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I narrow my eyes at her. “What do you mean byintimate, printsessa?”
Caterina swallows hard, and I think I see her hands tremble, but she lifts her chin defiantly. “I mean that there will be no more of this. I won’t submit to it, and if you do it anyway, you can forget that part of your moralcodewhere you believe you don’t hurt or force women because youwillbe forcing me. There will be no more punishments, no more of you making my body respond to you against my will, no more seductions. No more going to bed so that you can comfort yourself with me, no more nights like tonight.”
“What are you asking for, wife?” There’s a dangerous edge to my tone, and I know she can hear it, but she plunges forward anyway.
“I want my own room,” she says firmly. “I won’t sleep beside you again. We’ll fuck when the time of the month is appropriate—I’ll track it and share the results with you so that you know I’m not lying. We’ll fuck as quickly and clinically as necessary, and you won’t touch me outside of that.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. A moment ago, I felt on the verge of losing my sanity, ready to throw everything away while I was buried inside of her for the sheer pleasure of what I’d thought we were sharing. Now Caterina is speaking to me as coldly as I ever have to her, laying down rules for me, just as she’d tried to do at the beginning of our marriage.
“I think you’ve seen already how well trying to outline the rules of our marriage to me does,printsessa,” I tell her darkly. “What, exactly, makes you think that I—”
“If you force me,” she says quietly, interrupting me. “Or if you won’t make this compromise, then things will turn out as they did with your first wife. The bargain isn’t broken if our marriage doesn’t end through my leaving and going back to Luca. If I simply die, there will be no reason for war. No excuse to break the contract.”
I stare at her, horrified as her words sink in. Slowly, I sit up, feeling everything inside me go cold and dark. I’d wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, to believe that she wanted things to change, but this is a threat that I can’t abide by.
“You would do that to the girls?” I ask her quietly. “Take another mother from them like that?”
“Don’t use them as a weapon,” Caterina says, her voice hardening. “Don’t do that, Viktor. I’m not asking much. I’m asking you—”
“To fuck my wife like I’m jerking off.” I snort, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed and reaching for my robe. Caterina flinches back, and I laugh.
“Don’t act like I beat you,printsessa.You begged for what I did to you tonight, and you’ve begged for it before. What was tonight, anyway, if not you wanting me? What did you mean by all of this, if you were only going to—”
“I wanted to know what it was like,” Caterina says softly, not quite meeting my eyes. “I wanted to know how it would feel to have that kind of pleasure, just once. To submit to you and feel all of it, however far it could go. Just once, before I—”
“Before you cut me off.” I glare at her. “I was willing to be different for you, Caterina, softer—”
“You can’t do what I need you to do.”
I shake my head, rolling my eyes as I turn away. “This again. We’ve talked about this—”
“Yes, this again!” Caterina moves so that she’s in my line of sight again, her arms crossing over her breasts. She seems to have forgotten that she’s naked. Something about her ferocity while she’s standing there completely bare, her thighs still glistening with my cum, is so erotic that I almost forget that I’m angry with her. “I talked to Sasha—”
“Yes, I know. We’ve discussed this. And we’ve discussed my reasons, too—”
“You should never have taken her. Or any of them. You took away their choice—”
“To what?” I round on her, my voice rising with frustration as I face my beautiful, stubborn, infuriating wife. “To live in the gutter, tossed out by people who are done with them as soon as they age out of the system? To starve? To become whores for the lowest price, just to survive? To marry men out of desperation who will hurt them, beat them, steal their beauty and their youth? To be raped and robbed and treated like garbage? Do you know what happens to children in those orphanages, Caterina? Do you know what happens to them after they grow up and leave?” I shake my head in disgust. “You don’t, because you’re a pampered, selfish brat who lived with a silver spoon in her mouth from the moment you came squalling out of your mother—”
“Sashawasraped!” Caterina is shouting now, too, taking a step forward and then another until she’s so close that she’s almost yelling in my face, her dark eyes furious and impassioned. “And she wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t taken her and brought her here for that awful man—”
“I killed him!” I glare at her, my own fury matching hers. “One ofmymen. As punishment, I shot him in the head in front of everyone. I avenged her—”
“It never would have happened if she hadn’t been in that warehouse.” Caterina doesn’t back down, not even an inch. “Maybe it’s happened to other girls, and you didn’t know it. It certainly happens to at least some of them after you sell them. I guarantee they don’t all go to their newmastersand rollover happily like obedient dogs. You brought Sasha here, and you bear responsibility for what happened to her from the moment your men took her—”
“I know.” I hold her gaze steadily. “Caterina, I don’t kill men easily. I’m not feared because I’m violent or brutal like others in my world, no matter what you might have heard. I’m feared because I’m merciless when betrayed or crossed. I have killed very few men in my life, and I hope to keep it that way. But I killed him without hesitation.”
“Because he stole from you.” There’s derision in Caterina’s voice. “As if he’d stolen money or some other possession—”
“Yes, because he stole from me. But also because he stole fromher. And he had no right to do either.”
The words hang between us, heavy in the air. Caterina looks at me for a long moment, her face suddenly sad and tired.
“So did you,” she says quietly. “And you didn’t have any right, either.”
“Caterina—”
“Stop.” She holds up a hand. “Just stop, Viktor. I can’t be the wife you want, not unless you change in ways that I see now that you can’t. I’ll do the things that you bargained for. But intimacy, punishments, pleasure, the things we’ve done together—I didn’t bargain for those. And if I tell Luca, he won’t take it lightly. Especially now that I’ve told you no. No more. You fuck me until I give you a son, only when necessary. Or—”
