Page 58 of Cruel Romeo

My phone buzzes in my pocket, snapping me out of that thought. It’s Lev.

“There’s been a problem,” he says without preamble.

“Then fix it.”

“Would I have called you if I could?”

“Fine,” I snap. “Tell me where.”

“The warehouse.”

A cold sense of foreboding seeps under my skin. I don’t like where this is going. Better go see for myself what it’s about. “I’ll be right there.”

Looks like I didn’t lie to my wife about that emergency after all.

“Oh, and Lev?”

“Yes?”

“I want you to put new guards on my brother’s door. Eyes on him at all times. You got that?”

“On it, boss.”

I end the call, slip the phone back into my pocket, and take one last look at Dimitri.

I’ll make them pay, brother. Every last one.

23

SIMA

I shouldn’t be disappointed that Petyr left.

Seriously, what is wrong with me? This is the perfect time to take a breather. Be alone with my thoughts, plan my devious plots. Or even just turn on the TV and let some brainless reality show wipe the thoughts from my brain.

And yet, as I flop on the lush mattress of his equally lush penthouse apartment, my thoughts refuse to drift anywhere else.

It’s like Petyr has colonized my brain. Planted a flag straight into my hippocampus and claimed it for his Bratva kingdom of evil.

I blame it on what happened in the dressing room. Ever since that little power play, I’ve been… needy. Aching. Desperate in a way that makes the feminism astral project out of my body.

I want him. Badly. There’s no use pretending otherwise. I want the things he does to my body, the way he makes me let go and forget how to think.

He kisses like no one else, and I’m not saying that just because I have zero experience with kissing. Or anything other than that. I’ve seen people smooching on park benches after dark, and whatever it is they were doing, it wasnotthat.

My legs shift restlessly. The memory of his hands makes it impossible to keep still. It’s embarrassing how quickly he gets to me, how easily he pushes past every wall I’ve built over the last twelve years on the run. All I want is to let my hand slip beneath my waistband and relieve the aching pressure I’ve been feeling ever since he left me high and dry against that mirror.

But I don’t. Because that would be bad. Years of pent-up sexuality and vague memories of confessing my sins to priests (“I lied to my parents, I stole a cookie from the kitchen, I thought Brad Pitt looked cute in that new movie”) have hammered it in my head that I should not resort to flicking the bean unless it’s very dark, very quiet, and very much behind locked doors.

The thought of Petyr coming back and finding me moaning his name is also a pretty good deterrent.

I let my useless hands drop to my sides. Without him, the penthouse is quiet. Too quiet. Just the low hum of the city outside and nothing else.

I catch myself glancing towards the door like an anxious golden retriever, waiting for Petyr to come back any second. I hate that my heart speeds up at the thought. I’m supposed to be keeping my guard up, not counting down the minutes.

I pull up my knees and wrap my arms around them. This thing between us—it’s nothing. Just chemistry, pure and simple. A physical thing at best. A means to a million-dollar end.

I need to remember that.