Page 40 of Koroleva

I met up with Aleksa to accompany me. I wanted to see up close the eyes of the person whom Dante's men had brought there.

I cracked my knuckles; the body was tied hand and foot in the only chair set up in the two-by-two cell. The gag in their mouth prevented them from speaking, though not from making sounds.

They hadn't touched her too much. A few cuts, a bruise under the right eye, and the marks of fingers from having shaken her on the skin of her forearms.

Xia Wang might seem inconsequential, a Chinese woman who would have gone unnoticed in a world too Western to distinguish her from many other Asian women.

She had straight, black hair cut to shoulder length and an unremarkable figure. However, it was said that she had a prodigious mind, that Cheng didn't make a move without her oversight because she could concoct thousands of hypotheses about what could go wrong in operations.

Xia Wang was staring at us intently without moving a muscle.

I offered her a tight smile.

"Good morning, Miss Wang. I hope the room is to your liking." I signaled Aleksa to remove the gag. She continued to fix her gaze on me, without making a single sound. "My guys have told me that you have some information I need. Your boss, about three days ago, mistook my warehouse and took sixteen tons of snow powder. I know it was probably a miscalculation, a silly one, but as you understand, I want to recover what's mine." Nothing, no sound. "Aleksa, I think Miss Wang's mouth is dry."

My man grabbed the woman's hair, twisted it around his wrist, pulled it, and used the space between her lips to pour a liter and a half of water down her throat.

The Chinese woman tried to squirm before choking. I stopped my man from letting that happen.

"Better? Surely that clears your thoughts." She looked at me with disdain. I knew she spoke my language, so if she wasn't answering, it was because she didn't want to, not because she couldn't understand me. "I'm waiting." I tapped my fingers impatiently on my beard.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." I opened my eyes, surprised.

"Really? What a pity, because if you don't know, you're never going to leave this hole. Maybe you'd prefer to live here rather than in your comfortable apartment with views in Puerto Banús." I looked at my man. "Aleksa, Miss Wang still seems to be having brain fog, help her clear it up. I'll be back in a few hours to see if her thoughts have finally cleared." I turned my gaze back to our guest. "Enjoy our hospitality, Miss Wang."

?????

Romeo, in the kitchen.

I watched my wife drink her coffee.

It was strange. I knew many things about her thanks to Yuri and the impression I had formed from her behavior the night before our wedding and yesterday. But this morning, with just a couple of gestures, she made me wonder if there was a part of her reserved for a few privileged ones. Perhaps, circumstances had made Nikita harden even more than necessary.

My phone rang. It was Aleksa; so far, he had not managed to make Wang confess, and time was running out. Cheng wouldn't sit still with his second-in-command missing. It would only be a matter of hours before he realized that Wang wasn't where she was supposed to be and started digging. We needed to know the position of the coke.

I stepped away from the room, so engrossed in talking with Aleksa that I didn’t notice Nikita had followed me and was panting at the side of the staircase when I hung up.

Her voice caught me by surprise.

"Trouble in paradise?" I turned around to find her there. Her makeup-free version, without artifice, awakened a tremendous appetite in me.

"I'm not in the mood for your digs."

"I'm too used to my voice sounding cynical. I didn't mean for it to sound mocking. Let me try again. Can I help you? I gathered you need someone to talk, and I'm very good at getting others to confess things."

"It's not a man," I confessed, annoyed. She curled her lips.

"Do you really think that limits me?" I ran my hands through my hair, unable to hide my discomfort.

"You have no idea what's going on," I muttered under my breath.

"That's true, but that doesn't mean I can't help you."

"And why would you want to?" She turned that curl of her lips into a sly smile.

She closed the distance between us, her strap dress swaying over her thighs, her breasts unrestrained, their nipples outlined under the thin fabric. She was even more irresistible than last night. Her index finger traced across my torso without breaking eye contact.

"Because you're my husband, and because we've agreed to a verbal truce. Believe it or not, I'm a woman of my word. Let me show you what I can bring to our union."

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