Chapter 13 #3
He begins searching through drawers, as if the woman would leave anything within his reach that easily, while I pour the already hot water over the tea bag in my cup.
“Why did he hide it?”
“Because he is a bastard who says I’m already too restless and don’t need chocolate.”
He huffs, sulking, after closing a drawer where he doesn’t find the much-desired treasure, then scans the room with narrowed eyes.
“I’m going to make them regret stealing my chocolate.”
This time, I laugh softly.
“You should. I support you,” I say, lowering my voice a little in solidarity. “Anything but chocolate.”
“Right?” he exclaims, his face bright enthusiastically.
For a moment, I forget that he is almost my age and not some wild child barely ten years old.
“He doesn’t understand me. And he’s been doing this for a long time. Once, heliterally took my cake away from me on my own birthday! Said I’d already had one slice and that it had too much chocolate.”
He shakes his head and smacks his lips in dissatisfaction.
“To this day, he has never apologized for ruining my twentieth birthday.”
I laugh even harder.
Who still has chocolate cake at twenty?
Sasha, obviously.
“That was ugly of him,” I try to empathize with him. “He should have apologized.”
But Sasha snorts.
“Voron? Apologize? HA! Never going to happen. He couldn’t say those words even when he broke Mother’s vase, the one passed down from generation to generation from some great-greatgreat-something, and poor Mama was crying over the shards. You will never hear those words leave his mouth.”
His words collide with my memories.
With the way Artem apologized to me many times that night, when he grabbed me by the throat.
I did not imagine it. He truly did it, and I cannot believe what Sasha is saying now.
“It’s hard for me to believe he never apologizes. Maybe you just haven’t heard him.”
He looks straight at me.
“Believe me. He doesn’t. Especially since he became Pakhan. At most, he shrugs like he’s saying, it is what it is, and that’s all.”
The information leaves me confused, and I try to understand why, in my case, Artem was different.
Sasha opens another drawer and curses in Russian several times.
“The bastard! I bet he has it in his bedroom.” He immediately looks at me. “Did he have any in there?”
“No. Not from what I saw.”
He presses his lips together and looks toward the door with a wicked gleam. “Maybe I can get in.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Because I’m not allowed. No one is allowed in there. Didn’t he tell you?”
“I do remember him saying something.”
“Exactly why we were all surprised he asked you to sleep in that holy room.”
He blinks a few times, but slowly, almost hypnotically. He doesn’t move or take his eyes off me.
“You had a lot of courage.”
His gaze drops to my throat, where I think the purple marks are still visible now that they are no longer covered with foundation.
“Punishment is punishment,” I try to smile, reminding him of the reason I had to accept that situation.
Then I turn toward my cup on the counter beside me and add. “It won’t happen again.”
With my eyes on the tea, I do not even feel him coming closer until he is right in front of me.
If until now he looked like a sulking child, now his blue eyes carry a cold and sever breeze that reminds me I should not be fooled by appearances, and that I am dealing with a Russian who kills in cold blood, just like his brother.
“I have a feeling war is very close,” he tells me softly.
“What war?”
“The one from Troy.”
I frown, confused. “That was a very long time ago...”
“But now we have a new Helen, Ekaterina.”
Suddenly, he smiles and takes a step back, catching me off guard with all his shifts in his personality.
Just when I thought only his middle brother was unhinged, I realize the youngest may be just the same.
“If you find the chocolate anywhere, tell me. I’m going back to those men to threaten them with a painful death if they don’t give me at least one M&M.”
He disappears from the room, and I remain staring at the door closing behind him, wondering what the hell that was.
I go back upstairs to my room, the steaming cup in my hand, convinced that sleep is long gone, while his words haunt my thoughts.
Artem never apologizes, and yet he apologized to me.
And why did Sasha leave me with the impression that the war he mentioned has something to do with me?
Or that I am the cause?
The Koronov brothers are going to put me in an early grave. But at least they should do it before the wedding, because my doubts about that event keep growing, even though I know I can no longer turn back.
I am trapped in a situation that is far more complicated than I ever thought possible.
I sit on the bed and take a few sips of tea while I leave the TV on my show. I am already on season four, but right now, it is the only series that relaxes me and gives me the chance, at the same time, to think about my problems.
After about ten minutes, I finish the tea, and since the clock has already passed two thirty, I turn off the screen and let the darkness wrap around me, hoping sleep will come with it.
But the night brings me another surprise.