Page 24 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
“Viktor is difficult but not unkind.”
The suite was on the third floor.
I had been in my own room the previous night. The separate room Mikhail had mentioned, the gesture of consideration I had received with more suspicion than gratitude because I had been too raw and too tired to receive anything else.
The suite he led me to now was different. It was crazily large and perfectly arranged in a way that told me Mikhail wasn’t uninvolved in it. It was his space, after all. Has been for God-knows-how long. The walls were a blue-grey color, complementing the black couches in the living area.
We entered the bedroom. It was magnificent. The walls were still the same color but the furniture, from the couches to the bed frame and the wardrobe I could see from the doorless walk-in closet, was stark white. Black silk sheets covered the bed that was definitely larger than the king-size I thought I knew.
His room. And now mine too, presumably.
My stomach flipped again.
He closed the door behind us. The sound of it was quiet and final, and in the silence that followed I could hear the reception’s background noise—the low hum of other people’s presence, the managed ambient sound of a full house—draining away. It was just the two of us and the room and the dress I had been wearing for four hours and the weight of an evening I hadn’t finished processing.
He had moved toward the window, loosening his cufflinks with the automatic efficiency of a man removing the apparatus of aworking day. His back was to me, the dark suit jacket still on, the line of his shoulders composed even in this private space where composition wasn’t required for any audience.
I watched him for a moment and felt all the containment of the evening break open.
“I was chosen. That’s what you told me. Volkov chose me because of the specific shape of my situation. For my entire adult life I have been making decisions in the dark about things I didn’t have enough information to navigate, and I am tired of it, and I will not do it in this house.”
The room was quiet. Then he turned around to face me. Mikhail looked at me from across the space between us.
“You won’t,” he said, his voice certain.
It was hard to tell if he was being real or he was just saying it to shut me up.
“I need that to actually mean something.”
“It does.”
I pressed my hands together in front of me because they needed something to do and there was nothing available.
“I’m furious at you. I need you to understand that isn’t going to go away tonight. It isn’t going to go away because the evening is over or because you say the right things or because—”
“Because what?” he asked when I paused.
His voice had changed register. Lower. Something in it that was not the reception’s controlled distance.
The space between us was different from what it had been two minutes ago. He hadn’t moved. I hadn’t moved. But the charge of it had shifted in the specific way that charge shifted whenan argument stopped being purely argument and started being something else, and I was aware of it. He was, too.
But I was still angry. The anger I felt was real and I was not going to pretend the evening had been anything other than what it was. I was not going to pretend that being dressed and displayed had not cost something, or that the document I’d signed in the sitting room was not a fundamental rearrangement of my life without my full and free consent.
But also, there was the matter of what my body had been doing all evening. That quiet, persistent, deeply inconvenient awareness that had run underneath the performance like a current I couldn’t switch off. Every time his hand had found the small of my back. Every time he had leaned close enough to speak quietly.
“Elena,” he said.
The way he said my name. That was the problem, fundamentally, and there was apparently nothing available to me in terms of a defense against that.
“Because what?” he pressed, his gaze unmoving.
I closed the distance. I did it consciously. I crossed the room and I stood in front of him and
I looked at him directly, and I said, “ You don’t get to demand anything from me. ’m still angry.”
“I know,” he said.
“This doesn’t—” I stopped, and started again. “This doesn’t mean everything is resolved.”
