Page 20 of The Brutal Arrangement (The Ivanov Syndicate #2)

LUCY

I ’d never received a death threat before.

I wouldn’t have ever counted on getting one from the man who was supposed to be my husband.

But that title was something altogether so foreign to me that I couldn’t begin to make sense of what was now my reality.

Damon left me in his room. And that was that.

For three days, I didn’t see my spouse at all.

I had to stop thinking of this only as a contract arrangement since he’d taken me that first night. Isolated in his room and left alone, though, I had no clue what this was supposed to be.

“I’m not a prisoner,” I mused to myself in a whisper as I strolled in his apartment.

While I didn’t see my husband, his brother, his father, or his grandmother, I was getting familiar with the suited appearance of the guards and soldiers who came and went.

Similar to the men at the Kozlov mansion, these Ivanov employees were identically muscular and gruff-looking.

They were the ones who gave me a hard look if I tried to explore too far. Like the maids and other house staff members, they did their jobs and ensured I stayed wherever Damon wanted me to be.

I had free rein of his apartment that he didn’t come back to.

I could walk through the rooms on the main floor, where the kitchen was when I asked one maid who delivered me lunch. And I was able to peer out some windows at an ornamental garden in the back.

Without permission to leave this building, I had to convince myself that I was partially imprisoned here. I just wasn’t stuck in a cell or dungeon, with locks and chains trapping me in place.

“I’m not a whore,” I whispered to myself.

Despite the violent way Damon took me on our wedding night, he didn’t make a single attempt or move to be near me again.

Instead, I was left to my own devices, clothed in new garments that a maid or housekeeper must have purchased for me. Boredom hadn’t kicked in yet, but without anything to do, I felt like I’d go stir-crazy.

“What’s the point?” I wondered aloud, also in a whisper because I was paranoid about this entire building being bugged.

I didn’t want anyone to overhear my private thoughts.

That was the one thing I couldn’t make sense of.

Why? Why not annul the marriage if he’d just dismiss me?

Why keep me around if he would never even see me?

It seemed so backward to wonder why Damon was dismissing me. This was what Katerina had hinted at. She hadn’t told me the truth about my having to have sex with my husband, but she had told me more than once that the Ivanovs would let me into the building then ignore me.

But what is the point?

Some strategy had to be at play, but while I wasn’t harassed, bothered, under gunpoint, or taken brutally with a gag in my mouth and a binding on my hands, I wanted to relax and accept that for the first time in my life, I was simply cared for.

All my needs were seen to. I didn’t have to worry about where food was coming from.

I didn’t have any tasks to complete or rooms to clean.

If I were stupid, I’d lower my guard, but I just couldn’t ease up that much.

If he said I could give him heirs… then…

Shaking my head, I cringed and tired of walking so aimlessly.

Everything felt aimless, too aimless. Idleness didn’t suit me, but wishing for something to do seemed like I was wanting Damon to do me .

With this idleness, my mind kept wandering back to what it felt like when I was with him.

This morbid curiosity about how he could make me feel so good couldn’t be healthy.

Women weren’t supposed to want to be gagged and tied up.

We weren’t good feminists and independent females to desire a man who’d do that.

Yet, no matter how much I scolded myself for enjoying it, I couldn’t own up to the fact that it was so wrong.

Every time I heard someone approaching, I couldn’t help that my heart picked up faster.

In anticipation of seeing him again, I struggled to distinguish whether I was excited to be near him and experience that wicked desire or I was scared to be within his reach where he could make good on that death threat.

God, this is so not normal.

Rubbing my hand on the back of my neck, I worried whether this would ever make sense.

My life had never been “normal”. After my father passed away and left me with just my mom, I felt like we were both enslaved to the rat race of making money to live on without him providing for us anymore. Then with my mom’s diagnosis, I had no life at all outside of working.

But this?

This is supposed to be my life?

I shook my head. It wouldn’t last. And I despised myself every time that I wondered if it could.

Quit this stupid Stockholm syndrome crap, Luce.

I rolled my eyes.

This isn’t a real marriage. This is captivity. It’s abuse. It’s not right. And there is nothing sustainable about this waiting game.

Because that was what I was doing.

Waiting.

And waiting some more.

Damon wouldn’t have decided to keep me here if he didn’t plan to ever do anything with or to me again. I knew that as a fact, somehow, and so, each day passed the same. Tense and full of another waiting game.

I sighed, leaving his apartment floor to go down to the main level where a library of old books might help entertain me.

They were all classics, looking too expensive to touch, and none of them caught my interest, but at least it was something to look at.

Something to distract myself with as I took in all the titles on the spines in languages I didn’t understand.

Is he trying to get me to relax and lower my guard before he shows up?

Is he too busy doing… whatever scarred Mafia men do?

Questions went unanswered in my mind. No matter how much I dwelled on it all, I would be no closer to any truth if I couldn’t speak with anyone.

In the library, I tried to stay out of the way of the maid dusting in there.

She lowered her head when she saw me, but I tried to smile as pleasantly as possible to show her I wasn’t a threat.

And I wasn’t one of them , to whom she’d need to look invisible.

This woman was like me . I’d fit in more with her than anyone else.

Hey, maybe I can ask to be hired as a maid here, too. Then I wouldn’t be so anxious and bored and doing freaking nothing.

“Sometimes if you twirl it,” I said after watching her dust with a feathery contraption, “it collects and holds more dust.”

“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I’ll do better.” She curtsied and blushed.

“Oh, no.” I held my hand up. “I’m not saying you’re doing a bad job.” I tried again to smile as sweetly as I could. Maybe I was trying so hard to appear friendly and non-threatening that I was starting to freak her out. “I used to?—”

She flinched as I approached.

“I was—I’m a maid. Well, I used to be…” I hated how she looked at me like I was a threat. “Can I show you?”

After she handed over the duster, I demonstrated. “If you use a little flick of your wrist like that, it’ll sort of shake the particles into the fibers.”

She blinked, seeming so stupefied that I’d be giving her dusting advice.

Oh, give it up, Luce. Accept your fate and be alone until you can get out of here. I wasn’t on any fast track to befriending another maid. I wasn’t going to even have small talk with a single soul here.

I folded my arms over my stomach, patting my hand on my elbow, as I left the speechless maid.

I’d never realized how horribly lonely I was. As a maid, I’d have others to talk to on the staff. Joann was a sweetheart. And before that gig at the Kozlov house, I’d gotten along well enough with other maids, butlers, and other positions in big residences.

Here, I was subjected to the same dark-brown and black walls of Damon’s apartment, surrounded by nothing and able to connect with, well, no one.

Another heavy sigh left my lips and I furrowed my brow as I admitted that this listlessness and loneliness had really only cemented my sad fate when my mom received her diagnosis.

Thinking about her prompted me to remember how confused Damon’s father seemed, and I was curious whether he had similar care set up for him in this building.

It was bad enough that I was stupidly craving the submission Damon got out of me. I wasn’t going to soften toward him any further than that. Yet, not wishing someone to witness their parent losing their identity and mind was just simple decency.

I could check in on her, couldn’t I?

This was the longest I’d gone without checking in on my mom at the facility. She had so few “good” days that I never had a chance to speak with her, but it seemed like I was doing my duty when I called and spoke to the receptionist at the desk.

I got my phone and debated calling. Damon had warned me not to lie to him, and I hadn’t. It wasn’t a lie if he didn’t ask me about my mom or anything about my family. It was just a fact that existed outside of the orbit of his command on me.

Biting the inside of my cheek, I stared at the blank screen of my phone.

I kept it off all the time now, so scared that Katerina could call it.

It seemed safer that way. Because if Damon or anyone in this building knew that I was still in contact with Katerina, I bet that would apply as a reason for Damon to act on his warning.

What if the facility wanted to contact me about Mom?

What if something has happened and I’m unaware?

Deciding I could power it on long enough to check my messages, I glanced at the door and prayed that Damon or anyone else wouldn’t walk in right now.

The device booted on, and only one message showed. It was the debt collection place, the company in charge of where all my unpaid bills had gone when I couldn’t keep up with my mom’s care. The transcribed text from the recording confirmed that those bills were still out there waiting for me.

All twenty-one thousand dollars.

What the hell?

I worried that Katerina was reneging on me. She’d sworn she’d cover my mom’s expenses, and because I’d been so convinced that she was like a friend, I took her word for it.

Wait. Maybe this message is just older. If Katerina transferred money to cover it all recently, it might not show yet. That’s all. I’d only been here for almost four days now.

I wouldn’t dare call Katerina to check. I wasn’t comfortable to call the debt collectors or my mom’s facility, either. Any call or reach out would probably fall in the category of unallowed privileges, and that wasn’t something that I wanted to mess with.

Not with my husband’s death threat hanging over my head.

More worried than before, I powered down my phone and put it back where it had been sitting, on a side table. The fact that it was right there in the open felt like a test. Like Damon and his men were waiting to pounce on me for talking to someone they hadn’t approved of.

Because, yeah, I’m such an awesome undercover spy.

I flopped back on the bed and closed my eyes.

The irony.

Damon assumed right off the bat that I could be here to spy. And he’d been acting like that from day one—keeping me alone, locked up, and without anyone to talk to at all. Even that poor maid in the library was so skittish and nervous to be near me.

All I do is wait around and worry. What’s there to spy on?

I had no desire to spy. That mantra of keeping my head down and minding my own business was ingrained in my mind. Unlike at the Kozlov house, men didn’t party here or talk crap about things. Even if I had wanted to pay attention, there was nothing for me to pick up on.

Nothing for me to do at all…

I blew out a long breath as I wondered if a nap could kill some time of this loneliness.

Before I could relax close enough to dozing, though, the doorknob moved.

Someone was coming in.