Page 32 of Slipping into the Dark Side

“Please. As soon as I told you what you wanted to hear, you gave yourself to me. All this cock teasing finally paid off, didn’t it?”

She scoffed. “You give me too much credit. I was relieved, yes, that I could stay with Fedor and still be with you, but don’t think for one moment any of this was planned. You make me the villain when you are the bastard here.”

“Am I?”

“There is too much darkness in you. Like a Black hole. Any light is sucked away. But I will not be caught in your gravity.”

“I believe you already are.”

Tatianna snatched up her ripped clothes and slipped on heels. All the while, she felt his gaze as if he wanted to see the tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t about to let him see one single weakness in her. With a pleasant smile and sparkling eyes, she met his gaze. “It was a wonderful evening, Mr. Morozov.”

His eyes darkened, but she continued to smile, unbreakable, like indestructible glass.

“Thank you for everything. I learned so much.”

Yakov got to his feet as she backed out. He got to the door just as she shut it, and he slammed his fist against it. He didn’t know if her pain was real. How could he? Tatianna was as talented as he was. Did she feel anything? Could a woman be so empty? How dare she act like there was no plan. Tatianna was a chess player. She knew what she was doing.

Yakov cursed. There was a ridiculous amount of pain in his chest, and he wanted to dig it out with a spoon.

Chapter fifteen

Whose fault is it?

Tatianna sat in the chair in front of her father’s desk. Her hair was pinned in a messy bun, and she wore the longest and biggest set of pajamas she could find to help comfort her broken heart. She hugged her legs and fought back tears. No matter how she sat, there was no easing the ache between her legs or the pain in her soul.

Nevsky had his hands on his desk, leaning over the videotape and the letter. Since it was delivered, he had done nothing but stare at it. Tatianna couldn’t handle the humiliation. It was suffocating, but she had to face the aftermath of her actions.

“Was it worth it?” Nevsky finally whispered. He lifted his gaze toward her, but the sight of her pissed him off he flung everything off his desk, making her jump. He rounded thecorner and raised his hand to smack her, but Yakov’s warning still played in the back of his mind. Instead, he put a finger in her face. “Stop your fucking tears. Think I don’t know you by now, Tati? Your brother withered away in the room next to you, and you never cried once for him. Not fucking once.”

Tatianna hardened and planted her feet on the floor. She looked up into his face with a sneer on her lips. Her father was so sure of his statement because he didn’t know the nights she didn’t sleep or the food she didn’t eat, but why not just call her a cold bitch? Yakov certainly thought so. All these men thought emotions ruled women, which made it so easy to manipulate them. They set themselves up with their primitive thinking.

“It was worth it,” she bit because she knew he wanted to hear it. But it hadn’t been by a long shot. She was devastated and disgusted with herself, but why not become the whore her father’s believed she was?

Nevsky reached behind him, snatched the lamp off his desk, and threw it across the room. It knocked down the photo of her mother, and the glass cracked and shattered on the wood floor. He was like a gorilla having a temper tantrum. It made him appear so weak.

“You want to keep throwing things, Papa? Or do you want to get back at him?”

He flinched to attack her, a fist now instead, but he yanked himself away at the last moment. “I don’t want to hear from you again. I don’t want to know you exist. I would kick you out, but I can’t, can I? Because you whored yourself to the fucking devil.” Nevsky collapsed in his chair. “Get out.”

Tatianna shoved her way through her siblings. She cursed them for being around, for listening to her shame. None of them would understand what she was going through. They were young and inexperienced, and their innocence annoyed her. She slammed the door to her room, and though she wanted to throwherself down in her bed and cry, she pulled out a folder from under her mattress and slapped it on the desk. In it were dozens of ideas, dozens of terrible thoughts over the years when she wanted to get vengeance on her father for betraying her mother, vengeance on friends that would whisper behind her back, vengeance on a god that stole her siblings.

Tatianna was not going to be steamrolled into submission. She was going to fight back. Yakov picked the wrong woman to mistreat.

“So you went through with it?” Boris sat with his legs thrown over the armrest of the wingback chair, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, nearly falling asleep. He had just come from an all-night bender and looked like death and smelled like it, Yakov remarked.

“I told you I would,” Yakov replied with a deep sigh, staring at the papers, trying to work, but his eyes were heavy. Sleep was calling, but his dreams as of late were aggravating, full of a woman he hated and a family he was trying to destroy.

“You fucked it up.”

“And how did I do that?” he vaguely wondered, concentrating on the words on the paper with no avail. Boris was like a mosquito, buzzing in his ear, but there was no bug spray to get rid of him.

“You fell for her.”

The words disgusted him.

“You ever think if our fathers weren’t the crazy psychos that they were, we would have been stand-up citizens?”

Yakov gave up, dropping the paper and leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed. There was rarely a time that Yakov thought of his father. He knew long ago that if he didn’t shut out all the demons, he’d become a waste of space or kill himself. He learned to accept the bad parts of himself and embrace them. It was the only way to get Yaroslav’s attention, by being more evil than he was.

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