Page 41 of His Disobedient Bride

Mary rushes into my arms, then she’s throwing herself around my neck, her mouth on my skin.

“Your arm!” she cries.

“It’s all right,” I say. “It’s over now.”

“You kept me safe,” she breathes against my ear, and I can feel my cock hardening even as his blood dries on my arm.

I bring her mouth up to mine, my hand firm on her chin.

Who would have thought the sweetest woman in the world would be the reason I rediscovered my own savagery?

* * *

Andrei does not even say anything when he comes striding out to inspect the body of Oleg, just barks out a curt order for his body to be cleaned up. I see him nod at Mary. I’ve spoken his language by killing for my wife. He will see Mary as one of the family to be protected now.

Grigoriy is there, too, and I can feel my brother’s blue eyes on me, his tanned hand stroking his salt-and-pepper beard curiously. I can feel something warm, almost like he wants to smile.

My arm has been bandaged up with Mary’s bandana. She wouldn’t pass a nursing class with it, but it doesn’t matter. A little scrape like that isn’t going to kill me.

“I think I have been letting you do most of the work for too long,” I tell my brother. “I am sorry for that. I have taken the rewards and not done the work. Because you, Grigoriy, are too loyal not to share. But it has not been fair. I am going to pull my weight now.”

My brother smiles widely then, the lines on his tanned face crinkling up with pleasure. “My brother, I will be happy to have your help,” he says as we reach the front door. “Marriage suits you.”

I look up to see some of our men taking Ivan Ivanovich down to the basement. He already looks like he tried not to give up the names of the two spies.

But he failed, of course. Anyone going up against the Bratva Angel crumbles eventually under that remorseless viciousness and cruelty.

I expect Andrei to go down to the basement with him, but he doesn’t. I see his long upright figure stride down the hall to the safe room. He unlocks the door with a few taps of his fingers and I hear Cerise’s angry tone.

“Get the fuck out of here!” she shouts. “I don’t want to see your goddamn asshole face.”

Andrei grabs her without a word, and I see him carrying her up the stairs on his shoulders again, Cerise angrily grabbing his hair and kicking him as he carries her inexorably up the stairs to their bedroom.

31

CERISE

I’m steeping the afternoon tea a week or so after Andrei ended the Ivanovich rivalry when Dmitri comes up to me.

“I think,” says Dmitri in a carefully neutral tone, “that Ivan Ivanovich no longer has anything to tell us.”

I meet Dmitri’s dark eyes and I know what he means.

On the basement level, in the cells, my husband is torturing the Ivanovich boss who ordered the hit on us, even though he no longer has any information to give.

He is torturing him because my husband cannot accept that I was in danger. He cannot go back and keep me safe. He wants to extract with blood and force something that is impossible to get. He cannot undo what happened.

For a moment the darkness in me doesn’t give a fuck. Ivan Ivanovich should suffer endless punishment for the deaths of the women.

Sometimes I worry about Dmitri. He has a soft heart, a softer heart than he should have in the Petrovic Bratva. Sometimes I think he would make a much better pediatrician or dentist than he would a brutal Bratva enforcer, but he’s never been trained for anything but blood and violence.

But he’s right about Ivan Ivanovich. It’s not right.

I am glad he rescued me; it will keep him safe from any fallout for what I’m about to do.

I am the only one who can stop this, and I bite my lip, considering my strategy.

“He’s a fucking psycho,” says Dmitri, his dark brows drawing together. I know exactly who he’s talking about.

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