Page 25 of The Brutal Arrangement (The Ivanov Syndicate #2)

DAMON

I told Lucy the truth when I told her that I wanted to learn more about her.

I’d meant it, not only in a way to get answers that could inform us about what the Kozlovs were up to, but also because I wondered if I could ever get to a compatible level of trusting her almost like Maxim and Sloane got along.

Early in the morning, I lay in bed and realized how unthreatening it was to stay here with Lucy like this.

Usually, I left after we had sex. She’d pass out or shower, and I’d go tend to more business. The few times I’d slept in the bed with her, she maintained a buffer of distance between us. She’d take up space on the opposite side of the bed while I’d stick with my side.

Since that night I told her that I wanted to learn to like her, to learn to let her into my life as more than just a pussy to fuck and a person to question, I’d stayed in bed with her either pressed against me or draped over me.

While I was still slow to initiate more conversations with her, I was taking small steps of acclimating to being present with her.

And she seemed to like it.

I wouldn’t admit it out loud, but I wasn’t complaining, either. Holding her soft, warm body was comforting, and I wasn’t eager to reinstate that distance I’d wanted from the beginning.

After being lazy to lounge, then doze, even falling back asleep—something very uncharacteristic of me—I woke up with a start.

She wasn’t there.

I blinked, the sleep erased instantly from my eyes as I took inventory of the fact that Lucy had gotten up.

Where is she?

Instead of freaking out that she could’ve disappeared, which was impossible because she couldn’t breeze out of the building on her own and evade the many guards, I lay still and waited for her to return.

The likeliest reason for her to have gotten up without me was to go to the bathroom or something simple like that. It wasn’t so late that she’d be hungry for breakfast and not wake me first.

But the longer I lay there and she didn’t return, I struggled not to worry or assume the worst of her.

She’s probably in the bathroom. She’ll be back.

Telling myself to chill about her absence irked me. I couldn’t be… clinginess. Right? I was slowly opening up to letting her be in my life more than just my wife to fuck, but I refused to consider the possibility that I was anxious to be close to her too much.

She still didn’t come back.

I sat up, figuring I’d been waiting long enough. Upright, I focused all my senses for any clue of where she could be. No sounds came from the bedroom. No running water faintly vibrated through the pipes in the walls. No scent of soap if she were showering. Nothing.

What the fuck?

It was still possible she was in another part of the apartment and didn’t want to bother me. As I got up and threw on sweatpants, I sought her out and tried not to let my imagination get the best of me.

Stepping carefully so she wouldn’t know that I was coming out of the bedroom, I snuck out into the open floorplan of my apartment. Again, I stopped still and waited. Listening and smelling, I tried to be patient and detect a clue of where she could be.

Maybe she went downstairs?

I never saw the point in giving her strict rules to adhere to.

Because I didn’t want to bother myself with thinking about what she was doing when she wasn’t in bed with me, I didn’t take the time to give her instructions for what she could or couldn’t do here.

I knew she wouldn’t leave—the guards would keep her in the building until I said otherwise.

In the same way, I didn’t have to worry about her accessing any floors she wasn’t allowed to reach via the central elevator we residents used.

She couldn’t get to the floors my family members lived on. Each of us brothers had a floor, same with Grandmother and Father. Lucy couldn’t let herself into any of those areas. The dungeon in the basement was off-limits, too.

I hadn’t ever tried to limit her being in the more open areas of the building, though, the first three floors that resembled a home.

Before I gave up my crouched spot against the wall where I waited, a faint sound reached me. It wasn’t loud, but I couldn’t tell if the low tone was because she hadn’t realized she was too loud or because she wanted to hide from me.

That hmm-mmm intrigued me.

Who the fuck is she talking to?

If a maid or guard had come in here, that was fine. But something in me was automatically convinced this was something else.

I was sick of standing back and wondering. If Lucy was having a secret conversation with someone, it wouldn’t bode well for her. I’d been as upfront as I could from the beginning. I’d told her, I’d warned her not to mess with me. No lies. No tricks.

Regret coiled in my stomach, making it tense. Just when I told her that I wanted to learn more about her, she would make me question whether she was worth keeping? Right when I admitted that I didn’t trust others easily, she had to be secretive like this?

Creeping out into the apartment stealthily, I focused on finding her before she’d notice me. No words followed her murmur, but another one came. Even quieter.

Who is there?

Who is she talking to?

Fuck, is she just watching TV or something in the lounge?

If someone’s here, why can’t I hear them?

Too many questions inundated my mind, and I felt that telltale twinge of pain from clenching my jaw too tightly again.

What if it’s a guard? A soldier she’s been trying to keep up a secret tryst with?

That was a reach, but I couldn’t help my mind from jumping there.

With the way my mother betrayed Father, the concept of women being prone to lying and cheating would always stick with me.

I was predisposed to assume the worst of the other gender because of how my mother had lied to Father, almost sold secrets that would ruin us, and nearly got her sons executed to appease her lover.

No. No one in the organization would dare.

The Ivanov guards and soldiers assigned to this building’s security were the most loyal I had.

However, the second that I spotted Lucy in the guest room, hunched over as she sat on the edge of the bed, I knew that my instincts were right to an extent.

She was sneaking away from me to have a secret conversation.

She was doing something she didn’t want me to know about.

Because if this conversation on her cell phone was innocent, she wouldn’t have gone into another room to have it. She wouldn’t be sitting here tense and so quiet if she wasn’t hiding anything.

Dressed in a silk robe, she bent at her waist with one elbow on her knee, the calf of that leg propped on the bed.

Slanted over like that, she sat with her hair falling over her face like a curtain, preventing me from getting a peek of her profile as I eased into the room with her back mostly to me.

What the fuck are you doing?

Who are you talking to?

What are you hiding?

Saul had set it up for her phone to be tracked.

All he’d reported about that device was that she’d been in contact with a debt collector.

Maxim ran a report on her as well, a background check, and all he’d found was that she had been a maid since high school, starting that job shortly after her father died.

No mention of her mother showed up, so we assumed that she was either out of the picture or dead.

She let out a heavy sigh, hanging her head a little more. The curve of her back suggested she was burdened by whatever she was being told. Even though I was more in the room now, behind her back, I couldn’t hear the small voice of whoever was on the other line.

“Okay,” she replied. It left her as a distressed sigh. “I can look into that.”

Look into what ?

I curled my fingers into a tighter fist, trying to vent this vibrating anger into that action before I’d hurt her so much that she wouldn’t be able to answer me.

“Yes. I’ll look into it today and report back to you,” she said, still quiet and quick to appease.

“The fuck you will,” I growled.

I’d be damned if I stood around and listened to her agree to look into something here and report information to anyone. I’d been so distracted by wanting to know more about her and trust her that I lost an edge on the fear that she could be here to spy.

She squeaked, jumping up suddenly with how startled she was to hear me behind her.

As she whirled around with that slight shriek, she flung her arm out to keep her balance.

In doing so, she tossed her phone across the room.

It bounced onto the carpet and rolled until it smacked against the opposite wall and stopped its momentum.

“Damon,” she said, breathing heavily and panting immediately.

That fear belonged in her eyes.

That dread of being caught sneaking around suited her.

And the terror of her glancing at the dead phone proved that she was determined to keep this secret from me for as long as she could.

Every clue of her panic reinforced what I knew had to be true.

“I warned you not to fuck up,” I growled as I advanced toward her.

“I’m not!”

“I heard you.” I grabbed the front of her robe as she tried to backpedal away from me. “I heard you saying you’d spy and report in!”

“No. I’m not!” Her hands were useless over mine. She could pry and bat and resist all she wanted, but I wasn’t letting her have any mercy.

“The fuck you weren’t. I heard you!”

She shook her head. Tears leaked from her eyes as she tried to breathe through this panic attack that I witnessed over her face. “No!”

“I heard you!”

“I’m not spying!” She sucked in a wheezy breath, glaring at me with a mixture of too many emotions for me to track.

Sadness.

Anger.

Indignation.

Fear.

Panic.

Agony.

“I’m not spying,” she insisted hotly, her voice choppier with the tears she couldn’t hold in. “I was on the phone with the facility where my mom is.”