Page 47 of Ruthless Bratva's Forced Virgin
The second time I was looking at my plate.
I felt it before I confirmed it–I looked up. He was looking at me. His expression was even and composed. He held the contact for a moment before picking up his phone again.
I was not hungry. I had not been hungry since the parking structure. I ate the way I had been performing everything since I came through the front door–with the mechanics of the motion.
The issue was, I was not certain it was enough.
After dinner, I found a reason to disappear.
The library again, the refuge again, the room I had identified in my first week as the place the house breathed differently. I told myself I was going to read. I sat in the leather chair and I opened a book. But I looked at the words on the page and I did not read them.
I pressed the book flat on my knees and looked at the fire and let myself think about it directly.
He knew something.
That was the conclusion I had been circling since the entrance hall, the thing the atmospheric wrongness was pointing toward. Not everything–if he knew everything, the dinner would have been different. There would have been no dinner, or the dinner would have been a different kind of dinner.
He was building toward something.
The investigation that he had told me about–the interior leak, the compromised routes, the systematic forensic assembly of what had been feeding information and from where–was still running. It had been running for weeks and had been producing results that were, by his own account, converging on a conclusion.
The fire moved. I looked at it.
I thought about what it had been like, in the weeks before I stopped cooperating. The specific quality of moving through the manor with the knowledge of what I was doing underneath the performance of being Elena Golovina. The conversations I had been present for, receiving information I had known I was receiving with a different purpose than the one the room assumed. The mornings in his office. The library in the storm.
The library in the storm.
I pressed my eyes closed.
He had held me through a thunderstorm while I talked about foster homes and parents I didn’t remember. And the whole time I had been what I was.
I had been in his house. I had been in his bed. I had eaten his food and talked to his sister and been held by him in a storm and received his trust in careful increments–the timeline on the desk, the dinner with just the two of us–and I had been the interior leak his investigation was looking for.
I should tell him.
The urge arrived with a sudden, nearly overwhelming force–not the gradual building of it that I had been managing for days. This was the acute version.
I pressed my hands flat on the chair’s arms.
His world does not allow for explanations.
Betrayal had no context here.
This was what I knew. This was the foundational fact of the system I was inside, the principle that had held for decades before I arrived in Las Vegas.
He would not forgive this. That was the thing I kept arriving at, the wall at the end of every rehearsal of the confession. He would understand the coercion, would assess the full architecture of what had been done to me before I arrived in his world, might even–in the private accounting of a man capable of making distinctions–might even hold the conditions as mitigating. But he would not forgive. Because in his world, forgiveness was a kind of blindness, and he was not a man who chose blindness over truth, and the truth of what I had done while sleeping in hisbed and eating at his table was not the kind of truth that survived the Bratva’s accounting intact.
So I decided against it.
*************
He found me hours later.
He moved down the corridor outside the library and I had a moment, brief and useless, of the impulse to turn off the lamp and pretend I had gone to bed, and then the impulse passed because it was absurd and also because the impulse itself was information about what I had become–a person who considered hiding in the dark from her own husband–and I did not want to take the next step down that particular staircase.
He appeared in the doorway.
He looked at the chair, at me in it, at the book on my knees that I had manifestly not been reading. He came into the room without waiting for an invitation, which was consistent with every time he had come into this room, and he sat in the chair across from mine.
