Chapter 22
Sasha
“We should go to Russia,” my mother says. It’s been two days since I saw Maxim at the Kremlin, and I haven’t left the hotel room. I’m sitting by the window looking out at the street below. I alternate sitting here with pacing around the small room.
I don’t know if I’m thinking, or I’ve just shut down.
“No.”
“Please, Sasha. Be reasonable. We can’t stay here forever. Soon Ravil will figure out the hotel is still charging his credit card, and we’ll be kicked out.”
“You did this,” I snap at her. “You took away the only person who ever really cared about me!”
My mother’s eyes widen. “What are you saying? I’m the only one who ever really cared about you.”
“No.” I’m so sick of the hot tears that keep leaking from my eyes. “Maxim really cared. He listened. He supported my dreams. And now he’s terribly hurt because he thinks I tried to trick him.”
She shakes her head dismissively.
“If you want to leave this hotel, you should help me figure out how to fix this.”
“Maxim said he would file for divorce?”
I glare at my mother. She loves that little nugget because it means she’ll get my money. “I don’t want a divorce. I want Maxim.”
My mother sighs. “What about the lawyer?”
“What lawyer?”
“Isn’t Ravil’s fiancée a lawyer? Maybe she’s drawing up the papers. You could go and talk to her.”
I blink at my mother. It’s not the worst idea.
I don’t know if Lucy likes me, but she was certainly kind before. I pick up the phone and call her law firm to book an appointment.
I will make this work. I have to make this work. I’m not going to sit around passively letting people move me around the chess board like a pawn. This is my life, and I have to fight for what I want.
Maxim
I’m at the bar for the third straight night in a row when Pavel plops down beside me on a barstool. He doesn’t look at me, just examines the bottles behind the bar with a cool indifference.
The bartender comes over and takes his order for a beer.
He sips it slowly, still not acknowledging me.
“Whatever you want to say, rethink it. I promise I don’t want to hear it.”
“Hmm.”
I pick up my rocks glass and gesture with it. “This time my aim will be better,” I threaten.
He says nothing, just takes another pull on his beer.
Fuck this. I throw down a fifty and start to get up from my seat.
“She was fighting with her mother,” Pavel offers.
I don’t want to stop.
Walk away. Just walk the fuck away.
Goddammit. I sit back down.
“Her mom was saying she should’ve let her burn.”
If Pavel wanted to pick the one thing to make me react, he chose wisely. A wash of cold and then red-hot rage burns through me. “Excuse me?”
“They were fighting,” he repeats. “I really don’t think Sasha had anything to do with the plan. She kept begging me to tell you that. And her mom was telling her she’d done it for her, but Sasha was calling bullshit. She said Galina was basically stealing her money.”
My heart flops around in my chest. Indecision makes it hard to breathe. “You’re just now telling me this?” I snarl, deciding all of this is now Pavel’s fault.
He’s wise enough to get off his stool and back away, hands held up in surrender. “I tried.”
I shake my head. “No, you didn’t.”
I may want to never see Sasha again, but the idea of her being in danger from her own mother gets me up and moving fast.
Thank fuck I killed Viktor and Alexei. Would they have killed my bride if she’d tried to leave?
I pull out my phone as I get in my car and call Ravil. “Where are they?” I bark into the phone.
He waits a beat before answering, showing me he’s still top dog. When he speaks, his voice is smooth as caramel. “I presume you mean Sasha and Galina?”
“Yes. I assume you’re keeping tabs on them?”
“They’re still in the hotel where I left them. Their tickets to Russia, booked under false names, went unused.”
“What hotel?”
“You should just come back here.”
“Don’t fucking tell me to come back there.”
“No, really, come back. If you’re looking for Sasha… she found a way in.”
It takes me several moments to think that through. Nothing gets by Ravil, he’s our pakhan. No one can make him do anything except…
“Lucy let her in.” I surmise.
“She’s in your room.”
My heartbeat calms. She’s in my room.
Safe.
No one can touch her there.
No one but me.
I’m still torn. Not sure what to believe. But Pavel’s report ties in with what she tried to tell me. And her actions. She didn’t stay dead. She hasn’t left the country.
I step on the gas, screeching into the parking garage below the Kremlin and taking the private elevator to the penthouse.
I stalk into the suite without a word to anyone, rolling my shirtsleeves up as I go. As if I’m about to take care of my errant wife with a good old-fashioned spanking.
Which… actually sounds fun.
Some of the weight that’s been crushing my chest since I thought she was dead lifts. I push open the door, then step inside and quickly close it when I see what’s waiting for me.
Sasha’s naked in the middle of the bed. Naked except for a pair of red stilettos. Apart from the shoes, she’s the spitting image of the picture she’d made six years ago when I’d found her in my yacht cabin, offering herself up to me on a platter.
I don’t like the scene. I didn’t like it then, and I like it even less now. It feels like another manipulation. But then I notice how unsure she looks. It’s that, more than anything, that breaks down my resistance.
I lean my back against the door and scrub a hand across my face. “What are you doing?”
She swallows. I don’t like to see her so nervous. “I left my heels on,” she offers. “For punishment.”
The fact that she’s thinking the same thing I was when I came in busts down even more resistance. But I don’t want to think with my dick here. I can’t let her fool me if this is another trick.
“No tricks,” she promises, reading my mind. Without trying to look sexy, she scoots off the edge of the bed and then shocks the hell out of me by dropping to her knees in front of me. Her fingers reach up like she’s going to unbutton my pants, but then seems to think better of it, and they flutter back down.
We’re not there yet.
She holds her hands together in her lap, instead, gazing up with those brilliant blue eyes. “I’m not playing you. I wasn’t then. I’m not now.” Tears shimmer and release, falling down her cheeks.
My resistance gets blown to smithereens.
“I’m here to give myself to you. Because my heart and body and soul belong to you. They always have.”