Page 50 of Brutal Vows

He leans in close and whispers, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Luca!”

With a naughty chuckle, he straightens and walks away. “I need to shower, princess, so guess what, I’m going to leave you hanging.”

And guessing. Wondering…holy fuck. What if…?

I swallow hard, tracking him with my gaze. Those grey sweatpants. That dick print. Oh, my…

He’s hung like a horse. And leaving me gaping.

Asshole.

Gorgeous sexy asshole. Somewhat sweet and considerate asshole.

Goddammit. The man is actually getting to me.

24

LUCA

Jesus, I love teasing her, joking with her, making her laugh. I love how she came to the party in the kitchen, sharp with easy comebacks, making this situation we’re in bearable, despite everything else. This is how I’m going to work on her, getting her to be comfortable enough to open up to me. Milana didn’t offer a name, and she’s not ready to be pushed for one. The fucker might be dead, but I still want to know who he was.

I strip and step into the shower, fisting my cock. Fuck, she works this one up by just looking at me. As for those photos—and that video—I drop my head back with a groan as I tighten my grip and ease into this with a few languid strokes. Yes, they’re buried deep on our server with passcodes only I have access to, but my mind is a maze with walls covered in those images of her. Everywhere I look, she’s there and I can’t escape. I’m lost, forever.

Soon, my jaw goes slack as every single snapshot of her flits through my mind. It takes no time for my body to tighten in release, and fuck knows, I need to get off. The urge is always there, on the back burner, but with her in my space, it’s as if the whole fucking stove is on fire. Soon enough, jerking off isn’t going to cut it anymore.

When I come out later, she’s no longer in the kitchen. I knock on her door, and when I open it an inch, all I hear is the shower.

Fuck. Walking in there just to watch her would be such a treat, but I’m a good boy. I don’t want to startle my bride and make her skittish.

And this gut instinct proves right.

Several days into our arranged marriage, it feels like Milana and I have circled each other in this apartment for weeks. Somehow, we’ve slipped into a routine. I get up and go to the gym next door. She stumbles out of bed by the time I’m done, and we bump into each other in the kitchen. We have breakfast and then I go to the basement to work. She stays upstairs to stare at the piano. I check in on her several times a day. I make sure she eats lunch. She still seems to jump when she’s caught unaware. She always looks exhausted. I often catch her with pain in her eyes, a look that shreds me. Milana isn’t fully here. Most of the time, she’s somewhere else.

Despite all the money we’ve continued to send to Masha, this undercurrent of desperation still runs through her. I bet she’s still plotting an escape, but she has no allies here—not the sort that would come to rescue a princess from her tower. We’ve hacked into her phone and now receive every message between her and Masha, but there’s nothing to raise a red flag. They look like school friends who bonded over a love for music and played together in some orchestra in Saint Petersburg. It’s all just staff gossip.

We looked into her, this Masha Baykova. On the surface, there’s nothing to flag. What raises the alarm is how there are only scraps of information on the internet, mostly related to the time she spent at Oxford. She’s an only child, and her parents died seven years ago. From the little information we could gather, it looks like a domestic dispute that got out of hand, domestic violence that went too far—they killed each other.

Given the lack of information, and given this possibly staged death of her parents, Masha must be Bratva too.

And yet, I still get the feeling it’s something else. It’s something more than a friend who can’t work, whose story she won’t tell. I’m not sure if it’s this thing with Gabi, because we are all on tenterhooks, waiting to see what’s going to happen next. Matteo is luring The Mole, who used to work for Randazzo—but who was really our Don’s informant—to Boston with a woman named Mara in tow. I’m not sure why, except I’ve picked up on Matteo’s own secret agenda for this Mara woman. I bet it has something to do with the detour Tasha took in Sicily, which we are ‘totally unaware of.’

Everybody is working in the background on Gabi’s case. I’m staring at the puzzle pieces of this mess and have no clue how they fit together.

To make things even more dull, Benedict has received two boxes with the copies of Bianca Randazzo’s Bible from Petrov. It’s a fucking nightmare. I gave it one look and tapped out. We’re going to need the real thing to figure out what’s plotting.

“Fucker missed another double spread,” Benedict grunts as he drops a few pages back into the box. “This is fucking killing me.”

I glance at the organized chaos. Some pages are stacked on the floor, color-coded for now. I won’t even know where to start. “Those Bible pages are thin and delicate. Imagine having to make copies. I’m surprised Petrov stuck it out; I’m not surprised he missed pages. Probably had other things on his mind.” Like taking care of Gabriella.

To our knowledge, after the initial hiccup, the marriage between Gabi and Petrov seems to be faring better than mine with Milana.

“Yeah,” Benedict sighs. “He’ll be bringing the original with him when they come to Boston to suss out this Mara woman.”

“They need to come over already. All this hurry-up-and-wait is killing me.”

“Sounds like your marriage, bro. Hurry up and wait.”