Page 71 of Emerald Malice

Then, as if by its own accord, my finger pulls the trigger.

With a little shoop noise, both pictures are sucked into the ether and transported to Andrey.

Goosebumps pimple my skin as I try frantically to reverse course and delete the pictures before he’s seen them. But just as my finger hovers over the first picture, Delivered changes to Read.

No going back now, is there?

I close the thread and put my phone face-down on the bathroom counter. Stripping off the black teddy proves to be an easier task than getting it on.

Once I’m back in respectable clothes, I join Mila and Leonty in the living room. Neither one seems to have even registered my absence.

I slip into an armchair just behind Leonty and wonder if, at this very moment, my phone is lighting up with texts from Andrey.

I purposefully avoid the bathroom for the next few hours. We play Uno, though “we” continues to be kind of a superfluous word, because neither of my two game-mates seem to be aware of my continued existence.

Only after Leonty and Mila have left the pool house do I allow myself to slink back into the bathroom to retrieve my phone.

I see a text notification on my lockscreen.

I take a deep breath and open it.

ANDREY: I won’t be coming over tonight.

24

ANDREY

I should be happy. It’s just past midnight and we’ve done twice the normal volume of sales.

Sure, a few small-time dealers tried to muscle in on my turf. And a few working girls slipped under the radar and into the club, prowling for clients. But both annoyances have been dealt with.

The quarterly numbers are high. The time is ripe for expansion and Ivan Obnizov, freshly mollified by his daughter’s marriage to my shit-heap of a brother, is ready to throw his support behind me.

Everything is going exactly according to plan. I ought to be celebrating. And I would be—were it not for the two little alerts that popped up on my screen an hour ago.

Two images from Natalia.

She’s never sent me pictures before, so naturally, I was curious. I even blocked out Shura’s extensive club report in order to open the thread and see what she’d sent me.

As it turns out, what she sent me was blue balls and a fucking mountain of distraction.

My initial reaction was surprise—I had no idea the woman had it in her. The lingerie is nothing short of scandalous.

Fuck me—what I wouldn’t give to spread her out right now and devour every inch of her body. Lick the desire off her silky skin and replace her sweat with mine.

I’ve spent the last hour trying to forget. But even when I’m not sneaking a peek at my phone, I’m imagining her waiting for me in the pool house, her sweet, pink pussy bared and glistening for me.

If that weren’t enough, Mila has been blowing me up with dutiful reports.

MILA: She plays the piano but she’s conflicted about it. There’s definitely some stuff in her past she’s not opening up about.

MILA: She loves caprese salad. And pink lemonade. And anything to do with cherries.

MILA: We’re getting along great but I get the feeling she’s lonely.

MILA: Really fucking lonely.

Really fucking lonely. If Mila is right and Natalia is choosing to channel her loneliness towards me, that is a problem. Much as I’d like to be, I can’t be her savior.

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