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“Viktor and Luca will fix this,” Sofia says confidently. “Liam is coming as well, as soon as he locks down what’s happening in Boston and has enough men ready there to keep Alexei from moving in. They won’t let anything happen to us.” Her hand stays on her stomach, and I know that theusencompasses her future son or daughter.
My chest tightens as I think of the baby I might have had. I have no idea if I’d been pregnant when I was kidnapped, but there’s no way that any child could have survived what was done to me. Just the thought makes me feel hollow, and I keep my hands planted firmly in my lap, even as I want to let them stray to my stomach. I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea, and I don’t want to explain. I know that it sounds crazy that I was so sure that I might be pregnant, when there hadn’t been any real signs. It had just been a feeling, and I know that doesn’t mean anything at all.
One thing has become very clear to me: feelings have no place in my life anymore.
We all chat for a while longer, the conversation shifting to more normal things—or as normal as we can manage, given the state of our lives. Sofia talks about her violin practice, a hint of wistfulness in her voice as she mentions a performance that was coming up, one that she’ll almost certainly miss now. She talks about her doctor’s appointment just before they left and how she and Luca agreed not to find out the sex of the baby until he or she actually arrived. “He wants it to be a surprise,” she says, smoothing her hands over her jeans. “And I think that’s a nice idea.”
“Have you talked about names?”
“A little.” Sofia laughs. “He’s very sure that it’s a boy, so he insists on Giovanni, for my father, if it’s a boy. Which I think is very sweet.”
“It is sweet,” Ana says softly, and I can hear a hint of wistfulness in her voice, too. I hadn’t forgotten what she said when the three of us went shopping for my wedding dress, how badly she wants love, and how sure she is that she’ll never find it now.
“How are you doing?” I ask her, leaning forward. “How are—things?” It’s hard to know what words to use when I talk about what happened to her. I don’t know if the guilt will ever entirely go away, that it was my husband who was responsible for it. And I don’t know if she’ll ever fully recover. She’s still thin to the point of waifishness, as much as she was when she was a ballerina, if not more. I know from what Sofia told me that shecouldwalk again but that she can’t bring herself to try. Her doctors have been pushing her, from what I’d heard just before I left for Moscow with Viktor, but to no avail.
Ana has decided that she’s broken beyond repair, and no one, not doctors or friends, can convince her otherwise.
If Franco wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him again myself,I think bitterly, looking at Ana’s pale face. After all, I’ve already killed one man.
I wonder what Sofia or Ana would think if they knew. Sofia has done it too, pulled a trigger, and watched a man who deserved to die get his just deserts at her hand. Ana hasn’t, but I know she was glad that Franco was dead.
I don’t think either one of them would judge me for it—they might even praise me—but at the same time, I can’t bring myself to say it out loud. As glad as I am that I killed Stepan, and as good as that revenge felt, it’s colored now by the fact that Viktor had a hand in it. Stepan was a pawn, and that takes some of the satisfaction out of it.
Viktor was the one who should have died for that, not Stepan—or maybe both of them. Stepan might have been the tool, but Viktor was the one who ordered it. And that makes me feel a deep bitterness that twists my stomach and makes me feel nauseous, a nausea that climbs my stomach and slides up into my throat, until—
“Oh god.” I jump up, clapping my hand over my mouth and running for the nearest bathroom. At first, I’m unsure where it is, and I have a horrid feeling that I’m going to vomit all over the gleaming hardwood floor, where everyone will see. I press my hand tighter against my mouth, looking wildly around, and then I see a small door that I hope leads to a downstairs bathroom and not some kind of linen closet or something.
It does, and I only just make it to the toilet in time to fall to my knees and heave into it, clutching the sides as the tea and minimal amount of food that I’ve eaten all come rushing up. I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling the hot tears slide down my cheeks, and I wonder, not for the first time, how I’m going to endure this. How I’m going to go on.
Maybe I should have jumped off that balcony on my wedding night and saved myself so much pain.
If Sofia and Ana notice how quiet I am until dinnertime, they don’t mention it. We all change before dinner, and Viktor, thankfully, isn’t upstairs in our room. I don’t know at firstwhatI’m going to change into, since the cashmere dress I’m wearing is the only item of clothing I have. When I go back upstairs and look in the wardrobe and the closet, I’m shocked to see that sometime either before we arrived or since I’ve been upstairs, it’s been fully stocked with clothing of various styles in my size—jeans and t-shirts, workout clothes, bras and panties, casual dresses and more elegant ones. I pick out a black knee-length dress with a gold metallic collar, even though I know Viktor doesn’t like me in black. Especially now, as thin and pale as I am, I know he’ll hate it.
Good, I think viciously.Let him hate it.Maybe it will make my punishment later worse, but I can’t bring myself to care. Any small act of defiance that I can manage is all I can think of to make this even the slightest bit tolerable. He wants me to submit to him, but all I want to do is show him that I’m still not broken, despite what he did to me. Despite what I know, he still plans to do.
I slip on a pair of black heels and add gold jewelry, sweeping my dark hair up into a bun at the back of my head, another thing that I know Viktor doesn’t care for. He prefers my hair in a chignon or loose, but I’m going to show him that there are still decisions I can make for myself.
I might be his wife, but I’m not his possession. And I’ll die before I let him hear me beg again.
VIKTOR
Dinner is a tense affair.
Caterina comes down in a black dress that found its way into her wardrobe somehow—I instructed the staff not to purchase anything black for her, but it’s clear that someone along the way didn’t pay attention. It makes her look gaunt and pale, and I can see from the defiant glint in her eyes that she dressed that way on purpose.
That’s okay,I think with a savage pleasure as she walks to the dinner table. It’ll make punishing her later all that much more enjoyable. She’ll learn to bend to me, or she’ll suffer the consequences. Either will bring me pleasure and peace—eventually.
Yet again, the little stunt that she pulled in Moscow has changed things between us. I’d thought that they might change for the better when she’d been recovering in the cabin. I hadn’t realized until I’d thought I might lose her how much I cared. I’d felt that same fear and dread that I’d felt with Vera come rushing back, all of the old guilt and hurt eating at me until all I could think of was nursing Caterina back to health until she was strong enough to learn the things she might need to defend herself and to take the revenge I’d offered her.
But then, for some reason that I can’t fathom, she’d decided to try to run. Despite everything I’d done for her, all the ways I’d tried to show her the feelings that were growing, the things I’d done to show her that she was still beautiful and desirable to me, she’d thrown it all away in a desperate bid to steal from me and try to leave Moscow.
I still can’t fathom what she was thinking. The money she’d taken from me wouldn’t have lasted long, and she doesn’t speak Russian. Without identification or contacts, she wouldn’t have been able to get out of Russia. She might have had some harebrained plan to contact Luca, but I’d bet anything that she wouldn’t even have remembered the number to call him at.
It had been a ridiculous, barely-baked, impossible plan. It had, frankly, been the plan of a desperate woman. For the life of me, I can’t come up with a reason why Caterina would be so desperate to escape me that she would have done such a massively foolish thing—especially with the danger that she’d already escaped once still out there.
At this point, I don’t even care what the why of it is. All I want to do is make sure that it won’t happen again, that Caterina is made aware of her duties as my wife, and that she learns her place. That she learns to obey me. I don’t have time for a disobedient wife that I have to watch like a hawk—not again. I married Caterina first and foremost because she understood this life and because I had believed she would understand the role she was meant to inhabit.
Since it seems that she doesn’t, I intend to make certain that she grasps those things very soon.
