Page 170 of Deceitful Vows

She had been rejected by one.

Her devastation mimicked the pain that crossed her face anytime our mother told us we were unworthy of anything more than an arranged marriage. She was hurting, and I witnessed our mother deepening her wounds with a ton of unkind words only feet from Andrik’s room when Konstantine hit play on the tablet.

Her dressing-down proved that Andrik didn’t touch Aleena. He merely refused to let her leave his room until the people watching his every move believed he had.

Learning that is another reason I am showering earlier tonight than normal. It is hard to remember your objectives when you’re being swamped by euphoria.

“Where the hell is my phone?” I murmur to myself when my search of the drawers near the door comes up empty. I swear I left it there before showering, but it is nowhere to be found in any region of my room.

My brows furrow when I realize my phone isn’t the only item missing. The laptop I used to hack into Andrik’s home security system is also gone, and so are the instructions I jotted down when Maksim’s hacker, Easton, showed me how to override the firewall of the home server. It was a simple infiltration since no one expects to be hacked from inside their dwelling.

Konstantine made out that Andrik appreciated my help, so why would he confiscate my belongings as if I am a child?

The theories in my head piss me off.

So much so, I am done playing nice.

After releasing a big breath, suffocating the scream I am desperate to release, I charge out of my room and make a beeline for the west wing as if I am wearing more than a towel. I can’t confidently declare that Andrik demanded I sleep in the east wing because it was the furthest from his bedroom, but my hunches are usually accurate, so I run with it.

He wants distance between us. Lots of it, and I will give it to him—afterI’ve given him a piece of my mind.

“Andrik?” I call out while trampling over a pricy hallway runner and veering past paintings by world-renowned artists.

Andrik’s level of wealth reveals why my mother was so eager for Aleena to sink her hooks into him, and why her ruse seems to have started years earlier than Andrik realized. An average man would struggle to dream of this type of net worth. Yet Andrik achieved it by his thirty-fifth birthday. It almost makes me proud of him until I remember that I am meant to be angry.

“Andrik!” I shout again while opening door after door after door.

I stop dead in my tracks at the last door on the left when my senses tingle. They caution me to slow my roll. I don’t listen. I never do. It is a bad trait of being impulsively stubborn.

After another big exhale, I push open the door with force and storm inside. “I want my belongings back.Now!They’re not mine, and Maksim won’t take kindly to you confiscating his things.”

As my eyes shoot around a bedroom as manly furnished as the room I saw Aleena kneeling in, I swallow down the bile burning my throat. Nothing happened between them, so that isn’t the cause of the bitterness surging from my stomach to my throat. It is the dozens of photos spread across Andrik’s bed.

Why does he have multiple images of my childhood nanny?

I step closer and gasp.

Stasy isn’t the only person featured in the exposé of my family’s secrets. Zakhar is there too.

“Oh, Mother, what did you do?” I murmur to myself when I notice the similarities between Zakhar and Stasy. She looks just how Zakhar said. Me but twenty-plus years older.

Wet hair slides against my back when I jackknife to the left. A noise sounds from the bathroom. It isn’t the creak of old waterpipes. It sounds like a man in pain—or ecstasy.

Too curious for my own good, and somewhat a sucker for punishment, I step closer to the bathroom.

Trickling water sounds louder the further I walk, lengthening my strides.

I’ve never been more ashamed of my body’s needs when the quickest glance through a crack in the door has my clit beating out a mariachi tune.

A trillion theories roll through my head, though they seem inconsequential compared to the visual of Andrik in the shower, stroking his cock.

The heavy stream of water pumping onto the glass partition means not a single speckle of the awe-inspiring visual is hidden from my sight. I can see every ridge of his cock. Every throb of the vein feeding his fantastic manhood. I can even see the droplet of pre-cum his precise pumps cause to the end of his cut penis.

I should look away, but no matter how hard my brain screams at me to do precisely that, I can’t. I drink in the way his manly hand doesn’t deter from the size of his cock, and how his lips part more with every strangled pump.

I watch the frustration that crosses his face when he takes his anger out on his cock, and with that, learn that even the most unethical scene can be the most beautiful.

When my eyes lower to the wide girth of his cock pumping in and out of his fist, my thighs press. He must be close to finding release. I’m on the verge of climax, and I am only watching. I can’t feel the way his cock flexes when he balances his free hand on the tiled wall above his head before he flutters his eyes closed, or feel the smoothness of the pre-cum he drags down his shaft with his thumb, but nothing weakens the wave building low in my stomach.

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