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As if I could ever stop.
As if I ever had a choice.
CATERINA
Ihardly even notice the sticky heat of him on my thighs when he slips out of me and sets me down. What I notice is his forehead pressed against mine, the way his hands are still on my waist, gripping me as if he doesn’t want to let me go. He’s still panting, his breathing coming hard and fast, and when I breathe in, I can smell the scent of his sweat and flushed skin. It sends another shiver of desire over me, and I hate myself for it.
I hate everything that just happened and want it, with equal measure. But the way he’s holding me now in the aftermath hurts a thousand times more.
“What are you doing?” I whisper, closing my eyes tightly against the burning that I feel behind my eyelids again, desperate not to cry. Not here, not with him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Viktor murmurs, his hands tightening on my waist.
At that moment, I feel something break inside of me.
I wrench away from him, using every bit of strength I have to twist out of his grasp. “You can stop pretending,” I whisper, my voice shaking. “I know, okay? You don’t have to keep doing this. It hurts more than when you’re cruel.”
“Know what?” Viktor sounds confused, and I whirl around, anger bubbling up hot and thick.
“Oh, fuckingstop!” I glare at him. “I heard you. I thought I was just being paranoid when I thought you might have set it all up. But then I heard the phone call in the hotel room, and I knew.”
“Set what up?” Viktor frowns, and I don’t know whether to scream or slap him. I hadn’t thought that I’d married such a good actor, and right now, I hate him more than I could have ever thought was possible.
“My kidnapping,” I hiss through gritted teeth. “You set it up. You had them kidnap me from the loft in Moscow. You had Andrei and Stepan torture me. You faked the rescue. It was all you, all along.”
“What?” A look of absolute horror passes over Viktor’s face. “Why in the hell would I do that?”
I blink, swallowing hard. “To break me,” I whisper. “To teach me a lesson because I fought you so hard on everything. Because I wasn’t the wife you thought you were getting. Because I was angry about your business. So you had me kidnapped to teach me a lesson, and then pretended to rescue me and nurse me back to health, let me kill Stepan so I would feel indebted to you, so I would obey you and be the kind of wife you wanted, afterward.”
“Christ.”Viktor curses under his breath in Russian. “Clearly, it didn’t work, if that’s what I’d tried,” he says grimly. “Butfuck, Caterina, how the fuck could you think that? What kind of monster do you think I am?”
I stare at him, feeling a sudden whirlpool of emotion opening up inside of me, threatening to suck me down and drown me. He looks so genuinely horrified by everything I’ve just said, but I can’t fathom how to believe him. How to not think that this is just another act, another lie, another manipulation.
“Are you saying that’s not what happened?”
“No,” Viktor breathes. He crosses the space between us in two strides, reaching for me and pulling me into his arms. I tense up instantly, but he doesn’t let go. “I could never have thought of such a thing in a thousand years, Caterina. I wouldn’t do that to any woman, let alone mywife.” He tips my chin up, his blue eyes fixed on mine. “Alexei was behind your kidnapping, Caterina. I don’t know who he hired yet, but I will. I’ll find out who he’s working with, who took you from that loft, and I’ll make them regret every second they’ve ever lived from the time they came out of their mothers’ wombs.” He shakes his head. “I had no idea how I felt about you until I took your body out of that cabin, Caterina. I thought you were going to die. I thought I had lost you, and every moment between then and when you finally woke up was as much torture as anything I did to either of those animals who hurt you.”
I feel like I can’t breathe. I can hear the sincerity in his words, washing over me, wrapping around all my fears and doubts and hurt and anger and threatening to make it all dissolve. I want to cling to them, if only because it felt so certain, so right to hate him. After all, this is a man who does other things that I hate, so why not hate all of him? Why not believe that he could do something so revolting?
But here he is, looking down into my eyes with an expression that comes very close to an emotion I’m terrified to put a name to, his hands clutching me, that fear of loss that he’s talking about written over every inch of his face.
“I couldn’t lose you, Caterina. Not like—like—”
His first wife.I pull away, wrapping my arms tightly around myself again, my heart pounding. “Your first wife,” I whisper. “No one ever said what happened to her. Only that she died. I thought maybe—”
Viktor goes entirely silent, his face paling as what I’m saying, and not saying, sinks in. “You thinkIkilled her?” he manages finally, his voice hoarse with disbelief. “You think I killed Vera?”
“Or had her killed,” I whisper. “Maybe she was a difficult wife too, maybe—”
“She was.” Viktor runs a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “But I didn’t fucking have her killed, or god forbid, kill her myself!” He turns away, his shoulders tensing and then whirls back to face me. “I fucking loved her!”
I stare at him. “You did?”
“Yes.” Viktor swallows hard. “It was a love match. We were wild about each other. I loved her, and I wanted her, and she was everything to me. I couldn’t believe that she loved me back, this woman who was so gorgeous, who every other man wanted as badly as I did.”
I blink, swallowing hard. I’ve never heard him talk about his first wife quite so plainly. It shouldn’t hurt to hear him talk about another woman like this. It shouldn’t make me feel jealous, but I can feel my gut twisting with bitter, acrid envy that I can’t shake.
Viktor sinks onto a bench, rubbing a hand over his mouth. “Sit down, Caterina,” he says finally. “I’ll tell you what happened.”
