I nodded, and he gave me a look of surprise.
“This is nothing but a bargain for me. Marriage or not, you’ll always be the man who killed someone I loved in my presence and ruined my innocence. I’ll always hate you for subjecting me to that image when I was just nineteen,” I warned, looking up at him with the anger I felt.
He took more steps closer until he was right beside me.
“Your innocence was ruined the very day you decided to date someone affiliated with the Bratva. You know that better than anyone else,” he shot back, his voice level.
I had no response, no comeback to throw his way as he turned around.
Just as he got close to the door, he turned partially towards the bed as he warned, “I see your facade of cooperation, but you should know this: if you’re hiding anything about your lover’s network or any important intel, I’ll drag it out of you. Piece. By. Piece.”
“Do your worst,” I answered, rolling my eyes. As I dragged my body to lie down on the bed, I added, “And he’s not my lover!”
My pulse hammered against my skin as he left the room, and my eyes remained on the door.
Is it just my mind playing tricks, or is that the shadow of his feet I see from the small space beneath the door?
Chapter Six
Konstantin’s POV
I stood outside her door, listening. I couldn’t deny feeling the first crack in my resolve, and the crazy part was that I didn’t even understand why.
Do I want to break her? Or protect her?
I found that I didn’t have an answer to that question, either.
I always entered every negotiation, deal, or even torture rooms with a clear motive. Whether it was to get someone to spill a secret, achieve the most profitable outcome, or inflict pain, I always knew what I was going in for. However, with Alina, the motive kept shifting.
At the very beginning, the only motive was to seize her and get Vitya’s information from her. It was a clear-cut abduction to retrieve information and seal up loose ends. But then, somewhere between how pained she clearly was about a role I played in her sad history and the intrigue I felt at her audacity and confidence, the second option, which should have been automatic, began to feel wrong. The motive made a shift from strictly doing what the Bratva needed to being fair to her. It moved from dealing with her as a leak to pausing to consider the safest option for her. And now that I had made a marriage arrangement with her, I still couldn’t pinpoint what my motive was.
None the wiser on what was going on, I walked away from her door, leaving the two guards on either side.
It’s a good thing I don’t have to explain my motive to anyone. For now.
I knew I was kidding myself immediately after my body landed on my bed. With the myriad of unresolved thoughts inmy head, there was no way sleep would come anywhere near me. It didn’t matter that dawn was just a few hours away, and I hadn’t had any sleep; I needed to coax my body to relax enough to go into sleep mode.
Getting off the bed, I took my clothes off as I walked into the bathroom.
As the cool water rained on my skin and ran down in rivulets to the floor, I took a deep sigh in an attempt to silence my mind temporarily. Just like always, it worked; the noise in my head began to subside. It would have been a relief had it not been that the few lingering, muted thoughts in my head still revolved around Alina.
But they did. And it was more than a little disturbing. For many reasons.
I rarely, if ever, thought about a woman. I didn’t have anything against the gender, like Sergei and some of my other men often concluded. I just never knew how to align with them—and I really never cared enough to discover how. I had met a few women whose presence I could bear and even like, but nothing good ever came out of it. I had found that my path, what I was wired for, was simple, uncomplicated exchanges; just sex and money, no more, no less. That way, I never had to think about someone whose face or name I couldn’t even remember in the daylight. So, thinking about a woman now, even though it was in a work capacity, felt very unusual.
The fact that I now had an image of her younger self in my memory was another disturbing factor. It felt like I was involved in a part of her I shouldn’t even know.
I sighed again as I ran my hands through my hair.
What the hell have I gotten myself into?
I tried to shut my mind off as I stepped out of the shower and went to the mirror above the sink. I rinsed my toothbrushand put toothpaste on it. As I brushed my teeth, I realized I was hungry.
I’ve been too busy making life-changing decisions to think of eating.
There go these ‘life-changing’ thoughts again!
It’s just a containment strategy, just work, why would it change anyone’s life?
