Chapter 26
Ekaterina
Artem’s hands around my throat.
The air almost stops reaching my lungs. His cock driving deep and hard inside me. The shivers that take over my body when
orgasm lights up every inch of my flesh.
The explosion of pleasure that shakes my body and the strangled moan that barely escapes my lips.
Suddenly, the air comes back when he frees my airway, but he isn’t finished with me. He turns me onto my stomach, lifts my hips, and enters me again.
He is like a dark monster, one who seems to abuse my body as he pleases, but all he does is give me orgasm after orgasm for almost an hour, whispering how beautiful I am and that I belong only to him.
When he’s done with me, I’m too exhausted to move. But he takes me in his arms and places me in the tub filled with warm water, with him behind me.
He touches me carefully, cleaning my skin. He treats me like a fragile doll, even though in bed he destroys me as if I were as resilient as he is. But I adore every second in which he takes possession of my body, and he knows it.
With him, I discovered the pleasure of sex in a way I have never felt with anyone else. Even though Artem always gives me the feeling that, at any moment, he might lose the battle with the voices in his head, about which he has given me small hints to make me realize he isn’t joking.
My husband is not a man like all the others.
In fact, none of the Koronov brothers are, but I can state one thing without hesitation: nowhere do I feel safer than beside Artem or his family… Even if I still haven’t made peace with the thought that I had to accept a marriage to him in order to escape the one with Oliver.
Did I jump out of the frying pan and into the fire? A part of me still feels that way, and it keeps me just as angry about everything happening in my life. Before, I was only the daughter of a Vor, and Bratva barely noticed me. Now I am the wife of the most feared Pakhan.
His gestures, just like his touches and kisses, filled with the need to touch me and keep me close, make me believe that behind our marriage there truly are feelings he has been showing me ever since I was in his mansion.
Only in those moments do I forget the madness surrounding us and let my own feelings take over.
I missed him. Too much...
If Oliver’s attitude grew colder with every passing day as we drew closer to the wedding, Artem becomes more intense with each day, making me fall in love with him more and more.
His attention isn’t only about my physical needs and the desire that constantly smolders between us, the attraction almost palpable. More than that, he shows me he thinks even about the details connected to the romantic side of a marriage.
And that also has to do with the subject of the honeymoon, which Artem insists on bringing up when he sees me skeptical about it a few days later.
“Why do you think we won’t go on a honeymoon?”
“Because we didn’t have a typical wedding,” I say with a shrug. “And things are a little uncertain right now.”
He abandons the laptop he works on almost all the time, when he isn’t on the phone or between my legs – making me scream with pleasure – and looks at me with a serious face.
For two days, he hasn’t left my side, because he holds his meetings over the phone while his brothers scout the territory.
And now he’s sitting in the armchair across from me, his laptop left on the low table, wearing a pair of black-framed glasses on his nose.
The same pair that made me feel like I was melting when I first saw him wearing them yesterday.
What surprises me is that even now, although he’s home, he’s wearing suit trousers and a black shirt, as if he’s preparing to leave at any moment. Compared to him, I’m dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of jeans.
“You’re upset,” he observes, lacing his fingers over his crossed legs with the patience of a true leader.
“You think?” I say, a little ironic.
“I thought you’d calmed down.”
“Why would you think that?”
He pretends to think for a moment. “Your moans of pleasure?”
“Sex has nothing to do with it.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “More precisely, what are you unhappy about, Ekaterina?”
The tension is audible in my voice when I answer, gesturing with my hands at everything around us.
“Everything. Is this how my life will be from now on? Locked inside the house?”
“It’s only for a while, until we eliminate the danger.”
“This is Bratva, Artem. There will always be some danger that will turn me into a prisoner in a golden cage. That’s why I wanted out of this world.”
He sees my frustration taking the shape of anger with every thought spinning through my head since I woke up. We are being hunted by enemies we barely know, and every person around us could be a threat or a traitor.
I can’t even go to the gallery, and the only contact I have with Oksana is through messages, on an app that can’t reveal my location.
“Things won’t always be this tense, Katya.”
“Yes, they will, Artem,” I say, sadness in my voice. “I can’t go to the gallery, I can’t go out for coffee, I can’t do anything because I’m not allowed to leave this house. It’s worse than when I was in Moscow. At least then I could see my friends, even if I had an army of bodyguards after me.”
A shadow falls over his face, and I don’t understand what it is until he speaks, disappointment threading his voice. “I thought you were happy with me.”
“Why? Because you saved me from a false marriage and forced me into one just like it?”
Regret strikes me before I even finish saying the sentence, then goes straight to my heart, making me realize how unfair I’m being.
Maybe I don’t like this situation, but I know very well that a huge part of me is a thousand times happier today than I was a few days ago, when deep down I wished Artem would be the one waiting for me at the altar.
My hidden wish came true, so why can’t I get over the fact that he forced this wedding?
Just because he didn’t ask for my consent and took what he wanted, regardless of what my answer might have been?
Because he put innocent people’s lives in danger, people who won’t easily get over what happened that day, when so many were killed before their eyes?
Yes. I suppose that Pakhan attitude is what still upsets me and reminds me of how my mother was treated, like a beautiful accessory with one role only: to take care of the children.
I see his body tense and his hands curl into fists. In his eyes, dangerous shadows mingle with a pain that echoes inside my own heart.
“If you’re that unhappy, then I’ll annul the wedding as soon as Prescott is eliminated.”
His words are like a knife driven deep into my heart. A lump forms in my throat, and I barely manage to hide my trembling.
He gives up that easily after everything he did?
“If that doesn’t happen by the end of the week, I’ll give you back your freedom anyway, while ensuring the protection you need.”
I remain frozen. If for one second I thought the news of my freedom would make me happy, now I’m strangled by the agony of a moment I feel is not what I want.
“And that’s it?” I say, my voice shaking. “After that bloody show in the cathedral, now you just annul everything?”
“Isn’t that what you want?”
“I don’t know what I want. All I know is that I don’t want to be a prisoner for Bratva.”
“You say prisoner, I would have said marriage. But now it’s clear to me that, for you, it’s the same thing. Unfortunately, I am Pakhan. And if you once had the chance to leave this world, I will never have that privilege.”
His sadness tears me apart.
“I’ll do everything I can to make you happy, dusha moya. Even if that means knowing you’re far away from me.”
I open my mouth to say something, anything, but Artem suddenly rises from the armchair, taking his phone with him, and leaves the room.
In this moment, I feel like I’ve just lost him.
And it’s entirely my fault.
I live each day like someone condemned to death, except I’ve been promised freedom. A freedom I don’t rejoice in, but also haven’t had the courage to challenge until now.
I do it only in my mind, while I spend long hours with my piano, playing every sad melody I know.
Do I love him? Yes. I fell in love with this monster the day the image of his beautiful face wove itself into the musical notes, when I played for the first time under his roof.
Maybe even at the Christmas party, when I met his cold, dark gaze, the one that promised me the most forbidden fantasies, but also something more. Death. Or happiness.
Even now, I still don’t know, and because of that, I am alone in the apartment, after four days in which I’ve felt like I’m living with a ghost.
Since we had that conversation, we haven’t eaten together anymore, and when we cross paths in the kitchen or the living room, he hurries to leave the room as quickly as possible.
Since then, he has moved part of his personal belongings into another room, leaving me to sleep alone in the large bedroom, which feels colder than a Siberian breeze.
I miss him with an emptiness that robs me of many hours of sleep at night, because my heart aches for him with every day that passes without us exchanging more than a few words. And when we do, they are monosyllabic, forced by circumstance.
I barely see him, because when he isn’t gone, he locks himself in the office.
He gave me another phone, old and without internet, telling me I could use it to talk to Oksana. But my mood is so bad that I haven’t wanted to hear my friend yell at me that I’m an idiot for pushing away the only man who has made my heart truly feel love.
Or scold me for being spoiled, raised by my father to be proud, and that because of it, I now refuse to go to him and tell him the truth. That I love him and that I want us to find a way to be happy... together.
Sighing, I walk barefoot through the apartment.
The thin dress I put on today, although white, is meant to make Artem notice me.
It stops above my knees, and the loose skirt plays around my thighs, reminding me of the touch of the man I can still call “my husband.”
Still. Because there are two days left before Artem is supposed to file the annulment request.
A cold pain pierces me every time I think that I’m one step away from losing him for good. A pain that today makes me feel tears on my cheeks as I stare out the window at the gloomy city, covered in clouds and soaked by the heavy rain that has been falling for hours.
I haven’t seen him at all today, and once again, I wonder if he left earlier than usual just to avoid crossing paths with me.
He left fresh coffee in the kitchen, as he does every day, made by him exactly the way he knows I like it, even though he has quite a modern coffee machine. But he was nowhere to be found.
When I saw the pot of coffee he’d made himself, I felt an emptiness that made me sob right there on the kitchen floor.
That was the moment I decided to change this situation and try to talk to him. To understand, for myself, whether his feelings are real and not just a fleeting obsession. Or worse, a plan to secure his hierarchy in Bratva, even though he told me that wasn’t what this was about.
And I believe him. I truly believe him, despite every warning my father gave me throughout my life about men from the Russian mafia.
Artem, in his madness, is without a doubt the only man I trust with my life. And the only one I truly love.
Slowly, my pain transforms into determination, bright with positive energy. I have to talk to him, and hope shines through every pore as I plan each honest word I intend to tell him the moment he comes home.
A small noise from the direction of the door makes my heart beat faster, anticipating the moment when I’ll stand before him and tell him how much I want this marriage to actually work.
I almost smile as I quickly rise from the living room sofa and start rubbing my fingers together nervously, waiting to see his beautiful face.
“Darling! I’m home!”
I freeze.
The beating of my heart is drowned out by panic, because the deep voice I hear doesn’t belong to my husband.
It belongs to my former fiance.
Oliver.