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I’d buried the birth control pills under a stack of sweaters, and when I see them, my blood runs cold all over again. This is the one lie Theo hasn’t uncovered, and when I think of the conversations we had about children, his reaction to it, how sincerely he had said he wished he could give me time—
If he found them, I think he might consider it a worse betrayal than even not having come to his bed a virgin.
I bury them in my suitcase, stacking clothes and toiletries and everything else that’s left atop them, a solid lump in my throat. I’d really thought that this all might be different. That I might have gotten lucky with Theo—that I might have a chance at something more than I could have ever hoped for with him. I had been considering what a real future, a real marriage with him looked like, and how I would break that to Adrik—that I’d fallen in love with my husband and what there was between us needed to be over.
“It’s not fair,” I whisper aloud to the empty room. Other girls get to choose who they fuck for the first time, get to have relationships that end because they find someone else, or it simply runs its course. Other women aren’t expected to stay with the first man they go to bed with forever. Other women are allowed to fall for men like Adrik, for muscled chests and broad hands, and to decide later that they might have changed their minds.
But not me. I was born Marika Vasilev, daughter of the Bratvapakhan, and so I’m going to be punished for something as simple as choosing who to sleep with first, choosing when to get pregnant, and choosing to change my mind about who I want.
I never asked for any of this, but it’s still my burden to bear.
I shut the suitcases, setting them aside as I sit on the edge of the bed again, trying to think of what to do. To come up with a plan. But there’s nothing that I can imagine will help. Whatever Theo is going to do, I feel certain he’s made up his mind.
There’s nothing I can do to change it, now.
—
As I’d expected, Theo doesn’t come upstairs to bed. I sleep alone, tossing and turning in the huge bed, my sleep full of restless dreams and fear for what’s to come.
I expect to see him on the drive to the hangar, my stomach full of anxiety, but he’s not in the car either. That’s somehow more frightening, the idea that he can’t even stand to be near me, that he’s keeping his distance until we get back to Chicago.
And what happens then?
There are three members of his security team in the car with me—notably none of Nikolai’s—and Adrik is nowhere to be seen. The car ride is absolutely silent, none of them even looking at me as we make the long drive to the private jet hangar. I sit there with my hands knotted in my lap, sick with fear, wondering what happens next.
I’m not entirely sure that I’m going to make it out of this alive.
Theo is nowhere to be seen when we get to the jet, either. There are no vases of flowers strewn around the interior of it or soft blankets or champagne waiting, no handsome husband eager to make our honeymoon special. It’s still impossibly luxurious, of course, but there’s a cold feeling to the rows of luxe beige leather seats and wooden paneling now stripped of the way I saw it the first time.
I’m escorted back to the bedroom at the back of the jet by the security, boxed in so I don’t even have a chance to try to sit down or deviate from the path. The door to the room is opened, and one of the guards looks impassively at me. “You’ll stay in here until we land,” he says simply. There’s no emotion in his voice, no hint of censure or suggestion of whether he has any feeling about it one way or another, if he disapproves of what I’ve supposedly done to his boss, or if he even knows. He could just be following Theo’s orders, and have no idea about any of this.
I go into the bedroom. There’s no point in fighting that I can see; there's no reason to try to say no. The room is comfortable enough, outfitted with a large bed, a selection of books, and a television, but I couldn’t focus on anything if I tried. My head is a jumble of thoughts and fears, every muscle in my body twisted tight in preparation to flee the coming danger—as if there were anywhere I could go. As if there’s anything I can do except wait to find out what my husband’s verdict is.
The seven-and-a-half-hour flight feels impossibly long. I’m torn between fears for the future and memories of the flight in the opposite direction—the champagne toast, Theo pulling me into his lap, fucking me in full view of anyone who might have walked by, taking pleasure in me knowing how much he couldn’t wait to be inside of me again. And then—
I shudder, remembering seeing Adrik at the end of the aisle.Why couldn’t you have listened?I think despondently as I play it over and over again in my head. This wouldn’t be happening if he’d stayed in Chicago, as he was supposed to.Why did you have to do that?
But I know, deep down, it would have come to a head eventually anyway. We would have come back to Chicago, and Adrik wouldn’t have been patient enough to wait.
One way or another, I think we would have gotten caught—and that I was a fool to ever think otherwise.
When the plane lands, I’m once again escorted to a car without seeing Theo. It takes me back to the mansion outside of the city, and I’m marched inside what is technically my own home, straight to Theo’s office, where I see him at last.
I’ve never seen him look so cold and impassive, not even the first night I met him, at dinner with my brother and Lilliana. His face is set in hard, chiseled lines that do nothing to take away from how handsome he is, but make him look every bit the brutal crime lord that I was led to believe he was, not a hint of the gentler, softer man that I came to know anywhere to be seen. He’s sitting behind a long, heavy walnut desk, in a leather chair, his hands settled in front of him.
“The last time you were in this office,” Theo says, his voice deceptively low and quiet, “you sucked my cock for the first time. In an effort to get me to allow your brother to send his own security with us to Ireland. Don’t bother denying it,” he adds, as if I were even considering it. “I knew even then that’s what you were doing. I just didn’t know you were angling to have your lover come along on our honeymoon.”
The bitterness that drips from his words tells me there’s no point in arguing. That he’s not going to be convinced otherwise, no matter what I say, no matter how I plead with him to understand that while Ihadwanted my brother’s security along with the trip, I never asked for Adrik to come along, and I never would have.
“And I fucked you right here.” He taps the chair, heedless of the guards standing around me, or perhaps simply not caring. “I wanted the fucking scent of you here in my office, so I could remember it—my beautiful, lustful wife, wanting her husband’s cock. You were so wet for me that youdrippedall over my chair, and I fucking loved it.”
My heart clenches as I hear the torn emotion under those last words, the only hint of it he’s given. A glimpse at the emotion he was beginning to feel for me that’s destroyed now.
There is such a fine line between love and hate.
“Now,” he says calmly, his hands still folded on the desk, “things are different.”
The door opens again, and my stomach clenches with fear as I see my suitcases being rolled in. Theo is still sitting behind the desk, still and silent, his face as impassive as if he’s simply watching a series of events be set in motion—which is exactly what I think is happening. He’s planned all of this, and I’m merely a piece in the tableau he’s about to enact.
