“You’re incredibly astute for such a selfish asshole,” I remark. He’s wearing a black button-up shirt with a grayish-blue suit jacket. I undo the first button on his shirt. It unveils a portion of one of his tattoos—the skeleton of a bird.
I hadn’t noticed them before. There was too much going on in the lead-up to the shower sex. Now, I run my hand over the skull of the bird and down the wing bone. There’s rough, raised skin for the bottom half of the wing bone. Another scar that he’s covered with ink. Another secret that he will take to the grave.
“My father didn’t ask me why you were doing all of this,” I say. I glance up at him, my hand leaving his chest. “But I’m asking. I want to know why.”
There’s the hint of a smirk on his face. It slowly slips away. He takes my hand, his fingers intertwining with mine.
“I was married once,” he says. “Her name was Natalie. It was…not a happy marriage. But she was murdered. By a car bomb.”
His last words pollute the room. He doesn’t need to tell me that my family was behind it.
I shouldn’t have come back to this city. This place is hell.
I start to sit up, but Maksim puts his hand on my shoulder, applying enough pressure that I lie back down. I expect to see restrained rage on his face, but he appears perfectly calm.
“How long ago was this?” I ask.
“About a year ago.”
I wince. “So, it worked out well for you that I came back this month.”
“It did seem like the devil was willing to help me out a little bit,” he says, his finger tracing down my collarbone. “But if you didn’t return soon, I would have found a way to lure you back.”
I focus on the bird skeleton tattoo again. So, in the end, this is my father’s fault in more ways than one. He took my daughter, he killed Maksim’s wife, and now he wants to act like the victim. He should have been worried about me after finding out Maksim had me, considering he killed Maksim’s wife, but he’s ignoring his past like it will negate the consequences of his actions.
I won’t make the same mistakes.
I won’t keep running from my past like it won’t eventually find me and, as Maksim put it, lure me back.
“I want to see my daughter,” I say.
Maksim frowns. “No.” He makes a spinning motion with his hand. “Roll over.”
I grit my teeth. I should object. If I plan on taking on my father, I should be able to take on Maksim. But after hearing about his deceased wife—killed by my family—I feel like I owe him.
And, while my body still aches, the thought of him inside me is enough to make my sex throb.
I roll over. His arm wraps around my waist, and he pulls me closer to him. My back presses against his chest, but there’s still some distance between my ass and his cock. I wait for him to move his arm down and tug my lower half closer to him.
Seconds pass by. I feel his chest rise and fall behind me. When he moves his arm, I tense up, but he only moves it so our hands can intertwine again.
“Why didn’t you try to find your daughter?” he whispers. I tighten my grip around his hand. My instinct is to be defensive, but this isn’t how he brought it up last time—he’s not being accusatory. There’s genuine curiosity in the question.
“I did try initially,” I confess. “But I was eighteen. I didn’t have any resources. I’d just walked away from my family and I was … I was alone. Completely on my own. At the time I wanted it that way, but it meant I didn’t have help from anyone. A lot of my time was just spent trying to survive.”
I brush my bottom lip with my hand, nearly forgetting that it’s clasped with Maksim’s. His hand squeezes mine.
“I … well, like I said. I did try. I hit nothing but dead ends and I didn’t have enough money for private investigators. I didn’t even make enough money to save a single penny. I managed to get to North Carolina by selling nearly everything in my apartment. As the years passed … it just felt wrong to continue looking for her. I felt like she’d see me as the mother who wasn’t strong enough to stop her from being taken and that I didn’t deserve her anymore … and I think she’d be right. I still wanted to be worthy, though. Maybe that’s part of the reason I came back. Partly to write for the Fifth Avenue Journal and partly because I knew New York City was the place that would make me strong enough to deserve her. Not just because it’s a city that you need street smarts to survive, but because my family is here and … that’s scary. It’s just scary.”
I rub my face against the pillow underneath my head, trying to erase any evidence of the tears threatening to expose me as a fraud.
Maksim releases my hand. I wait for him to get up and leave, completely repulsed by my weakness, but his hand settles on my shoulder. I slowly turn to look at him.
“It sounds like we have more in common than most people would think.”
He leans down, kissing me with unexpected tenderness.
I unbuckle his belt and slide his pants down. It hasn’t been long since the sex in the shower, but when he pushes into me, it’s like I was dying without this and hadn’t even realized.
When he comes inside me, his body pressed firmly against mine, there is a brief moment where I forget where I am, who I’m with, who I have become. For one tiny second, everything feels like it might be okay.
He collapses down beside me, our
