Page 43 of Fractured Ties

She could have run from him—she hadn’t.

She could have fought him—she hadn’t.

She should be terrified of him—she wasn’t.

Kolya was borderline obsessed with these facts about Maya, and how much they pleased him. It was going to be a problem for him—he knew it already.

“Whatever you want in here,” Kolya told a still-smiling Maya, “and it’s yours. Point and say, I’m paying.”

“You don’t—”

“I do. Now.”

His unspoken words quieted her from saying anything else. She was his to do with as he wanted—and he wanted for her to be treated well and happy. Didn’t that include having nice things?

“Okay,” Maya said

Kolya nodded.

“And just how much does she need?” the sale’s woman asked.

Kolya saw the flash of hurt in Maya’s gaze and readied to snap at the woman simply because she’d offered her words with an air of arrogance. A person couldn’t miss that—he knew when someone felt better than him just by their tone of voice.

Maya saved him the trouble when she turned to the woman, and her ice-blue eyes seemed colder as all of her pleasant joy seemed to bleed out of her expression and tone in a blink. Especially when she said, “My measurements are thirty-two, twenty-two, thirty-two. Size six shoe.”

“I’m sure—”

“And what’s your name?” Maya asked.

“Trisha.”

Trisha.

That was it.

Kolya reminded himself to tell Viktoria to give the woman hell the next time she came around.

“And Trisha,” Maya added, her tone twisting the woman’s name with a false saccharine sweetness, “anything but black; we don’t all need to look like we’re going to a funeral.”

Kolya smirked.

Trisha was in black.

Head to toe.

Out of the corner of his eye, Kolya saw the woman glance at him again, but when he didn’t even bother to look her way, she quickly nodded and headed off. Maya’s tense shoulders loosened a little bit, and when she turned to stare at him, he was already looking at her.

“I really won’t need very much,” she said.

“I don’t like that,” he told her.

Maya frowned. “What?”

“When you do that—you’re happy and smiling, and then you snarl at a woman for dismissing you, but then you go back to this …” Kolya waved at her with one inked hand, and shrugged, saying, “Shell of who you occasionally let come out to play. That’s the reason I noticed you, Maya. At the bar, no? You sounded so bubbly. It was strange and interesting to me.”

For a long while, the two continued staring at each other in silence. Kolya wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but the buzzing of his phone in his pocket broke their daze. Likely the vet giving an update on Sumerki—Kolya’s demand.

Still, he didn’t reach for the phone.