Inked Athena (Litvinov Bratva Book 2)

There are things I won’t do for love. I make a list of them while pulling weeds from between the castle’s stones:

I won’t forgive him for disappearing.

I won’t let him touch me.

I won’t think about the new scar I glimpsed in the grainy photos Myles reluctantly showed me last week.

I won’t wonder who gave it to him.

I won’t imagine him bleeding.

The problem is, my body’s a traitor. It’s been another three weeks of solitude, and my hormones are staging a coup. Every night I wake up aching, sheets twisted around my legs, his name hot on my lips.

“Nova.” Myles’s shadow falls across the garden bed. “He’s here.”

I focus on the pea vine tangled in my fingers. If I look up, he’ll see the hope warring with fury in my eyes. “Good for him.”

“Aren’t you coming inside?”

“I’m busy.” The lie sits between us like the growing curve of my belly—obvious and impossible to ignore. “I’ll be in when I’m done.”

Myles sighs. In the weeks since Samuil disappeared, he’s watched me cycle through rage and despair with the patience of someone who defuses bombs for a living. Which, come to think of it, he probably does.

I wait until his footsteps fade before slumping into the grass. Meg, one of the border collie pups, nudges my thigh with her wet nose. Unlike most of the castle’s inhabitants, she doesn’t judge me for talking to dogs more than people.

“Your new master’s an asshole,” I inform her, scratching behind her ears. “A gorgeous, terrifying asshole who thinks he can vanish for weeks without a word and then just⁠—”

“Just what?”

The voice slides down my spine like steel against stone. I don’t need to look up to know he’s there—my body recognizes Samuil Litvinov’s presence like it recognizes its own heartbeat.

Vital. Necessary. Completely beyond my control.

When I finally lift my head, the sight of him steals my breath. His hair is longer than usual, curling at his nape. A fresh scar traces his right cheekbone like a signature. He’s traded his usual designer armor for dark jeans and a black henley that clings to his shoulders, but he still radiates lethal grace. Power wrapped in casual menace.

“Just waltz back in like nothing happened?” I turn back to my plants. “Actually, that’s exactly what I expected.”

He moves closer, and the dogs swarm him like he’s got bacon in his pockets. Traitors, every one of them. “I see you’ve replaced me.”

I follow his gaze to the scarecrow Mr. Morris helped me build last week. “He’s better company. Doesn’t disappear without warning. Doesn’t come back looking like he’s been in a knife fight. Doesn’t lie about where he’s been.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit me, zaychik.” His shadow falls across my hands. “Stand up.”

“That’s not how this works anymore. You don’t get to order me around just because⁠—”

His fingers curl around my chin, tilting my face up. “Please.”

That single word—soft and rough and nothing like the commands he usually issues—undoes me. I let him pull me to my feet, but I keep my hands fisted at my sides. I won’t touch him. I won’t.

I won’t look at him, either. I keep my eyes on the garden, on the life I’ve managed to create in this gilded cage.

Seeds I’ve planted have sprouted.

Flowers I’ve tended have bloomed.

Proof that some things can grow even in the shadows of monsters.

“Are you ever going to look at me properly?”

I want to stomp my foot and scream no. But again, that rough, tender hand of his cups my face and guides it up toward his.

His eyes crinkle as he smiles. The puppies are a mosh pit of cuteness at his feet, but he steps over them and brushes the back of his hand along my cheek. “You look beautiful.”

“Absence really must make the heart fonder,” I mumble under my breath. “I’m covered in sweat and dirt and dog hair.”

“I’ve always liked you dirty.”

I cringe away from his hand. It’s too tempting to nuzzle into his touch. “You think you can just waltz back here and pick up where we left off?”

He exhales a plume of warm, minty fragrance. “I know you well enough to know you’d never make it that easy on me.”

“Good. Then you must also know you’ll be sleeping in your own bedroom tonight.”

I try to twist around, to let that be the parting kill shot, but I should’ve known it would never be that easy. Before I can get far, he grabs my elbow and spins me back to face him. His grip is vise-like, but his smile is still soft and amused.

“You can be mad at me, krasavitsa. You can hit and scratch and even throw another vase—give me a scar to match the first. But at the end of the day, make no mistake—” He drops his chin and his voice, sending a bolt of awareness lancing directly between my legs. “—you’ll be in bed next to me.”

Then he sighs and his grasp loosens. Something like melancholy leaches into his voice, though I don’t really think he’s capable of emotions like that. “I need your warmth and your touch, Nova. I’ve been away from it for too long.”

I plant my fists on my hips. “Whose fault is that?”

Something sad flickers in his silver eyes. “That’s a complicated answer. But I wouldn’t have left if it wasn’t necessary.”

That’s the thing, though: No matter what, there will always be something that takes him away. There will always be some big, important cause that I’m forced to share Samuil with. He’ll leave me again and again and there will always be reasons; there will always be complicated answers to my questions.

I just don’t think I’ll ever like them.

“Did the dogs keep you company?” He bends down to scratch Finbarr behind the ears as the pup nibbles on his shoelace.

Yes. I love them. I love you. Never leave us again.

“The dogs—” I meet his gaze. “—were a manipulation.”

He grins. “But did it work?”

“Scotland looks good on you, krasavitsa.”

I watch his reflection in the patinated mirror as he unbuttons his shirt slowly. Each revealed inch of skin tells a story—scars from battles I’ll never know about, victories carved in flesh and bone. Watching him undress is like watching a transformation. The beast shedding the businessman’s skin, finally showing his teeth.

“Gardening, shepherding puppies.” His voice drops to that dangerous octave that makes my toes curl and my common sense go haywire. “You’re going native. Next thing I know, you’ll be out birthing sheep with Morris and speaking Gaelic.”

“He’s better company than my other options.” I reach for my sexiest negligee—a scrap of black silk that cost more than I used to make in three months of walking rich bitches’ dogs. If he’s going to walk around flaunting his washboard abs, I’m certainly not going to drown in my flannel pajama set.

“At least the sheep don’t disappear for weeks without a word.”

His eyes track my movements as I slip the silk over my skin, and something fierce and feral unfurls in my chest at his sharp intake of breath.

I love seeing that reaction in him, that confirmation that he’s actually fucking human after all. That I can still reach him.

Even kings can bleed if you know where to cut.

“The sheep also can’t make you scream my name in three languages.”

… Well, fuck.

Fuck, because that voice—that dark promise of pleasure twined with pain, of passion tangled with possession—is what started this whole beautiful disaster. It’s the voice that whispered filthy promises in my ear that first night in my apartment, when we were both covered in lake water and dog slobber and couldn’t keep our hands off each other. The same voice that murmured Russian lullabies against my stomach last month when he thought I was sleeping.

That voice is my undoing.

“Bold of you to assume I’ll give you permission to come anywhere close enough to do that,” I snap back. I try to inject venom into the words, but they come out breathier than intended. Because he’s moving now. Closer. Closer.

I feel like one of Mr. Morris’s lambs, locking eyes with a wolf on the other side of the fence.

“‘Permission’ has nothing to do with it.” He’s behind me in an instant, one hand splayed possessively over the slight swell of my stomach where his heir grows, the other tracing the edge of my negligee like he’s mapping territory he already owns. “This is about truth. About how your body responds to mine. About how you’ve been wet since the moment you heard my voice in the garden.”

His fingers drift lower, and I hate that he’s right. Hate that three weeks of silence and anger dissolve like sugar on my tongue the moment he touches me. Hate that my body arches into his hand whether I like it or not.

“I’m still mad at you,” I gasp as his teeth graze my neck, his fingers finding exactly where I’m aching for him.

“Good.” He spins me around, and the look in his eyes makes my knees weak. Hunger and possession and something deeper, something that looks dangerously like devotion. “Be mad. Be fucking furious. But be mine.”

He kisses me like a man starving, like he’s been dying in the desert and I’m the first drop of rain. His tongue slides against mine, and I taste his desperation, his need, his silent apology for leaving. For always leaving.

“I hate you,” I breathe against his mouth, even as my fingers dig into his shoulders, marking him like he’s marked me.

“No, you don’t.” He lifts me like I weigh nothing, pressing me against the cold stone wall. The contrast of temperatures—his burning skin, the frigid stone—sends shivers down my spine. “You hate that you love me. There’s a difference.”

And damn him straight to hell, because he’s right about that, too.

His hand slides up my thigh, pushing silk aside like it’s tissue paper. “Tell me to stop,” he murmurs, but his fingers are already moving higher and higher. “Tell me you don’t want this—don’t want me—and I’ll walk away.”

That’s the biggest lie he’s ever told me. We both know he’d sooner burn down all of Scotland than let me go.

Just like we both know I’d never let him.

“Fuck you, Samuil,” I moan as his fingers curl inside me, my nails leaving crescents in his shoulders that I hope scar.

His laugh rumbles against my throat, dark and satisfied. “That’s the plan, krasavitsa. That’s always been the plan.”