Page 103 of Twisted Proposal

"Then I got sloppy," Yelena said sadly.

"Then you got sloppy." Nadia nodded. "For what it's worth, I'm really glad you did." She rested her head on Yelena's shoulder.

Three years. They escaped these men and stayed ahead of them for three years. I couldn't even make it a single stop on Amtrak before Artem had me back in his hands. My cheeks burned, and I hoped the girls blamed the tequila and not my embarrassment.

"Yeah," she sighed. "Me too."

"Wait, you all ran from them and now you are married?" I asked. Something wasn't clicking. "Why are you still with them? Give me a code word if I need to call someone for you."

The girls all laughed again like I had said the funniest thing they ever heard.

"We're with them because we love them, and they love us," Marina said. "Though they all needed a little help learning how to show it."

"That is not love, it's kidnapping and wrongful imprisonment," I scoffed.

"You might think he's a monster, but monsters like Artem don't waste time on people they don't care about. If he didn't feel something deep, and real, you wouldn't be here," Nadia said with a shrug.

"Care? Locking me up isn't caring; it's control." I got to my feet, needing to move, then the room spun again and I had to hold onto the counter. "He doesn't care for me. He wants to own me."

"Sometimes, control and care are the same. For men like Artem, they don't know how else to love." Samara put a hand on my shoulder to help steady me. "Give him a chance. He wants to keep you safe. To make you happy."

The conversation moved on to something else, but her words struck me harder than they should have.

Did Artem care for me?

Did he just need me to show him how to lo?—

No more tequila for me.

I pushed the bottle away and tried to focus back on the conversation at hand as the housekeeper came in and dropped a platter of meats, cheeses, caviar, and massive hunks of bread in the middle of the table. Something to soak up all the booze. Each of us went straight for the crusty bread, apparently all having the same idea.

Soon after, the girls left, thankfully taking the tequila with them.

I went for a nap in one of the guest rooms on the second floor.

The housekeeper tried to get me to use the bed Artem and I had slept in, but I refused.

There was no way I was going to sleep in the same bed Artem tied me to.

When I woke up several hours later, it was dark out, but Artem still wasn't here.

I went back to exploring, and every time I got close to that back corner of the house, she was there to usher me away.

I didn't know what was in the room, but I was sure the answer I was looking for was behind that door at the end of the hall.

So I waited. Artem wasn't letting me go anytime soon, so I had plenty of time. Thankfully, I didn't have to wait long. The housekeeper began vacuuming upstairs while I pretended to nap on the sofa in the office, a book opened on my chest.

As soon as the whine of the vacuum started, I crept through the main level, convinced she was going to pop up out of nowhere.

She didn't. I got all the way to that dim hallway and the door at the end without being interrupted.

The room was small, and almost dingy compared to the rest of the house. But it was also cluttered. I had heard of some homes having a junk drawer where random knickknacks wound up. It looked like this house had a junk room.

There were extra chairs stacked up against one wall, a rolltop desk that looked like it had been here as long as the house had existed, and a few end tables, all under a thick layer of dust.

I started with the desk. At the very least, no one had been in here in a while, so the room probably didn't have a camera recording me.

Along with random odds and ends, there were stacks and stacks of papers inside the drawers, in different handwriting and different languages.