14. I didn’t like that sweater anyway #2
“He tried it on at her apartment. What an animal.”
I still. “You have experience with him?”
“No, but I’ve gone to a lot of Pi Beta Epsilon and Rho Epsilon Beta parties. He’s always there. It’s one of the reasons I stopped going.”
“What happened? Your guards never mentioned an issue with him.” If they had, he’d be dead.
“There was this cover-up. One of the girls there, she’s a twin—Lex Taylor-Wright—”
“Daughter of Gideon?”
“That’s right. You know him?”
“Of him.”
“Lex was in the sorority but her twin wasn’t. They pulled some twin swap at a fundraiser and Derek Dyers and Ben Sanders attacked her.”
“And you were there?!”
“Yes, but I wasn’t their target.” She pats my stomach like that can soothe the heartburn she just triggered.
“Their intention was to hurt Lex?”
“Yes.”
My brow furrows. “Gideon is a Veronian.”
“What?! That can’t be right. Why would Dyers attack the daughter of a fellow Veronian?”
“That’s a very good question. Why would they ask you to hurt Daddy Harrington for that matter?”
Silence tumbles between us. Hers contemplative, mine annoyed.
Harrington veered around the truth. Again. He’s still protecting them.
Which compromises his intel.
Tomorrow’s priority is to break him. Utterly.
“I don’t know. None of this makes much sense. D-Did you collect?”
Her small voice distracts me. “Collect?”
“Payment for my bruises.”
“Oh. Of course. Six wounds, each worse than yours, kotik.”
“Good. Did you ask him why he’s been targeted?”
“Yes. He doesn’t know.”
“Oh.”
“I shall keep on collecting,” I promise.
“Even better.”
I rub my chin over the crown of her head. “Were you always this satisfied by violence? I didn’t notice it when I was your driver.”
“My life changed,” she says simply.
“Abramovicz.” I invoke the name of my enemy. The old fuck whose dick her sister bit off.
“Yes. Him. But moving in with the O’Donnellys didn’t help. It made me see things differently.”
“In what way? They treated you well. I know your sisters love you.”
“Father hated all of us. Mama didn’t. She adored us. Then… he had her murdered.” She interprets my sudden stillness accurately: “You’re not surprised.”
“Acceding to his position came with the ‘perk’ of accessing the information he had at his fingertips.”
“Would you have ever told me?”
“And cause you pain? No. But I’d have struggled with it if I thought you liked him.”
“I loathe him. If I could piss on his grave without causing a fuss, I would.”
Laughter barks from me. “I can make it happen…”
“I might take you up on that,” she says grimly. “He used to compare me to them all the time.”
“Your sisters?”
“Yes. It turned everything into a competition. Inessa can do this and this, and you can’t do anything. Camille, by your age, was this and this. You’re a slob who I’m ashamed bears my last name.”
“Direct quotes?”
“Pretty much. He detested Camille for her treachery too. Which meant he hated me more if I fell short of her in his eyes.”
“I’ll make arrangements for you to have privacy at his graveside.”
“Thank you.” She snickers. “I think I spent a lot of time unlearning what he said. While also getting to enjoy being a part of a more functional family.”
“I think the O’Donnellys would classify themselves as anything but.”
“Probably. They have one another. Through thick and thin. That’s a gift.”
“You have your sisters.”
“Yes, but like I said, I had to unlearn that we weren’t competing. It still crops up. It did today. When I was thinking about the Veronians and why I put myself through it all.”
“To impress the O’Donnellys?”
“It’s more complicated than that, but at its heart, yes.”
“You view them in a paternal light.”
“I do.” She turns her face into my chest. “I wanted to impress them. I wanted to give them something my sisters couldn’t, wouldn’t.”
And put herself in more danger than any of them would like…
“But it wasn’t enough to just give them more than Inessa or Camille could. I had to be better. The best. T-To thank them for bringing me into their circle. For letting me in.”
“You are enough as you are, Victoria. You don’t need to jump through hoops to be accepted. They accepted you years ago and freely.”
“Because of their wives.”
“Isn’t that how families work? Ties that bind us together, making more connections, tighter knots. Would you have preferred to be dumped in an orphanage?”
“No.”
“I’m sure they’re better here than in Moscow.”
“Shut up,” she grouches, but she nuzzles her nose into my chest.
“Now you want to fix things for this Lex girl.”
“Her sister.” She clears her throat. “I’m still shocked you let me go through with it.”
“In all honesty, so am I.”
She snorts, at first.
But the snort morphs into a peal of laughter that has my lips curving as she laughs herself hoarse.
When she collapses against me, her torso heaves with the remnants of her humor. Scurrying free from my now-ruined sweater, she plops her tousled head in my lap as I ask, “Bed?”
“You’ll sleep here then,” is her coy retort. “I half-expected you to drag me to the farmhouse.”
“I still can—”
“No!” Looping both arms around my waist this time, she buries her face in my abdomen. “Stay here. It’s full of my shit.” I can’t disagree when I look at the state of her floor. “It’s home.”
The kiss she presses to my stomach has me gritting my teeth. I feel the soft heat of her through my sweater and shirt and decide I’m eligible for sainthood.
“Stay.”
Another kiss.
Lower this time.
Fuck.
“Please?”
Ignoring how her wild curls attack my hand, I grab her chin to put on the brakes. “You don’t need to convince me.”
She licks her lips. Lips I want around my cock more than I need my next breath.
“Maybe I want to convince you.”
“Maybe I want you to crave my cock before you blow me, korovka.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Maybe it’s not enough when you’re still upset about last night.” I tap her upper thigh. “Get into bed. I need to shower and then I’ll join you.”
She pouts but stumbles to her feet, rubbing her thigh in a way that makes my cock ache. “I’m watching.”
“You can wash my back if you want,” I drawl.
“Why didn’t you say that was an option?!” She strips off as she walks over to another room that is just as chaotic as this one.
Makeup everywhere, crap on the floor, towels discarded over any surface that counts.
“Does this disorder make sense to you?”
She pauses mid-unfastening her bra. “Of course.”
Of course.
She flings her bra at me, earning my immediate attention. Then, she does the damnedest thing—she rubs the thigh I tapped. Again.
“That stung.”
“Did you like it?”
Her eyes narrow. “Perhaps.”
“Some say it’s cleansing,” I inform her, pretending to be distracted as I undress.
Unlike her, I find disorder stressful. Thankful to find a coat hanger on the back of the bathroom door, I hang up my clothes as best as I can, barely avoiding a spilled pot of some beige sludge I assume she puts on her face.
Suddenly, I’m grateful for the his and hers bathrooms in our Manhattan brownstone.
“Cleansing like… of sins?”
“So they say.”
“How very Catholic. Priests will whip themselves to purge their souls.”
I smile at her. “I was raised Orthodox too, Victoria. I know how crazy those fuckers can be. Trust me.”
Her tongue peeps out as she studies me, then she steps into the cubicle, which is, at least, clean. A part of me thinks this explosion happens immediately after the housekeeper tidies around her.
When she blasts on the water, standing to the side to avoid the cold spray, I get a glimpse of the vision that she is.
She calls out my name and I follow it. Follow her. Just as I know I’ll follow her to the ends of the Earth.
It’s amazing to me that she’d even think I wouldn’t go with her to Montenegro.
That I’d allow an ocean to separate us.
Misha’s right.
She is my weakness.
She is a liability.
I will do anything and everything to keep her safe…
And I failed in that last night.
I shouldn’t have let her take part in this stupid ritual.
But I did.
Because you cannot chain a butterfly. Not without killing them. And my soul recognized something in hers years ago. Nothing physical. Or sexual. Just a connection. Innocent. Pure. Like nothing else in my life.
Wherever she is, I will be.