side facing away from me.
Her breathing slows. She's exhausted. I watch the line of her spine in the dark, the way the covers drape over her hip, and I think about staying. I think about it with a thoroughness that has nothing tactical about it.
Then I get up.
She stirs as I find my clothes. "Where are you going?"
It isn't a question. Her voice is flat again. Armored. This is what we do. We have sex, and then I leave. She's used to it now.
"This room is yours," I say, buttoning my shirt without looking at her. "You have full use of it. I won't disturb you again."
Silence.
"Artem."
I look at her then. She's pushed herself up slightly, the sheet pulled around her, her hair loose. The mascara is dried on her cheeks. She looks young and old at the same time.
"If you're good," I say, and I hate myself more than I have in a long time, "you can keep dancing. I won't interfere with the company. I'll have one of my men give you a credit card, and you will have a guard and a car."
Her face goes very still.
Her breathing turns heavy, and she inhales shakily.
"Get out," she says quietly.
I pick up my jacket from the chair. Walk to the door. I pause there with my hand on the frame, and I know I should leave it alone, leave her alone, leave the clean tactical exit intact, but I can't quite make myself step through without?—
Nothing. There's nothing to say.
I leave.
The hallway is dim. The rest of the penthouse is quiet, the wreckage of the wedding reception waiting for the morning staff. I stand outside her closed door and listen to nothing, which is worse than any sound she might have made.
I have done everything correctly. Every step of this operation has been precisely executed.
She is my wife. The marriage is consummated.
Viktor Popov's granddaughter is irrevocably bound to me, which means I'm one step closer to the thing I've been building toward since Irina wrote me her first letter detailing the pain that Alexei put her through.
The plan is intact.
I should feel nothing but forward momentum.
Instead I stand outside my wife's door and listen to the silence, and I think I can hear, underneath it, the sound of her crying into a pillow she's pressed against her face, so I won't know.
I know.
I stand there for a long time.
Then I go to my own room, sit on the edge of my bed, and stare at the floor, and try to remember why any of this was worth it.
The answer doesn't come as easily as it used to.