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“Who do you trust?” he asked. “The monster who sold you to me, knowing I killed your brother? Or the monster who would never lie to you?”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t know if I can trust either of them,” I admitted. “Both are equally bad.”
“You’re right,” he sighed. “But know this, Elia. I would never hurt you..”
“You hurt me the day of our wedding,” I blurted out, remembering the shame of that day. Not only had he come after me, but he had forced me to suck him on the side of the road, watched me change into my dress, and forced me to march to the wedding altar with his cum on my face. He had humiliated me. And never once had he expressed even a hint of remorse.
“I hated you that day,” I said.
“I know,” he answered curtly.
“I still hate you occasionally.”
“I know,” Aleksey repeated. His hand reached out gingerly to brush the hair away from my face. “Believe me. I tried to hate you too. Iwantedto hate you from the moment I found out I was marrying you, Elia.”
I couldn’t fault him for that. I had felt the same way.
“But then I saw you in New York,” he continued, dropping his hand. “The night before our engagement party. You were impossible for me to look away from. And each moment after that…you made me feel. You woke something in me that I thought was dead. And somewhere along the way, I realized that I couldn’t hate you, no matter how hard I tried.”
Tried as I might to hold it back, a smile hooked on my lips. He had intrigued me that night. The way he took me in his arms and slowly leaned in toward me. The panic that had seized my throat when I thought he would kiss me. I was intrigued about him. He was supposed to be my enemy, yet he set my heart on fire.
“You were irresistible for me,” Aleksey said. “You made me want to know more about you. You are nothing like your father, Elia. No matter what passes between us, no matter how much we hurt each other, I could never bring myself to hate you.” He drew in a breath. “All I’m asking is that you trust me. That you believe me.”
His words tore at my heart. “I want to believe you,” I answered after a few moments. “Because the last thing I want to believe is that you are lying to me about the pin. About everything.”
It was the truth. I wanted to believe that he had the best of intentions in everything he did, that I didn’t have to worry about him scheming or trying to manipulate me, but the seed of doubt had been planted. And its sprouts were already poking out of the dirt.
The pin, that stupid pin, was a wedge driving us apart. No matter what he said or did.
“Who is the Bogat…” I started. I couldn’t even say that word.
“The Bogatyr?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed. “I don’t know. An enemy, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” I asked, incredulous. “Who told you about him?”
“My uncle.”
“And you trustedhim?” I felt my heart cracking at the admission. “You were the one who told me you couldn’t trust your uncle. But in the span of a couple of days, you took his word over mine?”
“I don’t know who to trust anymore.” Aleksey stood up. “So why don’t you tell me about your visit with your father?”
I watched him remove his coat, then the weapons that he had tucked on his person, placing them carefully on the bedside table for easy reach. It was a ritual I had watched him do a few times since we were married.
But tonight, the familiar motions felt different. Tonight, they felt like a threat.
“Come here.” Aleksey settled himself against the pillows and patted the space next to him. “You look exhausted.”
Cautiously, I crawled into bed and he pulled back the covers so I could slip under. His arm encircled my shoulders, and I found myself involuntarily drifting to his chest to rest my cheek there.
“We argued,” I started. “He told me some things that I didn’t want to believe.” Now I wasn’t so sure as to who to believe, and something told me that Aleksey was struggling as well. “When did your uncle tell you about the Bogatyr?”
“As soon as you left,” he breathed, stroking my hair.
Suddenly, things started to make sense. “They are trying to tear us apart,” I said, lifting my head to look at him.
