“I’ll handle it,” I tell Yuri.
He glances at the wedding ring which I’m still spinning between my fingers and I shove it deep in my pocket.
“Will you?”
I set my jaw and give him a nod. “I said I’ll handle it.”
I’ve got a plan. The thought of letting anyone else near this situation makes my skin crawl. Natalia may be a traitor, she may be selling us down the river to help her family despite all her promises to the contrary, but she’s mine.
I don’t need to think too hard about a plan because I’ve already thought it through. Which means, I have to admit to myself, that I thought this was a possibility. I knew there was a chance Natalia was lying to me.
If I was a weaker man, the lingerie set that Natalia’s wearing when I get home would break my resolve. She looks so innocent and pretty, covered in lacy wildflowers, that it’s almost unthinkable.
I walk straight to her, where she’s perched on the edge of the couch, staring at me expectantly.
I take her chin and tilt it up so that I can watch the reaction in those green eyes. Her lips part on a sigh. I want to taste her, to kiss those soft lips and steal her breath away, pretend everything is normal. She’s the one who’s taken that option away from us and I hate her for it.There’s no room for doubt in my mind. It crushes every ounce of tenderness — tenderness that only she has brought out in me — and flattens it to nothing.
“You’ve been lying to me, Natalia.”
Her head gives the slightest shake, but her gaze flicks away from my eyes immediately.I wonder what she sees there. Can she read me the way I thought I could read her? Is she surprised that I’m not holding a gun to her head?
“Somehow your father still knows exactly which of his shipments we’ve been inspecting. The paintings which you have been analyzing for me.”
I feel a tremble run down her spine. It doesn’t stop.
“My question is, what are you getting out of this? Still a Daddy’s girl at heart, huh?”
Natalia blinks away tears, her eyes coming back to meetmine, widening in something like confusion. The waterworks won’t work on me this time.
“Did you lie to them? Tell them you were still an untouched princess who they could marry off to whoever they saw fit? Still a blank slate?”
She shakes her head, tossing that sunshine-golden hair over her shoulders. But she doesn’t open her pretty mouth to deny it.
I shove her chin away, sick of looking at her.
Sick of how much I want her.
That was my weakness. That was my mistake. Trusting her when I had the proof in my hands that she had betrayed me. I knew that she was a liability, knew that I should have told Yuri, but I didn’t want to have any sense talked into me.
That’s called denial and it could have cost me everything.
“Are you going to admit it? Destroy the bugs that you still have here? Or do we have to do this the hard way, Natalia?”
Her eyes flicker as I trace my hand over her throat. She doesn’t pull away, doesn’t stop me, but her eyes don’t meet mine. She’s far away, probably thinking about one of her precious paintings. I don’t like it.
I know what this expression is.
Fear.
I’ve gotten used to her being herself around me. She’s not afraid to argue with me anymore. I forgot how frozen she could be, how withholding. I guess this is how Natalia has really felt around me the whole time, as she’s used me to get information which she could feed to her father.
I know then that she’s not going to admit a single thing. She’ll just retreat, shut down, and take whatever I do to her.
I need to get her out of here. Problem is, I don’t trust anyone else with Natalia. She may be a traitor, but she’s my traitor.
Fuck.
I’d believed that she was angry with her father. That she could see what an asshole Maksim had been.
