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I feel no panic that he’s bleeding so much. No stab of guilt. It’s as though I’m watching a stranger bleed on television. The person I’m most aware of is the man behind me, underneath my thighs, his breath warm against my temple, his arm solid around my waist. His body is the only steady thing in this entire kitchen, and I crave to lean into him.
That’s a terrible thought. I push it away before it can take root.
Zevran slowly draws his fingers out of my underwear and raises them to his lips. He sucks each one, just like he did after he went down on me, only this time he’s looking directly into Troy’s eyes.
“Sladkaya,” he murmurs against my ear, low enough that it travels straight through my whole body. “Sweet as ever.”
My cheeks burn hot. Troy is staring at me with a dawning horror as the pieces click together through his blinding pain. This is not just any man who’s tied him to a chair. This is a man who intimately knows his wife.
Zevran drops his chin onto my shoulder and holds me in full view of my husband as the minutes stretch.
“She’s not going to you,” he observes conversationally. “Don’t you think it’s interesting that you’re bleeding right before her eyes, and she’s not going to you?”
I should, shouldn’t I? The thought arrives with genuine confusion. I should be fighting to get to my husband, performing the role of the worried wife, doing what I’ve always done. Half-heartedly, I shift my weight forward, trying to slide off Zevran’s lap.
His arm tightens immediately, and he plucks the gun from my grip. “Ah-ah. It’s too late to pretend now, printsessa.”
The gun in his hand rests on his thigh, not pointing at anything in particular. The glint of the dark metal barrel in the corner of my eye is threat enough.
“He needs a doctor.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “He’s losing blood. We need to—”
“No.” Pleasant. Utterly unmoved. “We don’t.”
“He could die!”
“He won’t.” The arm around my waist doesn’t loosen a millimeter. “Not yet. You’ve been sitting here watching him bleed, and you haven’t moved an inch. Don’t perform concern you don’t feel.”
The shame his words bring is different from anything I’ve felt before. Not the shame of being caught doing something wrong, but the shame of being perceived with total, terrifying accuracy. He sees straight through me to the woman beneath, and the fact that I don’t give a damn about my bleeding husband.
Zevran smells the same as he did when he kissed me on that back road—expensive, clean, and dangerous—and his arm around me is the safest I’ve felt since I left him.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
Troy’s eyes widen. His mouth works behind the gag. I’m really not helping him.
“After you left me at that gas station,” Zevran begins, and I hear the lethal heat underneath the pleasant tone, “I had a very interesting conversation with Dragan. About you, Viktoriya.”
My stomach drops into a bottomless pit.
“Suddenly, all these little things that didn’t add up were adding up.” His lips brush my ear, and despite everything, I feel it right down to my toes. “Like how you didn’t want to come home. Most women I pull out of basements are desperate to get back to their families. You fought me every single step of the way.”
His gaze moves to Troy.
“Do you hear that? Your wife didn’t want to come home to you.”
Troy glares at both of us, the blood shining wetly on his chest.
“You shattered over a broken coffeepot worth about ten dollars,” Zevran continues, turning back to me. “You hid a broken wrist rather than make a fuss. You have your own hair. Your own nails. Your own teeth. Your own tits.” I feel his gaze drop to my neckline, and my skin prickles with intense awareness. “Rare for a wealthy man’s wife.”
His thumb traces a slow, heavy circle against my waist, and I feel it everywhere.
“But most telling of all is that you never once asked for my phone. Not to call your family or your darling, wealthy Bratva husband who was paying six figures to have you safely returned to him. No one.” There’s a razor-sharp edge to his voice when he continues. “And I was the idiot who didn’t clock it, because you were fighting me, biting me, attacking cops, and making me lose my fucking mind entirely.”
I hear the raw admission buried in the accusation: You made me lose my mind.
I lost my mind too. I’m back at that roadside, sitting on the hood of his car while he so tenderly cleaned and bandaged my scraped hand. I feel again his mouth on mine as he kissed me in the moonlight, his thumb careful of the bruise on my cheek, his mouth slow and certain.
In the dark on that back road, he was imagining a future with me that had nothing to do with the job. That was the moment I should have confessed everything.
