Page 79 of Broken Sins (Volkov Bratva 3)

“Maybe you should get some new books then.”

“Maybe,” he agrees, looking longingly into the distance. “Maybe.”

An uncomfortable silence follows. I take another sip of the wine and realize we’ve passed it back and forth so many times that it’s just about empty now. I close my eyes and feel the warm rush of tipsiness. When I open them again, Mateo is looking at me strangely.

“What?” I ask.

He opens his mouth to speak then reconsiders. “Perhaps not.”

“What is it?” I repeat. I push his knee and am surprised when he flinches like I shocked him. “Tell me.”

He twiddles his thumbs in his lap, diverting his gaze to look anywhere but at me.

“Are you really gonna clam up all of a sudden? This is the most words you’ve said to me in, like, however long I’ve been here, and—”

“Eleven days, three hours, and thirty-seven minutes,” he says quietly, as much to himself as to me.

I blink. “Is there a countdown clock I’m not aware of or something?” I demand sarcastically.

But he doesn’t laugh this time. “There’s a countdown clock for all of us,” he whispers.

“What the hell does that mean?”

He looks up at me. “It means that I don’t think any of us are going to make it out of this one alive, Milaya.”

It feels like someone sucked the air out of the night. The owls winging past overhead settle down; the wind shushing through the trees stills. All there is in the world is Mateo’s murky green eyes and thick, furrowed brows. I feel myself moving closer to him on the steps. Before I even realize what’s happening, I’m resting my head on his shoulder and cradling his hand between mine. He flinches again, but I don’t let go.

I don’t know what crazy impulse is driving my decision-making. It would be easy to blame it on the wine, but at most, all the alcohol has done is loosen my hold on the urges that have been brewing in me for eleven days, three hours, and thirty-seven minutes now. It’s a knotted tangle of twin dueling urges, but I think I’m finally beginning to make sense of them, sort of. There’s the obvious parts—the burning physical attraction for each of the brothers pitted against my hatred for what they’ve done to me. Then there’s the underlying part that’s harder to suss out: how much I want them to suffer for their sins, compared to how much I want to take away the pain that’s eating each of them alive. That last part is what makes me touch Mateo and hold his hand in mine, even when it’s so clear that he is fighting his desire to let me do that.

When I touch him, I feel like I’m siphoning away some of the sadness. I feel like he’s finally drawing the kind of deep breath he’s waited years to take—maybe even his whole life. I feel like I’m doing something that only I can do. I don’t know how or why—I just know that it feels like what I was meant to do. What I was brought here for.

“We shouldn’t,” he whispers. “Ishouldn’t.”

“I don’t think there are rules anymore,” I reply just as softly.

“No,” he agrees finally. “No, I don’t think there are, either.”

We sit like that for a little while. Maybe minutes, maybe an hour; I’m not sure. Neither of us says anything, and yet it seems so obvious to me that this is the most essential act of healing that I’ve ever been a part of. Dante needed to be brought to the very edge of life and death before he could draw in that deep breath. Leo needed to be brought face-to-face with the river of desire coursing through him.

Mateo, it turns out, needed to be forced to sit in a garden and breathe. To get out of his head and into the world around him. My cheek on his shoulder, my fingers woven through his—that’s what tethering him to the here and now. That’s what’s important.

Eventually, the moment passes, though neither of us acknowledges it. I sit up and eye the empty bottle at our feet. “I want some more wine,” I say suddenly.

Like earlier in the hallway, when he asked if I wanted to join him for a drink, there’s a separate question underlying what I just said. I know by the flash of recognition in his eye that Mateo heard it too. So when he stands up and offers his hand to help me to my feet and I feel the first surge of heat between my legs, it’s clear to both of us what will happen next.

He doesn’t look at me as he leads me back up the path to the house. He doesn’t look at me as we step back into the cool interior of the castle, down a long hallway, to a winding staircase I’ve never seen before. He doesn’t look at me as he unlocks a thick, steel-reinforced door to reveal a sprawling wine cellar, then ushers me inward and steps behind me as I gaze up at a huge rack of hundreds of dusty bottles that are no doubt worth half the GDP of Jamaica.

And because he doesn’t look at me, I am not ready when I feel his lips press against the base of my throat and his arm wraps around my waist from behind. The heat of his kiss is a delicious contrast against the cool, musty air of the wine cellar.

“Mateo …” I gasp.

“Shh,” he tells me. “Don’t say a word. You’ll break the spell.”

He’s right. There’s a fragile tension in the air that might shatter irretrievably if I say anything. But it takes all my willpower not to moan into the rafters when his fingers find the button of my jean shorts and pop it open before sliding past my sheer panties and spreading me wide open. I rest a hand on the shelf in front of my and let my head sag forward. Mateo kisses down my spine. He tugs my jeans down to my ankles and I gasp again as the cold rushes between my thighs.

He doesn’t make me wait long before he frees himself and thrusts into me. It’s a good thing I am already soaking wet, because he is girthy and rock-hard. He goes slow at first, but when I reach back to grab his hip and pull him slamming harder into me, he picks up the tempo, faster and faster, until the vibrations running through me cause the bottles to rattle on the shelf to which I’m clinging for leverage. He clamps down on my shoulder with his teeth and presses his torso against my back as he thrusts, grunting with each effort.

I’m full to bursting with him. The smell of my sweat, his spicy cologne, and the acrid musk of the wine cellar all combine in my nose like an aphrodisiac, so that when his hand swipes down to find my clit and rub urgently on it, it doesn’t take long before I come explosively. I tighten my grip on the shelf as the orgasm rockets through me, every muscle fiber squeezing hard while the waves pass again and again.

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