Page 73 of Ivory Ashes

Pyotr walks around to help me out once we pull up to Cerberus Industries, but I’m already out of the car and wrenching open the glass double doors by my damn self.

Jackie waves and says something nice about my sweater, but I’m too angry to engage in small talk today. My heels click down the tile hallway towards Mikhail’s office like a war drum. When I reach his office, the only warning of my arrival is when the door bangs off the interior office wall.

“We need to talk,” I bark.

Of course, Mikhail doesn’t flinch.

He doesn’t even look up, actually. He’s signing some contract—probably his NDA with Satan. I swear not to tell anyone you inhabit my body for your evil bidding eighty percent of the time in exchange for dangerously good looks and more money than any human has a right to.

Whatever it is for, I swipe it off his desk with a violent sweep of my arm.

“I said we need to talk,” I repeat icily. “It’s important.”

Mikhail clicks his pen, lays it perfectly parallel to the edge of his desk, and finally looks up at me. “What do you need, Viviana?”

“From you? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I never needed anything from you.”

“Is that why you came in here today? To tell me you don’t need anything?” His eyes slide down and back up my body slowly. “Or is there something else?”

His old words ring in an obnoxiously horny part of my brain. You know I like what I see. I’ve never denied that.

The need twisting low in my gut despite everything this man has done to me and my son only fuels my anger. It’s gasoline to my righteous rage.

“I don’t need a damn thing from you. Your son, however, was crying on your closet floor this morning because he’s scared you’re leaving him again.”

Mikhail’s eyes darken. “I never left him. You took him away. I’m sure you cleared that up with him.”

“You’ve been in his life for less than a week and you’re already disappointing him. If you want to make me feel bad about keeping him from you, being a halfway decent father would do the trick. Right now, you’re proving me right.”

Anger bubbles just under his surface. I feel it like an electric charge in the air. But Mikhail’s face stays calm. Impassive. Like it’s carved out of a goddamn glacier with an avoidant attachment style and repressive emotional tendencies. “The kid was crying because he missed me. Sounds like he thinks I’m a little more than ‘halfway decent.’”

I gasp. “You cannot be serious. Are you trying to spin him crying into a good thing?”

“I never cried when my father wasn’t around and that definitely wasn’t a good thing. You know what I think?”

“That the world revolves around you?” I guess. “Yeah, you’ve made that painfully obvious.”

He continues on like I didn’t say anything. “I don’t think you’re here because Dante misses me. I think you’re here because you miss me.”

“That is not true!”

It’s not entirely true, anyway.

If this was just about what happened between us the other night, I’d carry on in silence. I would fight back by responding to his work texts with increasingly aggressive punctuation until he was forced to clear the air.

“Dante is the reason I’m standing here. Dante is the reason I agreed to marry you in the first place. Dante is the only reason you and I are in the same room right now.”

“What about when you spread your legs for me and begged me to come inside you?”

In the silence that follows, I could hear a pin drop from a mile away.

Mikhail’s face is unreadable. Anyone walking by probably thinks we’re discussing schedules and upcoming meetings. But, oh boy, if they could hear… HR would have a field day with this conversation—with our entire relationship, actually.

Though the thought of Judith with the beehive hairdo from the nineteenth floor telling Mikhail what he can and can’t do almost makes me laugh.

I hitch in a breath to try to respond, but Mikhail charges on ahead.

“Dante didn’t exist yet, so I know that wasn’t about him. Is it possible, Viviana, that you did want something from me that night?” His voice lowers, smoothing over my skin like velvet. “Do you still want it?”

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