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A man Ishouldn’twant.
A man who is right now feeding me ham and eggs and looking at me as if my well-being is the only thing on his mind right now.
“Did you stay here?” I blurt out suddenly after eating another bite. “I woke up a few times, partway, and I thought I saw you here. Sitting by my bed.”
“Of course.” Viktor stabs another piece of ham with the fork. “You’re my wife, Caterina. Someone hurt you. We weren’t sure if you would live for a little while there. There’s no way I would have ever left your side, except when strictly necessary.”
The words take a moment to sink in. The seriousness in his words strikes a chord somewhere deep inside of me, and the lingering paranoia that I’ve felt since I was abducted, the worry that Viktor had a hand in this somehow, falters. That it was a way to punish me or teach me a lesson. A means to break me, so I would be easier to handle in the future.
But that doesn’t match up with how he’s looking at me right now. It doesn’t match up with anything he’s doing.
Or how he’s making me feel.
“I didn’t think you cared.” I regret saying it almost as soon as it’s out of my mouth. I don’t want Viktor to thinkIcare, or that I really even think that much about him at all. I don’t want him to think that it matters to me.
“You’re my wife,” he repeats, as if it should make perfect sense. “Of course I care.”
That’s not quite what I meant,I think as I eat the last bite of food, but I let it go. I’m not ready to have this conversation, not when I can’t even picture what tomorrow will look like.
He stands up then, reaching for a duffel bag by the door that I hadn’t seen before. “We managed to get some clothes for you, too. It’s nothing fancy, and they might not fit perfectly, but at least you can get dressed. The doctor said that as long as you don’t wear anything too tight yet, and keep the bandages clean, it would be good for you to be able to walk around the cabin.”
He moves the tray away then, and I get a glimpse as he unzips the bag, handing me a pair of loose men’s sweatpants and a t-shirt that will definitely be too big on me. “It’s a long way from being couture,” Viktor says with a laugh. “But it should be comfortable, at least.”
I honestly couldn’t care less. I’m just glad to have clothes on again. It feels like another step in the right direction, another step towards normalcy. A step, just like the ones I took from my bed this morning, no matter how few or how difficult.
“Here,” Viktor says gently—more gently than I would have imagined. “I’ll help you.”
He touches me, and I go very still, unsure of what to expect. His hands are soft on my arms as he reaches for me, pushing back the blanket and turning me slowly in the bed. I stifle a gasp as his arm slides around my back, steadying me as he pulls me towards the edge of the bed, and it all feels as if it happens in slow motion. His hand is gentle, pressing against my spine, holding me up.Supporting me, I think, and the idea of it seems so ridiculous that I almost laugh.
“Can you sit up on your own?” he asks, his voice faintly rough, and something about it sends a shiver down my spine. It twines with the hot flicker of pain that shoots through me every time I move, making my skin feel hot and cold all at once, and I let out a small sound that could have been a gasp or a moan; I’m not sure which.
Viktor’s eyes flick up to mine, and for a second, I see a glimmer of heat in them that makes my breath catch again.
“I think so,” I manage, pressing my hands into the mattress to brace myself. The healing lacerations around my wrists burn, but I manage to keep myself upright. With Viktor sitting in front of me, so close that I can almost feel his breath on my skin along with the pressure of his hand on my back, I’m suddenly so much more aware of being naked.
However, with that awareness comes the reminder of how I look now.
I’m not the woman he married anymore. My slender, smooth, olive-hued body doesn’t look like the one he unwrapped on our wedding night, the one he lusted after, the one he punished and turned into a sobbing, melted mess of pleasure on his bed. I’m skinny to the point of scrawniness now, my body littered with wounds, my hair lank, my skin sallow. I saw myself in the mirror this morning, and I’m nothing that could be called desirable anymore.
But for some reason, Viktor is looking at me with a heat in his eyes that makes me want to believe he doesn’t see any of that.
Don’t let yourself think that. You’ll only get hurt in the end. The only way you survive this marriage is by remaining as cold as he is.
Nothing about his expression looks cold right now, though. My husband should be as icy as the Russian wilderness beyond this cabin, but I can feel his gaze on me, licking over my skin the way—
His hands smooth over my legs, down the sides of my bare thighs. It’s not a sexual caress, but itfeelslike it. I can feel the rough tips of his fingers, sliding over the unmarred spots of skin, skating around the cuts on my thighs. There’s one on my inner thigh, a deep one that I know will scar, that he’ll never not be able to see if his lips make their way up my flesh ever again.
Just as quickly as the thought enters my mind, I try to push it away. There’s no reason for Viktor to ever touch me like that again. I can’t imagine why he would want to.Ishouldn’t want him to. Even if his hands feel warm on my thighs, sending a flush through me as if I’ve been starved for touch. Which makes no sense—why would I want to be touched? I’ve been touched far too often in the past days, and for all the wrong reasons. But for some reason, I don’t want Viktor to move his hands.
But he does, of course. He wasn’t caressing me. He was moving my legs gently into place so that he can slide the sweatpants on, the fleece material brushing over my skin where his fingers were before, and it was stupid of me to think that there was any meaning to that light brush of his hands other than something purely practical.
It doesn’t mean anything that his hands linger on my waist as he tugs the sweatpants up into place. It doesn’t mean anything that when he pulls the oversized men’s t-shirt over my head and arms, his hands skim lightly past my breasts as if he wants to touch them. As if he wishes he could touch me the way he used to, without so much skin that’s too hurt to really run his hands over.
“There.” Viktor pulls the fabric down around my hips, looking up at me with those fathomless blue eyes. I can’t tell what he’s really thinking. The heat I saw a few moments ago is gone, making me wonder if I imagined it. Surely, I must have. There’s no way he could feel anything like desire for me.
Not now. Not ever again.
As he stands up, stepping back a fraction to give me room to try to get up, I tell myself that should be a relief. After all, I’d started this marriage bargaining to keep myself out of Viktor’s bed. Any reason for him to want that, too, should put us on the same page.
