“Is that so?” Dimitri licks his lips and takes a step forward, hands still over his dick but I don’t have to see it to know he’sgetting hard. He tries to take another but doesn’t get to, not when my girl is the one in charge.
“Stop,” she says firmly and he does, almost as if she alpha-barked at him. “You don’t get to come closer yet.”
Dimitri’s nostrils flare as he lets a low growl rumble through his chest, but he waits.
“On your knees in front of my omega.”
My bonded alpha narrows his stare on Liv briefly before he looks me in the eye and slowly, almost too slowly, lowers himself to the floor and follows her command.
We have barely gotten started and I’m already so fucking turned on that all it would take is one shift of the towel covering my dick and I’ll come so fucking hard I pull a muscle.
Having Dimitri like this, having our alpha submit to me in even the smallest way, it’s so fucking hot I barely give a shit about why he’s doing it in the first place. Until our girl reminds me, anyway.
“This is your one and only opportunity, Volkov,” Liv says as her hands slide over my chest and she leans down to press her cheek against mine. “It’s a now or never situation. You want redemption? Forgiveness? To be with your bonded omega and the rest of your pack? Now is the time to explain yourself, or it’s never going to happen.”
Dimitri growls again but I can tell it’s more out of frustration than anything else.
I doubt he expected this to happen—let alone this way—when he woke up this morning and I won’t lie, I’m fucking here for it.
“Now, Volkov.” Liv nips at my shoulder and she kisses the side of my neck before straightening up and pulling me with her.
She goes back to playing with my hair and caressing my skin as I lift my arms and rest them on her knees and across Leon’s. Being able to touch them is keeping my heart from beating sohard I go into cardiac arrest but the anticipation is going to destroy me.
Except, Dimitri is going to try to do that first.
“When I got back to Boris’ house,” he starts as his eye contact intensifies. “The morning after we bonded, he was waiting for me. He saw it on my face as soon as I walked in. We got into it, he was screaming at me for being with you, telling me I was a disappointment, that I brought shame to the family and our name by taking you as my mate. I told him I didn’t give a shit about that.” He looks away briefly and shakes his head then meets my stare. “I told him I was in love with you, that we were scent matches and what he said didn’t matter. I told him I didn’t want anything to do with the Bratva anymore, that I didn’t want to take over and we were leaving. I told him I wanted out because I wasn’t going to do to you what he did to my mother, and that’s when he pulled a gun on me.”
The pain, the anguish and heartbreak I feel rip through our bond takes my breath away and has tears welling in my eyes.
I know what Dimitri is saying is the truth based on that alone but despite what happened, despite how he hurt me, I know he wouldn’t lie to me about something like this, and he’s not right now.
“I told him to shoot me,” Dimitri says with a hollow laugh. “If he wasn’t going to let us be together, he could fucking shoot me. Instead, that bastard alpha-barked me into a hit on my goddamn bonded omega, and I swear to god that is the only way I would ever do something like that to you,mylak. You have to believe me, Niko. I would never fucking hurt you. I’d die before I did something like that but he barked the order, and I had to follow.”
A tear slips down my cheek but I don’t move. I don’t do anything at all. I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that. Boris barked at us more than once over the years and when it happened, there’s nothing anyone could do to change it. Youcan’t go against someone like Boris, anyway, but his bark was just as bad as his bite, and he had no problem unleashing both.
While I believe what Dimitri is telling me, it still doesn’t explain why he never tried to find me, or why he’s running from them now.
“I lied,” he says as he basically reads my mind. “I told Boris I carried out the hit.”
“And he didn’t ask for proof?” Liv asks the question I wanted to ask.
Dimitri nods. “He wouldn’t believe it without proof.”
Considering his proof of a completed hit was usually the middle finger from the left hand of his target, I have no fucking clue how he was able to convince him I was dead.
“I had your shirt,” he admits quietly. “The t-shirt you were wearing when you went into heat. There was blood on it, probably from when I bit you but I’m not really sure. Either way, I had it with me when I left, and I shot a hole through the stains to try to make it look like I’d done what he told me to. He saw blood, he saw gunshot residue, scented both, and confirmed it was you. That’s all he needed.”
I guess that makes sense.
Boris never paid too much attention to whatever we brought back with us from our hits, it’s not surprising that he didn’t that time, either.
What shocks me about that entire thing? The fact that Boris didn’t have Dimitri killed, or shoot him himself, after he said he wanted out. That’s basically blasphemy.
He didn’t, though, and that means my alpha never came for me because he chose not to.
Dimitri shakes his head as he sits back on his heels. “I wanted to go after you. So fucking bad. I wanted to find you and make sure you were okay, I wanted to explain everything then leave together, but?—”
“It would have gotten you both killed,” Liv says as she rests her hands over my heart.
