Page 19 of Vasily the Hammer

So she’s in my office.

I roll my eyes, trying to decide what trouble she’s gotten into. I was told that she was rescued with nothing on her person except a tank top and panties. She may have arrived without her memory or a single belonging, but according to the notes the medical staffprovided, it’s likely just a matter of time before it returns. What will happen then? A lot has changed in the past six years; she might happily con me out of any information that would help Tony.

I need to shower. I’m sooty. I’m sure I reek of smoke, but so much of it went up my nose I can’t smell anything.

But she might have already gotten her memory back and be raiding my office right now.

Benedetti said Tony was sending a mole in. It’s insane to think this thing with Ana was staged, but I’ve been accused of insanity once already today.

I storm off my private elevator with the intention of grabbing her and forcing her to empty whatever pockets she has and locking her up in the apartment until I can figure out what to do with her, but she’s sitting at my desk, looking as sunk and sad as ever, tiny in the chair built for a man twice her size.

Laid out before her is a collection of guns. My ghost guns. Four of them are operational; three are currently loaded. At least one has a bullet in the chamber. Despite the stern lectures I’ve given my heart, it catches at the thought she may have accidentally shot herself. I have to be cautious with her and protect my own self-interests. It is possible she’s Tony’s pawn, but I’d rather not return her to him in a casket if I can avoid it.

Yeah, don’t like that thought at all.

And I don’t like the fact that what seems to be the critical item on the desk isn’t the guns. It’s the box of condoms.

“Mind telling me what you’re doing in my office?” I ask gruffly, the gravel in my voice from the smoke inhalation doing most of the heavy lifting. If nothing else, now is the time for me to make it clear she’s not welcome in here, just in case her memories do come back.

Her scowl deepens, and that gives me a perverse joy. I was completely blindsided by her crumbling yesterday. I’m prepared for this.

“I’m trying to figure out who I am, and apparently I need to figure out who you are too,” she says with the most peevish tone, like I couldn’t just throw her over my leg and spank her for that bad attitude. She’s pouting, and with her make-up done and her lipstick a dark shade that’s somewhere in between red and purple, richer than I would have picked for her but highlighting her sinfully plush lips, I just want to give her something to pout about.

“I’m your husband,” I lie, but I can’t help my boasting tone. It’s not nearly so outlandish as it seems on the surface. We once had a fantasy of a life together, but that fantasy was of running off and leaving the organized crime world behind. What if I’d simply forced her to be a Bratva wife after Artyom was murdered and I could no longer leave?

It’s what Tony wanted. He’d have happily sold her to me for whatever favor it would curry. He probably would have rewritten the sale of his sister from a transaction to cover a debt into an arranged marriage. This would have been her life if I hadn’t sent her back in hopes that, if she could not find happiness, she could at least escape my family’s fate.

Wasn’t her biggest lamentation the fact that when her virginity was sold to me, her value went down and she would no longer get the wealthiest, most powerful husband possible? Well, here I am.

She reaches ahead, and I suppose that yes, she could grab one of the loaded guns and fire a single shot that would end me here and now in Los Angeles, California, but it’s not just my firm belief that I’m going to die in Flagstaff that has me unsurprised that she reaches for the box of condoms instead.

“Then why do you have these?” she asks.

“Because I enjoy practicing safe sex,” I drawl, approaching her then, preferring to have this conversation up close.

I do reconsider when she grabs the box in her fist and, for just a moment, looks as though she’s seriously contemplating chucking it at me. Not that I think I’d be hurt, but I’d rather not get pelted by a 6-pack of Trojans.

“You’re cheating on me,” she says as she crushes the box in her hand.

“That’s a bold assumption.”

“I went through your nightstand. There was lube but no condoms.”

I sit on the corner of my desk, the way Benedetti does when she’s flirting with me. I let Ana’s words hang in the air as I study her for effect. Am I trying to come up with an explanation? Yes. Am I going to do my best to make the pause seem deliberate, like I’m just playing a game with her? Yes. And as much as both first impressions of her have been clean-faced, six years ago with her still in a bathing suit from a morning at the pool and again at the Consummate headquarters, I do like how she’s done her makeup. Her complexion smoothed into a soft glow, her eyelids with a faint shimmer and a natural contour, her long lashes making her chocolate eyes gigantic, and those fuckable lips?

She might be in trouble.

“We don’t fuck in my bedroom,” I tell her.

“Then what are you doing with the lube in there?”

I hope my smirk comes off as intriguing and only a little asshole-ish as I make a universal gesture with my hand. I don’t bring women back to my penthouse, so yeah, thatisexactly whatthe lube is for.

She crinkles her nose. “So our sex life sucks. Cool.”

Ouch.

“No, baby,” I murmur, feeling my stride, for the first time realizing exactly what I want from her, what I’ve always wanted from her. Even the first time fucking her, with her blindfolded and her brother watching, with me high as fuck and pissed at the world because, despite everything that happened that day, there’s nothing in the world I find more revolting than a rapist, burying my cock in her put me in another plane of existence.

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