Page 50 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

As impressive as my propensity for calm was, it sure wasn’t a long-lasting affair. Even the walls seem to back away from the dangerous edge of my voice, daunted by the challenge my soul dares the man in front of me with. Maybe it had been a mistake to offer him the evening to get it together. Clearly, it was a mistake. My teeth clench, eyes telling him to Do better.

He’s blind to it.

How is he blind to it?

“Yes,” he says, and his voice has an edge of its own. A strain.

I watch him down the drink he brought me as he’s already knocked back his own in one toss. His face is one big grimace.

“Is that all you have to say to me?”

“I don’t know what else you want me to say!” His response is muffled by the hand he buries his face into. He drops it right before he turns away from me once more. Like he can’t stand the sight of me. Or maybe the reality I’m confronting him with. Like he’s a fucking coward.

I’ve been here before.

I can’t believe I’m here again.

By now, I know that no one has ever made me angrier than Anton Zakharov. But I’d thought, at the very least, I knew the worst it could get. I thought I knew when he belittled the friendship that I’d extended to him the first time I walked right up to him, with a gala swirling around us, and he’d spit in my face. I thought I knew when he tore me apart on our wedding night, only to deposit me in a bathtub like an afterthought, leaving me to fall asleep and awaken in his big, cold, strange bed. Apparently, it can get worse. With him, it can always get worse.

“I know what I don’t want you to say,” I spit, shoving away from the couch and storming up to him. A furious hand grips his chin, yanking his face towards me. “I know I deserve to be looked at.”

His eyes still manage to evade me. “I don’t know how this happened,” he mutters as if to himself.

“We had sex!” I shriek, shoving his face away in disgust. “We had a lot of sex, and sometimes condoms don’t fucking work. And you came inside me that first night. Congratulations on the quality of your sperm, because that’s definitely when you knocked me up.”

“Did you—” He doesn’t finish the question. But he doesn’t have to.

“Are you—” My voice cracks. “Are you honestly implying it could be someone else’s child? Really? You’d rather be a cuckold than a father?”

My insides are a vicious, stinging red. My vision is a haze of it, too. It threatens to pour out of my ears in place of smoke. Out of my eyes, in lieu of tears. I hate him.

“I wish I could tell you that. You have no idea how much I wish I could tell you that right now,” I force out, the words scraping past the tightness in my throat. “But you’re the only man I’ve been with since long before you proposed to me.”

“This is not why I proposed. We just,” Anton rasps out.

“That doesn’t matter. It stopped mattering the second we consummated this marriage. There’s been nothing politically motivated about the way you—” The way you have my coffee waiting for me by the time I’m finished getting dressed, even though you wake up after me. The way you talk to me for hours. The way you tell me about your childhood. The way you want to know everything about me.

“I care about you.”

“But not this baby, right?”

Anton frowns at the wall, his forehead creasing. “How far along are you?” He has the audacity to reach for the bottle this time, forgoing the glass completely. Like I’ve made him need copious amounts of liquor to swallow down a bitter pill.

You know who doesn’t get a drink? With a cinematic sweep of my arm, I send crystal flying off the surface. Debris crunches beneath my heels, reduced to glittering dust, and I shove him with all my might, choking on my faltering breath. “Six weeks, I told you. Can you do math? Our wedding night.” I’ve turned into a banshee. I didn’t know my voice could shriek to this tenor.

I hope the pitch cuts him.

I hope he bleeds, so he feels the way I do now.

He just takes the blow, absorbing it. “Please calm down,” Anton bites out through a clenched jaw.

How many times have I meditated on the perfection of this jaw? How many times have I traced its shape while he slept—cupped it when I’ve kissed him? I’ve thought it was chiseled like stone. Like marble. But his jaw isn’t the only part of him that’s cold, hard, and devoid of a soul.

Calm down.

It rips something in the fabric of my might. Every bit of the wind in my sails escapes through that tear. I’m left deflated and raw. “You know what you could’ve said?” I ask. “You could have asked me how I feel. If I’m okay. Whether I’m—” I hate the way my voice breaks. Everything inside me smarts, an open wound he shakes salt on with every look that passes over his face.

Every word he dismisses me with.