Page 44 of The Payback

She rolls her eyes but gets up. “I’m serious, Dimitri. Do not push me on these things. You do not own me, no matter whose surname I’m using. I will continue to play the part when needed, but when it’s the two of us, you will treat me with respect.”

Like a queen commanding her subjects, she looks down at me; the moon haloing her head and casting an ethereal glow around her.

With an infinitesimal nod, I agree, unable to deny her anything—but orgasms apparently, and we both know the time is coming when neither of us will hold back any longer. The whispered promise of that distant future grips my soul and takes root.

I take her offered hand and let her pull me up from the chair, my drink forgotten as she leads me to our bed.

She thinks she’s won this round, and maybe she’s ahead, but I’ll win this war if it’s the last fucking thing I do. Because while this life will end as I step away from it, I need to start thinking about my afterlife. My rebirth.

And more than anything, I want Eleanor in that heaven I’m chasing.

She strips out of her underthings and climbs into her side of the bed. I get naked on my side and slip under the covers with her. I take my book as she looks at her phone, scrolling through a few videos of her daughter that someone sent her. She doesn’t hide her from me the way she did the first night here now that I know about her.

“How is she doing?” I ask.

Eleanor smiles wistfully at the phone. “Good. She’s biting one of her godfathers relentlessly, but she’s teething. It should be better in about a week.”

“One of her godfathers? How many does she have?”

“Four,” Eleanor answers without a thought. “And they’d all die for her. She’s safe,” she reassures me when I prop myself up on my elbows.

“That’s a relief,” I say, genuinely meaning it. Because if someone is coming after me the way they did with my father, the last thing I want is any blowback on Eleanor or that sweetheart on her phone.

“What’s her name?” I ask, hoping for one more truth tonight.

“Bellatrix,” she answers with a smile. She turns her head in my direction, rolling it along the pillow and snuggling in deeper. Around a yawn, she asks, “Are you ever going to give me back the equipment from the other day?”

The warehouse. The secret footage that will send all of this careening off a cliff.

“Tomorrow, my Sabre. Let us face the darkness together tomorrow.”

CHAPTERSEVENTEEN

Eleanor

Dimitri,the usually unaffected and stoic man, sits next to me, and there’s the slightest lifting of his heel as if he’s willing his knee not to bounce up and down as he sits in his desk chair.

“Jesus, Dimitri, how bad is the footage?” I ask. And to think, we’d woken up this morning wrapped around each other, lazing in the streaming sunshine. I’d half forgotten I was working as he murmured my name—myrealname—and treated me to a massage, always heedful of the bullet graze on my arm. It was a picture-perfect morning, and I wanted it to last.

Slowly, he turns his head towards me, and his gaze bores into mine, not letting go for a second as he goes from profile view to full-frontal, assaulting me with his icy eyes—not that full-frontal. I havegotto stop thinking about his cock.

His vulnerability last night was unexpected, and I dreamt about it all night. That brief moment of letting his guard down and showing me who he was underneath was just that... a fleeting glimpse of someone he wishes he could be but isn’t. And he might never be. Not yet, anyway. I’ve never known someone so wrapped up in presenting themselves a certain way that they thoroughly hide who they are.

Nik left for the gym downstairs hours ago, so there’s no need to put on a show. Yet, even now, as we sit alone in his office, he’s wearing a suit and a white button-up shirt.

The collar is undone so I can peek at the delicious strip of skin leading to his chest. The slightest expanse of skin and my body reacts, like he’s teasing a present right under my nose. I’m winning the gold medal for restraint by not leaning over and tasting every inch of his exposed body with my tongue. This must be what the Victorians felt when they glimpsed someone’s ankle.

“Yes. It is that bad,” Dimitri answers, reminding me of what we were discussing before I got a teensy bit distracted.

With a few clicks of his mouse, he opens the footage and audio from the shipment day he’s been so cagey about.

He fast-forwards through the drive to the warehouse on the docks, letting it return to normal speed as the town car slows to a stop. He never turns towards Nik, but I know those tattooed hands on the monitor’s edge. I stared at them, studying them in minute detail, when he was bandaging my arm, wondering when and why he got them.

A sense of dread settles low in my belly, and I lean forward on the chair I dragged over, letting my elbows rest on the big desk before me and wincing at the pain as the movement tugs on the stitches of my upper arm. It isn’t until Dimitri reaches over and plucks my bottom lip from between my teeth that I realise I’ve been gnawing on it. He swipes it, pulling away a smear of blood on the pad of his thumb.

I try not to notice as he lifts the digit to his lips and sucks the red off. Okay, that’s a lie. I notice the fuck out of it, but I know what he’s doing. He’s trying to lighten the mood. Or, at the very least, turn it sexual.

“We don’t have to watch this,” he murmurs. “You can just get it to whoever you need to, and we can go upstairs. Your arm needs rebandaging anyway, right?”

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