Page 36 of Broken Vows (Marital Privileges #4)

Mikhail

M y stomach riots as I stumble through the front door of Zelenolsk Manor. What should be a familiar scent of home is tainted and murky. It stirs up bad memories and has me grateful I left the first bar I came across with a recently opened bottle of whiskey.

The whispered murmurs of the staff not accustomed to seeing a Dokovic so out of sorts blend into the cacophony that matches the mayhem in my heart as I dismiss them with an arrogant wave of my hand.

Whiskey sloshes out of the bottle and onto the floor when I jackknife toward the owner’s suite.

“Mik—”

“Leave!” I shout, cutting Kolya off before he can get in a single word.

He looks like he wants to argue but chooses life instead.

After a brief dip of his chin, he gestures for the housekeeping staff to leave before he follows their brisk exit, leaving me as alone and isolated as I feel.

My feet drag, heavy and uncooperative, as I make my way down the hallway. The dim lighting from the overhead fixtures cast long shadows, making the narrow space feel even more constrictive.

My shoulder clips the edge of an antique hallway table halfway down, sending a vase crashing to the floor. The sound of shattering glass echoes through the quiet, and I curse under my breath.

“Fuck,” I mutter, rubbing my shoulder.

The pain is sharp, but it is nothing compared to the ache in my chest.

I drank like a fish over the past several hours to both numb the pain and avoid the conversation my heart wants to have with my head.

No matter how many shots I downed in a dingy watering hole five clicks from Zelenolsk, my heart’s begs didn’t lessen. Its rebelliousness meant I downed liquor too fast to be responsible and uncaring that I had to leave my custom Irbis in the unsecured lot of a rundown bar.

I’d give a shit if I hadn’t learned again, only hours ago, that a man’s most prized possession isn’t materialistic.

After dumping my bottle of whiskey onto the hallway table, I lean against the wall, trying to steady myself.

The wallpaper, with its horrid floral pattern, blurs before my eyes.

I close them for a moment and take a deep breath.

The room spins, but I stay upright—just. I drank so many shots so quickly that my veins are filled more with alcohol than blood.

When I open my eyes again, the shattered vase is still there, mocking me. I should clean it up. I hate leaving my messes to anyone else, but the thought of bending down makes my stomach churn. Instead, I kick a piece of glass out of my way, cursing again when a sharp pain hits my foot.

Looking down, I see a large piece of glass embedded in my shoe. There’s blood, too. A lot of blood. But no pain.

I laugh. Finally, the alcohol I consumed in excess has reached its desired strength.

I’m about to pull the shard out, when a voice at the side stops me in my tracks—a highly recognized and stupidly highly craved voice.

“Don’t yank it out yet. We need to make sure the area is sterile before exposing a wound to the elements and ensure that the shard didn’t nick anything vital,” Emerson says, kneeling to inspect my foot.

Even though I am sloshed, my cock hardens at the image of her kneeling before me. It pisses me off how quickly she can weave herself under my skin, but cut me some slack. I didn’t lie when I said this woman could stab me in the heart repeatedly and I’d still come back for more.

I’m a fucking simp.

“There’s too much dirt on your shoes to remove the glass here.

” Emerson peers up at me, her eyes full of concern.

“We should do it in the bathroom. Can you walk?” Although she’s asking a question, she leaps to her feet and then bands her arm around my waist, accepting the brunt of the weight the wall was supporting.

Although she is here, helping me, it does little to drown out the last words she spoke to me.

I don’t want to be remembered as a dud.

Her voice was hazed with lust, and a fire burned in her eyes I’ve not seen in a decade that I would have given anything to squander with hours beneath the sheets, but the definition of remembered is to bring to one’s mind an awareness of someone or something from the past.

Past.

Not present.

Not future.

Past.

Spit flies in all directions when I pfft my stupidity at how easily I fell under her spell again. The flirting, the connection, the whizz back in time, were nothing but a ploy for payment.

“Why are you here, Emerson? They paid you, so you should have left hours ago.”

Ignoring me, she continues our slow and careful walk down the hallway.

I grit my teeth, the pain and alcohol making it hard to think straight. “I don’t need your help.”

I pull away and stumble two steps before falling face-first through the door of the owner’s suite.

Emerson chokes back a sob when I hit the floor with a thud. It makes her voice crackly when she pleads, “Please let me help you.”

“No,” I reply, shaking my head enough to rattle my brain. “You are only here because you’re worried about losing your mother’s placement in the trial program. You’re not here for me.”

“That isn’t true.”

I continue as if she didn’t speak. “You have no reason to fret. I will continue with our agreement as per the terms cited in our contract. Kolya drafted a media release that announces you had to return to Lidny to take care of your mother. I will take Emmy up a handful of times over the next twelve months to make it seem as if I traveled to visit you. Then, once our first-year wedding anniversary slips by unnoticed, we will announce our separation. We don’t even need to be in the same room to pull this ruse off. ”

Her voice is a croak. “That isn’t what I want, Mikhail.”

“Then what do you want, Emerson?” Even though I am asking a question, I continue talking, stealing her ability to reply. “Because we sure as fuck know you don’t want me.”

I see her anger glaring up, but she refuses to nibble at the bait I’m throwing out—goddammit!

We fight, then make up.

That is how we operate.

Or should I say, that was how we operated.

“Emerson…”

Her eyes are brimming with tears, but her voice is surprisingly firm. “Let’s get your foot cleaned up first. Then we will talk.”

“No,” I shout. “You broke my heart, remember?” I spit out, my words slurred. “That’s more important than this.” I thrust my hand at my throbbing foot at the end of my sentence before ripping out the shard against her silent pleas for me not to. “It is more important than anything.”

“It is?—”

I grip the glass fragment, and it digs into my palm when I interrupt. “Then come clean! Tell the truth. Admit that you broke my heart!”

Her wet eyes drink in the droplets of crimson dripping from my palm before she shouts, “Yes! Okay! I will admit it. I broke your heart.” Her chest rises and falls as she takes a deep breath, her expression unreadable.

“I hurt you, and I’m sorry for that. But doing this…

”—she jerks her hand at the shard of glass—“and acting this way won’t fix anything.

It won’t take back what I did or how I hurt you. It will only hurt you more.”

Her confession adds more sways to my steps than the alcohol coursing through my veins. I stumble toward the bed and sit on the edge, where I stare at her, unable to comprehend what I’m hearing but grateful she has finally admitted her part in our downfall.

After a beat, I try to mask the vulnerability her words stirred in me. “Saying you’re sorry won’t make everything right.”

“No, it won’t,” Emerson agrees, her eyes never leaving mine. “But hopefully it is a step in the right direction, and it will prove to you that I’m here for the long haul.”

I don’t know how to respond to the last half of her reply. The hope in her tone has me speechless. I never expected her to take the blame, to admit that she was the one who broke my heart. But this, an admittance that she wants to stay, is shocking.

I honestly don’t know how to respond.

As I stare at the woman I promised to love until eternity, the wall hours of drinking built around me feels like it is already cracking.

I don’t like it.

I don’t want to let her in. I can’t. I won’t survive a third round of heartache. But as she stands before me, vulnerable and raw, my guard drops.

“Why?” I ask, my voice barely a whisper, needing closure. “Why didn’t you show up?”

Emerson looks down, her shoulders slumping as a handful of tears escape her drenched eyes. She is quiet for so long that I think she will never answer me.

When she does, it goes differently than the numerous scenarios I’ve run through my head over the past ten years.

“I was scared. Scared of what I was feeling. Scared of getting hurt.” Her eyes lift and lock with mine.

“Scared that your family was right.” She sees me shake my head, but she acts as if she didn’t. “We were young, Mikhail?—”

“And what we had was fucking perfect.”

Her lips shift upward as she nods. “It was. It was perfect.”

She moves forward, her steps cautious.

Her mouth tilts higher when I don’t pull away this time. Don’t look at me like that. The love we once shared has turned into a battlefield, and we’re both wounded soldiers struggling to stay alive.

Even fighting with her, I’ve breathed more in the past three days than I have in the past three years.

As Emerson removes the shard of glass from my hand, she confesses, “If I could change anything, I swear to you that the first thing I would change is that I would walk through those doors instead of walking away from them.”

Doors?

The truth smacks into me like a ton of bricks and pulls the world out from beneath my feet—not in a good way.

She was there.

Outside the church.

She made it that far but didn’t enter.

That hurts to acknowledge.

It hurts so fucking bad.

It shouldn’t maim as much as it does, but the betrayal cracks something deep inside me. It makes me a shell of a man I had hoped to be and has me lashing out.

“If you’re handing out genie wishes, I guess I’d wish to have never wasted my last coin on a jukebox in a pub no one outside of Lidny had ever heard of.”

I don’t know what hurts more. The physical discomfort of ripping Emerson’s heart out of my chest and handing it back to her, or the way she looks past me, as if she can’t see me standing directly in front of her.

I shouldn’t be surprised she can’t see me. I don’t recognize myself when I say, “You should go. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”

The alcohol dulls the pain in my foot as I race for the bathroom, but it can’t numb the ache in my heart when Emerson doesn’t come after me.