Page 64 of Devil's Vows

“Is he coming back?”

“No.”

“He went back to Russia?” she asks softly, her fingers now toying with one of my shirt buttons.

I shake my head, but don’t answer as I place my hand over hers to still her fiddling. She’s playing with fire and probably doesn’t know it. I’m not burning her in this moment when she’s still vulnerable and trusting. At this rate…fuck, who knows how she feels about intimacy—about sex—with what she’s witnessed.

“Where’s he now?”

So many questions. Like a child, almost, and not filling in the blanks left by my silence. She really is naive in many things, or maybe she just feels safe enough to really ask and not come to conclusions.

“Tell you what,moya ptichka,” I say, deflecting. “I’ll take you to meet my Papa soon. We’ll start there.”

32

GABI

Ivan has me by the hand and guides me out of my room.

“You shouldn’t sleep alone,” he says softly, but in a no-nonsense tone. He closes the gate behind us, and it shuts with a clink, locking me in.

I’ve no idea where he’s going with this, but for once I don’t have in me to fight…or to run. I just can’t and I no longer want to. Not with him having been everything I needed as I spilled my guts. I never talk about that interim phase. Only Mother Lucia knew, because I told her once when I was much older. When I found my voice and enough time had passed and the horror of those days in Antonio Mancuso’s cellar grew numb. Ever since, I’ve been holding back, not wanting to relive any of it again.

His bedroom beckons. I never slept in Ivan’s bed while he was away. I mean, how could I? The linen carried his scent, and the fantasy of him, without clothes as he just dropped the towel and got into bed, skin still shower-warm and wet, sensual, with all that ink playing hide and seek with me under the sheets. I already had a lusting problem. Sleeping in his bed was the last thing I needed.

The possibility of him deciding to come home from the office for the night and finding me in his bed was a situation begging for exploitation. Never mind every desire pulsing through me, my mind wouldn’t leap over the stumbling block of sin, but even more important: I’m not going to be the nanny who sleeps with the dad while he’s planning to wed another. I might not have much, but I have my dignity.

I stop short outside his room. “Where will you be sleeping?” I don’t want to barge into his life like this. It isn’t my place.

“I’ll sleep in the treasure chest when I come to bed.”

Mere yards away in the same room, essentially. I won’t be able to see him. He won’t be able to see me.

That’s not the only thing making me hesitate. I still have so many questions, I can’t let him go yet. Plus my body… I want him with me, until I fall asleep. Even the treasure chest is too far.

“Ivan?”

I don’t know when I slipped into calling him by his first name. During our phone calls, it was always Mr. Petrov.

“Yes,moya ptichka?”

“What happened here?” I ask, delaying him with the one question that still hangs between us. “The house…I saw one of the rooms in Milana’s suite, all the bullet holes, the ruin?—”

He sighs, and with a squeeze of my hip, tries to nudge me along the corridor, but I stand my ground. “Just a Fourth of July party that got a bit wild.”

“It got a bitwild?” I stare wide-eyed at him. “A Fourth of July party? Like Independence Day?” My American history knowledge is basic, but that’s what you get when you spend most of your school years in Italy.

What happened here was way more than a wild Bratva party.

“Yes,moya ptichka.” He leans closer. “What’s it going to take to stop you asking so many questions, hmm?”

A kiss, obviously,a voice pops up in my head, but it isn’t Chiara’s. It’s my own...

I blink as my gaze drops to his mouth, those lips that soothed along my temple, along my hairline, whispering comfort to me as I clung to him. Down to the soft scrub of his beard, and his Adam’s apple that bobs with a swallow, lower to the beautiful smooth skin exposed by the open collar of his shirt. I bet if my gaze keeps traveling, dips lower and lower, I’ll see what I felt earlier as I sat in his lap. What I saw that night when he came out of the bathroom.

Long ago, Chiara told mea man can give immense pleasure with it. I lick my lips. She also saidwedded bliss is just that. Bliss. And that it is even better outside of wedlock because it’s sin.

What she never told me is how the right man can light you up in all the right places by just looking at you. But with Ivan, it’s even more. I’m not sure how he can make me swing like this—one moment revealing my past, the next craving something that has me traumatized, except this isIvan. It’s nothimor the types that came to Mancuso’s cellar. Ivan will never hurt me.