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The storm hasn’t gotten here yet, but it might already be where they are.
God, what if they don’t reach the hospital in time? An icy needle pierces my heart. What if Slava is so sick he dies? It’s a thought I hadn’t allowed myself before, but now that it’s crept in, I can’t banish it, and the sickening anxiety expands, crowding out the air in my lungs.
I should be there with them.
I should be in that car.
“Where you should be is your bedroom, trying to get some rest,” Alina says quietly, and I spin around, startled to find her back on her bar stool.
When did she come back? Also, was I talking out loud?
I must’ve been, because she’s regarding me with weary sympathy while cradling another cup of coffee in her hands. Even though she’s normally a tea drinker, tonight she’s mainlining the real stuff, same as me.
“Do you really think we’re going to get attacked?” I ask, ignoring her nonsensical suggestion. “And if so, by whom? My father?”
Alina sighs and rests her chin in her hand. “Or one of our enemies. God knows there’re plenty—not that Nikolai or Valery tell me anything.”
“But Konstantin does?” From what I’ve gathered over the past few weeks, she has a much closer relationship with their oldest brother, the tech genius. The two of them talk at least a couple of times a week.
“Sometimes. When he thinks it won’t upset me.” Her beautiful mouth twists. “He thinks I’m so fragile I’ll fall apart at the slightest hint of bad news. Especially anything to do with—” She stops. “Never mind. The point is, I’m not exactly in the loop.”
Neither am I—and I don’t have the excuse of Alina’s headaches, which Nikolai told me stem almost entirely from her mental state.
“Some people get stomachaches when stressed, she gets headaches. Bad ones,” he explained when she didn’t come down for dinner because of a migraine one day. “Sometimes they last for several days, and get so painful she has to knock herself out with a whole cocktail of addictive shit. Hopefully, this won’t be one of those.”
It wasn’t, thankfully, and Alina was back to her normal self the next day. But I can see why Konstantin worries—I’ll never forget the drugged-out mess she was that morning in my room.
If Alina doesn’t already have a prescription painkiller problem, she’s not far from it.
“Do you think she might benefit from something like rehab?” I had asked Nikolai later that day. “Or at least therapy?”
“She hates shrinks and refuses to talk to them,” he told me. “As to rehab, we’ve considered it, but it’s not clear that she’s actually addicted. Her drug use is sporadic, centered around times of extra stress. It starts with more frequent headaches, and then it spirals until the headaches are no longer the main problem. She’s always been able to stop the pills after a bit, though, which is why I allow her to continue using them. They’re the only way she can escape the crippling pain when it strikes.”
“What about pot?” I asked carefully, not wanting to rat Alina out in case Nikolai didn’t know about her occasional smoke sessions with Lyudmila. “Maybe it could help as well?”
His mouth quirked. “Sure. Which is why I don’t say anything when she comes in smelling like an Amsterdam coffee shop.”
So he did know. I wasn’t surprised. He sees everything that goes on around here—including the tangled contradictions in my head.
I love him. I have no problem admitting that now, to myself and to him. And he says he loves me. It should be enough, more than enough, yet it’s not. Even when I lie in his arms in the afterglow of mind-blowing sex, there’s an inexplicable distance between us, words unsaid and fears unvoiced.
It’s mostly my fault, I think. For one thing, I still haven’t been able to bring myself to ask about his father. Each time an opportunity arises, I chicken out. The darkness in Nikolai is like a two-sided magnet, drawing and repelling me at once. I want to know him fully, to understand his past as well as he understands mine, yet I’m afraid of delving deeper into the part of him I saw that day in the woods, when he dealt with the assassins.
Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night cuddled against him, I can hear the tortured assassin’s screams, and I want to scream as well.
I also can’t forget Nikolai’s threat to drug me into marrying him. It didn’t come to that, but I know it would’ve. Because for my husband, love and possession are the same.
He would do anything to have me.
Of course, contradictory mess that I am, I don’t always mind his ruthlessness. There are times I’m glad he forced the issue, leapfrogging over the normal stages of a relationship in favor of marriage. And there are definitely times I enjoy his darker side in bed—pretty much all the times he brings it out, really. Our sex life is as blazing hot as it is varied, and as overwhelming as his hunger for me can be, I never go unsatisfied, to the point that I have to question if there’s maybe something wrong with me… if it’s healthy to lose myself in his embrace so completely.
