Chapter 6 #2
"That's what I thought." He nods slowly, a muscle ticking beneath his beard. His voice carries no triumph, no smugness. Just the quiet certainty of a man whose arrogance has never been challenged.
I shoot to my feet, the chair scraping against the floor.
"I can't do this. It's bad enough that I defied my father.
" I shake my head, backing toward the door on unsteady legs.
"I take it you know who I am and why this is not good.
I already have a target on my back. I can't add to it. I can’t add working with the enemy to my growing list of sins. "
"Don't forget to add sleeping with the enemy." His voice cuts through my retreat, sharp and knowing–a blade wrapped in silk but a blade all the same. "And… getting pregnant by the enemy."
The words hit like bullets to the chest, each one tearing through flesh and bone to lodge in my heart. I freeze mid-step. The air rushes out of my lungs. My heart slams against my ribs so hard I swear he must hear it from across the room.
Pregnant. He knows I'm pregnant.
How? The question ricochets through my skull, but I can't form the word. Can't form any words. My tongue has turned to sandpaper, my throat closing around a scream I refuse to release.
I haven't told anyone except Luna. She would never betray me. She would never.
"What makes you say that?" The words scrape out of my throat, raw and jagged. I force my spine straight, force my chin up, even as my hands tremble at my sides. "What makes you think I'm pregnant?"
His smile doesn't waver. If anything, it sharpens. He reaches for his phone on the desk, and my stomach drops through the floor before I even understand why.
Then he turns the screen toward me.
My own image fills the display. Naked. Vulnerable. The caption I added burning beneath my body like a brand.
2 months pregnant.
The floor tilts beneath my feet. "How did you get those?" The words come out strangled, barely audible over the roaring in my ears.
"You sent them to me."
One dark eyebrow arches, the corner of his mouth twitching with something that might be amusement if it weren't so dangerous. He's enjoying this. Not cruelly, but the way a cat enjoys watching a mouse realize the trap has already sprung.
Me? No. That's not possible. I would never...
I pull out my phone with trembling hands and scroll to my messages, my vision blurring at the edges. And there it is. The photos I meant to keep private, timestamped two nights ago as being shared with the number Luna gave me for my interview.
His number.
The memory crashes over me. Falling asleep with my phone in my hand. Exhaustion pulling me under. The notification I dismissed without reading the next morning.
Message sent.
"My god." One hand flies to my mouth, pressing hard against my lips as if I can somehow hold back the horror rising in my throat. The phone nearly slips from my numb fingers, and I clutch it against my chest like a lifeline, like evidence of my own destruction.
The room tilts. I can feel the blood draining from my face, rushing downward and leaving nothing but cold, hollow dread behind.
I sent him nude photos of myself. Pregnant. With a caption announcing exactly how far along I am.
“What have I done?”
"You accidentally sent nude pregnancy photos to the father of your child." His voice is infuriatingly calm, almost amused. "Quite the icebreaker."
Father of your child. The words echo in my skull. He knows. He's known since Saturday night.
"I have to go." I shove my phone into my clutch and turn for the door, my only thought is escape, escape, escape. I need air. I need space. I need to get away from those knowing eyes and that devastating scent and the wreckage of every plan I thought I had.
"Sit down." His voice drops low, barely above a murmur, but it carries the weight of a threat. Quiet. Controlled. The kind of calm that comes before a storm.
"No." My hand closes around the door handle, the metal cool against my clammy palm.
"You are not taking our child out of my sight." His voice hardens into steel, all pretense of civility stripped away. "Nor yourself. You're not going anywhere that puts you in danger."
"My father—"
"Your father can deal with me if he has the balls to stand in my presence and look me in the eye."
I turn slowly on the tips of my stilettos, fury burning through my veins hot enough to scorch.
I slice a hand through the air between us. "No. I am tired of egotistical men controlling me. I'll find another way out from under my father." My chin lifts in defiance. "Getting under another one isn't smart."
His smile turns razor-sharp, his dark eyes glittering with something dangerous. "But didn't you already?"
The words land like a slap. Worse than a slap. He's throwing our night together in my face, weaponizing the most vulnerable moment of my life, using my own body against me.
Red colors the edges of my vision.
"Do not sully what we shared." The words tear out of me, and I'm shaking now, truly shaking, but not from fear.
My chin lifts. My chest heaves with ragged breaths.
Tears burn at the backs of my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall.
I will not give him that. My nails bite crescents into my palms hard enough to leave marks.
"Don't you dare do that. Do you really want to shame me for sleeping with you? Are you that low?"
Shadows pass over his handsome face, flickering through those dark eyes like storm clouds racing across a midnight sky.
Regret, maybe. Or guilt. Or something darker still that I can't name.
I don't know him well enough to read what lurks behind that controlled mask, what secrets he keeps buried beneath all that dangerous charm.
The shadows pass. His expression smooths.
I turn the door handle, my heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
"Delete them," I demand without looking at him.
"Why would I?" His voice carries a smile I refuse to witness. "They're beautiful. And that baby is mine."
"Delete them, or I walk out this door and you never see me again." I’m leaving anyway, but he doesn’t need to know that.
"You walk out that door, and those pictures find their way to your father." His tone doesn't change. Calm. Certain. Devastating. "And I'll make sure he knows they're from me."
I spin on my heel, disbelief and fury warring for dominance in my chest. "You wouldn't."
"I very much would." He rises from his chair with fluid grace and rounds the desk, pointing to the seat I abandoned. "Close the door and sit down. We need to talk."
The command in his voice. The absolute certainty that I'll obey. The arrogance dripping from every syllable.
I don't sit down.
Red floods my vision. My feet move before my brain catches up.
One stride. Two. Three. My arm swings wide, palm flat, fingers tight, and I pour every ounce of rage and humiliation and betrayal into the blow.
The impact jolts up my wrist, through my arm, into my shoulder.
The crack of my palm against his cheek echoes off the walls like a gunshot. Satisfaction burns through my veins.
His head snaps to the side. When he turns back, blood beads on his lower lip where my ring caught the skin, a crimson droplet against that infuriatingly kissable mouth.
But he's smiling. Actually smiling, the bastard, his dark eyes lit with something that looks terrifyingly like approval.
"That's the kind of woman it will take to raise a Valentina baby." He wipes the blood with his thumb, examining it like it's a gift rather than a wound. "Don't lose your spunk, Ilona. This is just the beginning, my sweet jungle flower. You're going to need every ounce you can find."
The endearment turns my stomach to acid. Jungle flower. He whispered those two words against my skin while he made me come apart in his arms.
It was sexy then. Now it drives my blood pressure to heart attack levels.
"You don't get to call me that again." I'm shaking with fury, my palm stinging from the impact, my chest heaving with ragged breaths. "Ever." I jab a finger into his hard chest and immediately regret it but I swallow the jolt of pain.
"Then you're really going to hate what I have in store for you."
He turns away from me, and I watch, momentarily stunned, as he shrugs off his suit jacket in one fluid motion.
The fabric slides down his arms, revealing the white dress shirt stretched taut across his shoulders, the material straining against muscles that move with controlled, predatory grace.
He tosses the jacket over the back of his chair then turns to face me again.
My traitorous eyes track every movement.
The way his forearms flex as he crosses them over his broad chest. The way the shirt pulls across his biceps, hinting at the ink I know hides beneath.
The viper. The panther. All that dangerous art mapped across a body I've explored with my hands, my mouth, my entire being.
I hate him. I hate that I still find him devastatingly attractive. I hate that my body remembers his even as my mind screams at me to turn around and leave.
Two things can be true at the same time.
He stands there, arms crossed, watching me with those dark eyes that see too much. Waiting. Patient as a predator who knows his prey has nowhere left to go.
I swallow the lump in my throat. "What do you want from me? I assume you have some end game here."
He holds my gaze, all traces of humor bleeding away until nothing remains but cold, hard intent.
"Your silence on what we shared. Your obedience to the rules I’ll lay out before you.
Your body." A pause that stretches like a blade across my throat.
"And most importantly, your signature on a marriage certificate. "
A laugh tears from my throat, sharp and bitter and edged with hysteria. My arms wrap around my midsection, an instinctive shield over the life growing inside me. "Marry my blackmailer? You're insane."