Page 43 of The Payback

It’s none of my fucking business. Elsa said she was mine for now, but that doesn’t mean she won’t return to her child’s father when this is all over. But I don’t want to let her go; I just want a piece of her. I want to keep her with me. To provide a safe and stable home for her and her daughter. Hell, if I could, I’d pump Elsa full of my cum until we added to our family. Because even though I’ve never met her child, I consider her mine to protect and mine to love. Even if it’s impossible.

Everyone in the Bratva insists sons are the goal but watching Elsa and her strength hiding under the surface... the idea takes hold. I run a hand over her stomach, imagining it round with our child. I think I’d like a daughter.

“She does not,” Elsa answers my earlier question about her daughter’s father. And instead of making me feel relieved she is free and unattached, it makes me rage inside. How could someone abandon them? “But she is safe with her godparents. If anything happens to me, there is no one on this planet I trust more.”

“Good,” I choke out. “That’s good.”

She looks towards the apartment’s interior, and I study her face in the moonlight. “Tell me your name.”

She smiles softly. “Ellie. Everyone calls me Ellie.”

“I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you.”I don’t want to call you what Nik calls you.

She studies my face, and after many moments of silence, she must decide I need this more than she needs to protect it. She swallows, her throat bobbing with the reflex.

“Eleanor.”

I close my eyes as it washes over me. “Eleanor,” I whisper, skating my lips along her bare skin, careful not to irritate her wound. “My Eleanor.”

“Dimitri, truly, you can’t slip up.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. No, Idefinitelyshouldn’t have told you.”

“Then why did you?” I ask, begging for her to admit to this—that this isn’t all one-sided.

She searches my eyes when I pull away, and her hand rests on my jaw, stroking the stubble growing along my chin. “I can’t seem to help myself with you, and that’s a shit position to be in.”

“And Nik?” I ask. Her jaw snaps shut so quickly her teeth click together. “I’m not imagining the spark there, am I?”

She shakes her head, focusing on the liquor on the table like I did earlier.

“I’m not exactly the sharing type, Eleanor.”

“Yeah, that much is obvious with all of yourmine, mine, minetalk,” she deadpans. “You didn’t seem opposed when he watched us in the living room.”

Her cheeks flush red, and she raises her good hand to one of them, touching the pinkened skin. My cock twitches under her, and she spins her head towards me when she feels it under her thigh.

“I didn’t say I was against a little exhibitionism. Just that I don’t share.” I shrug.

“It’s funny how you think you have a say in this,” she counters.

“You want Nik?” I ask incredulously.

“Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, it’s not your call to make.”

“Bullshit. It is when you’re wearing my ring and signing my surname.”

She chuckles. “We can always go back to the way it should have been. Without touch. Without intimacy. And you know as well as I do that I’ll give that surname right back when this is all over.”

She’s bluffing.

I study her face—the determined set of her jaw, the relaxed brow, and the set of her shoulders.

She’s not fucking bluffing.

She’d give me up. It would be easy for her to cut me from her skin and discard me with the rubbish.

A woman who is okay with being alone is a powerful woman. And I have a feeling if I don’t play my cards right while she’s here, she’ll walk away when this is all over, leaving Nik and me in the dust.

“Come on,” I say, nudging her from my lap. “Let’s go to bed before you do something you might regret.”

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