My husband shook his head, that smile growing even harder. “All of these things cost money, my sweet, dear wife. “
His mocking tone did nothing to soothe my fears, and every hair on the back of my neck stood on end, warning me to not push him any further.
“Gavril,” I tried again, starting to panic on the inside. He was incensed with anger about me seeing what I had seen, but more importantly, he didn’t agree with me about the mistreatment of those women. And that hurt.
Oh, how it hurt.
“Answer me!” he shouted, startling me. Gavril’s chest was now heaving with exertion, and his eyes had a glazed look about them.
Almost feral.
I had seen him angry before, but never like this.
“I—yes, I do,” I forced out, keeping my tears and panic at bay the best I could. If I survived this confrontation, there would be plenty of time for freaking out later.
“Then you understand why I am doing this,” he finished, not moving from caging me in.
“But there are better ways,” I urged, hoping to connect to some part of him that was the rational side. “There have to be. This isn’t right, Gavril.”
I didn’t care how mad he got at me. He needed to know where I stood on this.
“There are other things you can do, honest things,” I continued.
“Honest things?” He let out a humorless laugh. “Honest things?”
I shook my head, pressing my lips together to keep from sobbing, and he leaned in, his eyes glittering with rage.
“I’m the fucking Pakhan of a Bratva, Sveta. There are certain concessions I must follow, certain laws that dictate what I can and cannot do. The thieves’ law forbids me from obeying the law of the cops. It is a life, not a choice!”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from his lips. He wasn’t even telling me how disgusted he had been by the sight before him or how it had bothered him.
All Gavril was worried about was the image he had to maintain.
What about saving his soul?
“You should have realized that the moment you married me,” he continued as I wrestled with the shocking revelation. “Because this is who I am.”
“The moment I married you?” I couldn’t take it any longer. “I didn’t choose to marry you!” I shouted, letting all my anger and rage bubble to the surface. “You forced me to marry you! You kidnapped me, stripped me, humiliated me, and put that ring on my finger like a shackle!”
Gavril’s expression grew even colder, and I knew I had crossed a line.
“Careful,” he said. “What is done can easily be undone. I can dissolve this marriage with the snap of my fingers, and you will find yourself out in the street.”
His words were so cold, so hard, that I shivered. Had I not meant anything to him? Would it be that easy for him to just kick me out and walk away?
“But,” Gavril finished. “Then our secret would be out, and there would be hell to pay—you included. Should I tell you what will happen if the Krasnaya brigadiers find out you’re not their dead Pakhan’s precious daughter?”
Even when he had taken me from my apartment and forced me to wed him, I hadn’t been this scared before. There was no trace of the man who had laughed with me in bed days before or that had started on a crib for our child.
Here was the monster on the docks, and he had me cornered.
“So,” he insisted, his eyes dead and still. “Tell me that you have nothing more to complain about.”
“I have nothing more to complain about,” I said in a small voice, wanting nothing more than for him to leave me alone. I wanted to get as far as I could away from Gavril so that I could breathe again and process what had just happened between us.
Gavril finally pushed away from the chair, straightening his lean body. “This will be the last we speak of my business,” he started, glaring down at me. “You will not follow. You will not question.”
I opened my mouth, but he silenced me with his hand. “Perhaps I was too lenient with the command of my staff. You no longer have rule over them, Sveta. I will inform them of that change immediately.”
Oh God!
He was ripping away all the freedom that he had given me. He’d extended an olive branch and then cruelly yanked it back. Little by little, Gavril was tearing me apart, and there was nothing I could do about it.
“You will not ask to see me anywhere outside of this mansion without my explicit permission. Do you understand?”
I could only nod, my stomach churning, and Gavril gave me a long look before striding out of the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.
For a moment I stared at the closed door and forced myself to take slow breaths. What had happened? What the fuck had just happened?
Then the entire situation caught up with me and I started to gulp air, the room closing in. This could not be happening. I knew that he wouldn’t take it too well once the truth did come out, but I never thought he would be so cold, so brutal.
A sob escaped my chest and I pulled my legs up into the chair, to curl within the emotional pain that had just been caused.
Tears ran down my cheeks unchecked as I replayed his angry words, trying to find something that would tell me I was imagining the entire encounter. It had to be a nightmare.
But it wasn’t. He’d reminded me of the cruel terms of our arrangement: that from the beginning, I was only ever here to help him fulfill his plans.
All the softness that he’d shown was nothing more than another front to pull me to him, to make me compliant.
I hated that I had fallen for any of it. I had fallen in love with Gavril, but he had never intended to love me back.
He never would. He never could.
I swiped at the tears on my cheeks with my hands, my heart breaking all over again. If I was smart, I would throw myself off the balcony right now to escape it all.
I shook off the thought the moment it crossed my mind. Maybe if I wasn’t pregnant, it might have been the easy way out, but I couldn’t do something so heinous, so selfish just because my heart had been ripped out. The baby inside me didn’t deserve an untimely death. It was innocent, sweet, and—I wanted to believe—had been conceived during a time when there had been softness, gentleness even.
A time that had now become a distant memory.
I hated being scared of him. I hated that feeling again, with another man that I thought I had loved.
A brittle laugh escaped me. Love. That didn’t exist for me. Every time I thought I was close, the walls came crashing down.
I was incapable of having anyone reciprocate love.
I had never hurt as badly as I did right at this moment, and nothing was going to be the same again.
Not with my life. Not with Gavril, not with anything.