Gilded Cage: A Russian Mafia Romance (Kovalyov Bratva Book 1) by Nicole Fox (free novel 24 .txt) 📗

He lifts his hand and dangles a small silver key in the air. “This is my home,” he drawls. “In case you forgot.”

“Don’t remind me. I’d like to go back to my home now, please.”

I don’t actually want that, but now is not the time to get into specifics. I’ll start with getting away from here and from him. Then I’ll figure out where to go from there.

“Your home is a pile of rubble and ash,” he says coolly.

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine, directly speaking. But your father brought that on himself.”

“Oh?” I say with an arched eyebrow. “Did I bring this on myself?”

Artem doesn’t answer that question. He just uncrosses and recross his leg, still playing with that silver key the whole time.

He doesn’t look away from me, either.

“Did you sleep well?” he asks. His voice is so infuriatingly casual.

“Do you even care?”

He just shrugs.

I sit down on the edge of the bed, as far from him as I can manage.

“They were innocent, you know,” I say, breaking the tenuous silence.

He raises his eyebrows. “Am I supposed to know who you’re talking about?”

“The people you killed,” I tell him. “Armando Ayala, Silvio Barrera, Ronaldo—"

“Listing names will not make me care about them,” he interrupts. “They were collateral damage. It happens in this business.”

I shake my head. “You’re a monster.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you.”

He is so calm that it rattles me.

And then I realize why.

I was never allowed to mouth off or disobey Papa without facing consequences. My whole life, I’d been conditioned to expect pain for the slightest infraction.

I assumed that would happen with Artem, too. He is every bit as dangerous as Papa was. Maybe more so.

Apparently, though, it’s a different kind of dangerous.

I felt it once before. Saw it with my own eyes, actually. He’d utterly destroyed the man at The Siren who tried to rape me.

Back then, his violence saved me.

Now, it’s about to consume me.

“Stop thinking so much,” he says, interrupting my thoughts. “You’ll give yourself a headache.”

“You didn’t have to kill the house staff,” I continue, refusing to let him derail my accusation. “They were innocent.”

His eyes are cutting. “They were working for a cartel don. None of them were innocent. You can bet they all had a few skeletons in their closet.”

“And that means they deserved to die?”

“Sometimes, it’s not personal.”

“Right. They were just the loose ends you needed to tie up,” I mock in disgust.

“That’s a lot of judgement coming from the daughter of a man who did horrendous things,” he shoots back.

I try not to, but I can’t stop the flinch from escaping me. “I can’t help who my father was,” I reply softly. “I’m not delusional though, I know he was a monster, too. That’s how I can tell you’re the same.”

I glare at him, but he meets my gaze with absolutely zero remorse.

He stands suddenly. I flinch back, even though he’s several feet away from me.

He rounds the bed, almost close enough to reach out and touch. But he doesn’t stop near me. He keeps going past where I’m seated on the mattress and walks to the window.

He leans against it and crosses his arms over his chest. A beautiful silhouette of a man against the Los Angeles skyline.

I can almost feel that rock-hard chest press against me, my breathing coming in fast, his lips on my neck, his hands dancing up my thigh—

Stop it, Esme. There’s no point reliving it. That was all just a lie. A deception. A mistake.

But I can’t stop the question from sneaking out of my lips like a thief in the night. “Was I a target all this time?”

“What?” he asks. His tone is genuinely puzzled.

“Four months ago,” I say. “In The Siren. Was I just a mark?”

He doesn’t look at me. He’s not the most expressive of men, but even from here, I can see something warring in his face. Emotions I can’t name or describe.

“You were… a mistake,” he says at last.

Can he be saying what I think he’s saying? That he really didn’t know who I was?

I frown, wondering if I should believe him or not. It seems too convenient to have been just a coincidence.

“A mistake. Yeah. It was. That night should never have happened,” I say.

I have to fight to suppress the urge to touch my stomach. Where Artem’s baby is growing, living.

“That we can agree on,” he nods.

It shouldn’t hurt me to hear him say that. After all, I was the one who said it first.

But my chest constricts a little anyway when he agrees with me.

All I can do is hope that he doesn’t see the hurt on my face.

“I know I’m just an object in this world,” I say softly. I don’t dare look at him. I keep my eyes on my hands in my lap. “I know I don’t mean a thing to you, that I’m just a tool in a big game. And once you’ve got what you want from me, you’ll discard me. I’ll be nothing more than the day’s collateral damage. But I won’t be used. I won’t. I just won’t.”

I half-expect him to laugh at my silly little speech. To mock me, tell me I don’t have a choice in the matter.

But he doesn’t.

He just stares out the window and takes in my words. The silence makes me aware of other things. His scent. His breathing.

Then he turns and locks eyes with me. He takes two long strides and then he’s right there, standing in front of me and looking down at my face.

It’s like the night in The Siren, when he set me on the counter. The moment before everything exploded in hot passion.

The air between is charged. The atmosphere prickly with heat.

It’s the contradiction that’s tearing my brain in two. These opposite but equal memories of Artem.

The night in the club.

The night in my father’s home.

He’s a savior.

He’s a killer.

He’s a hero.

He’s a beast.

I hate him and yet I’m fascinated to him, drawn to him,