Page 127 of Gilded Cage (Kovalyov Bratva 1)

Or to finally start giving me answers. The truth I can handle. The truth I deserve.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “I would have killed him like I killed your father.”

“Or maybe he would have killed you.”

“Is that what you dream of at night when you get into bed?” he demands. “Do you want to see me dead?”

I suck in my breath. “That’s not what I said.”

“It was implied.”

I get up suddenly and brush the sand off my legs. Then I look down at Artem where he sits hunched over on the white beach.

“I’m not like you,” I hiss at him. “I don’t wish death on anyone. Even people who may deserve it.”

Then I turn away from him and start walking down the beach, my feet displacing little tufts of sand with every step.

I hear motion behind me, but I don’t look back.

Until, a second later, Artem seizes my arm and whirls me around.

I spin fast and stumble into his chest, but the contact just pisses me off further, so I place my hands on his torso and shove him away from me as hard as I can.

“Don’t touch me!”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he murmurs.

“Bullshit,” I retort, and I hate that my voice trembles as if I’m close to tears. “Everything you do is to upset me. You’re addicted to your fucking power games.”

“Esme—”

“No!” I scream, trying to shake off his hand. “I wish that you’d just leave me alone!”

“Do you?”

The question slices through the air between us and lingers there.

I stare at him, forehead wrinkled in confusion. “I… what the hell does that mean?”

“It means that I can see through your tough façade, Esme Kovalyov,” he says, deliberately using the name I now bear as his wife. “You want to hate me, but you don’t. You can’t.”

I swallow hard. He struck a nerve. I should go. Should turn my back on this son of a bitch for good.

“I…”

My words break off in a whimper. The sound of my own grief, my rage, my despair, my desperation… it all reverberates inside me like a dull echo.

I feel so powerless. More so than ever.

I can’t even fight back against my own emotions.

I raise my eyes, searching Artem’s face like there are answers written there. But all I can see is confusion.

“It was that night at The Siren,” I whisper. “That night… it messed with my head. It’s still messing with my head. I thought you were someone different.”

“You thought I was your knight in shining armor,” he guesses correctly. “But it turned out I was just another monster.”

I cover my face with both hands for a moment. He twitches forward like he wants to peel them away. Before he can, however, I remove them myself and fix him with a gaze that’s equal parts desperate and defiant.

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