Page 74 of Betraying Family Vows

Dimitri is gone. The empty space beside me is cold. He's been up for some time, I guess.

I stretch, wincing at the pull of muscles I didn't know I had. My thighs ache. The insides of my wrists are tender. And there's a light scratch along my collarbone that stings when I touch it, a memento from his blade.

But my mind feels clear. Scrubbed clean. Like the sex burned through all my confusion, leaving only certainty behind.

I rub my face to clear away the sleep.

God. What the hell are we even doing?

After Dimitri fucked me senseless against the wall, we moved to the bed to rest, but it didn't last long.

Soon after, getting comfortable, he gripped my jaw and demanded answers about how I'd found the files, how I'd pieced things together.

"Walk me through it," he'd said, his thumb pressing into the soft underside of my chin. "Every click. Every thought. Don't leave anything out."

So he sat across from me, shirtless, looking more like a king at a war council than a man who'd just made me come so hard I couldn't see straight. I walked him step by step through exactly how I'd found everything on my father's laptop.

He asked questions, made me show him the files again, then the login screens. I could tell it bothered him, how close he'd been to all that evidence without ever realizing it.

He tried not to show it, but I saw that frustration buried under a carefully blank expression.

I told him it was fine. That his men couldn't have seen something in the Recycle Bin. There were over five hundred files there, and even if they did, the Spartan Holdings login was something they'd never have been able to access without a password I knew.

Once the frustration settled, I watched him catalog every document, every file, asking question after question. I'd watched his mind work, systematic and unrelenting. Like he was teaching himself to trust me, but muscle memory kept fighting against it.

"We need to unlock that phone. Do you think you could do it?" he'd asked after I was done showing him everything.

I shrugged and told him that I couldn't have guessed how much I got from the laptop so it was worth a shot. I'm here to serve him, I said with a smile to playfully entice him.

He kissed me and went and got it.

Truthfully, I wanted to be the one to crack it. I wanted to prove I was worth something, worth the trust I felt he was internally fighting to give me, or so I thought.

I was overeager, and as soon as the screen lit up on the phone, I just started typing in password combinations, number sequences, pattern locks. Anything I could think of.

But I failed.

After six wrong passwords, the phone locked me out for five hours.

"Five hours?!" I had said loudly.

He nodded. "I didn't want to tell you, add more pressure. But yeah. You get six tries and then it locks for five hours. My fear is that it will eventually lock indefinitely."

I'd been so angry at myself that I nearly threw the thing across the room.

But Dimitri hadn't let me. He'd caught my wrist in that iron grip, pulled me to him, and kissed me.

"Fuck it," Dimitri growled, rolling on top of me. "We'll try again tomorrow."

He'd made me come twice more after that, his mouth doing sinful things between my thighs until I'd forgotten how to be angry.

I push the sheets away and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The floor is cold against my bare feet as I move across the room to a stack of women's clothing on a chair by the window. More things from Calli's closet, I assume. I slip into the soft cotton T-shirt and the leggings.

I stop in the mirror by the door and run a hand through my hair, trying to smooth it into something halfway presentable, and walk out into the hall.

I don't know exactly where to go, but I know I need to see him.

Damn, the house is beautiful in the daylight. It's almost too beautiful to be real, the kind of home where wealth isn't flaunted but simply exists, like it's been here for generations.