Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 106541 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 533(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106541 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 533(@200wpm)___ 426(@250wpm)___ 355(@300wpm)
I shoot my eyes to him, my fear not as apparent as normal. “There are no ‘I’-sounding words in the Russian vocabulary. They’re pronounced ‘ee.’ Big is Beeg. This is theese.” His shocked expression encourages me to continue expressing the differences I adored about Ghost’s accent. “And you don’t roll your R’s enough. A real Russian flicks his tongue along the roof of his mouth almost the entire time he speaks. You do not.” I could leave our conversation there, but my grief is still too deep for me to pull myself out of it. “You also didn’t have an accent the last time we spoke.”
As he looks at his shoes, his tongue darts out to replenish his dry lips. “You remember that day?”
“It is a little hard to forget the day you were sold.”
I twist to face him when he mutters, “That is what he wants everyone to believe.” When he nudges his head to the door, a blond lock falls in front of his face. He has a similar mannish manbun as Alek, but his hair is more platinum blond than dirty. “He wants everyone to believe that you are here of your own free will. That you choose to be with him.”
I huff before I can stop myself.
The chances of blowing Kirill’s cover are doubled when Aaren adds, “And that you begged him to birth his child.”
“Begged.” My laugh is more manic than authentic. “I don’t recall it quite like that.”
When I move into the main part of my room to wash down some headache tablets with a glass of water, I look at Aaren in a completely different light. It isn’t solely his offer to pour the glass on my behalf, it is how he raises it into the light and swirls it around.
More than water is in my jug.
Specks of white powder can’t be missed in the swirls of the light.
“It’s a lot harder to drug you when you pick your own place to sit.” With his accent forgotten and his wink a little too cocky for my liking, Aaren wishes me goodnight before he exits my room, leaving me speechless.
50
KATIE
A parcel of air escapes my mouth in a hurry when I’m suddenly clutched at the side.
Kirill drags me into a room next to the entryway before pushing me toward a desk a bank of monitors is spread across. “Who is he?” He shoves my head so close to the monitor, I can’t make out a single image before asking again, “Who the fuck is he?”
“I can’t see who you’re referencing, but if they’re anyone associated with me, he is one of your men.”
“One of my men?” He laughs a condescending chuckle. “None of my men are brave enough to go against me.” He pushes my head in so close to the monitor it almost cracks under the pressure. “They know what happened to the last fool who betrayed me.” He tosses me across the room as if I am a ragdoll, uncaring of my ‘condition’ as he often refers to my pregnancy. “Get the fuck out of my sight and stay away from him.”
He doesn’t need to tell me twice. I scamper to my feet, then race for the door, narrowly missing the man who has Kirill’s panties in a twist for the fourth time this week.
“Katie, what’s going on?” Aaren asks, following my race up the stairs.
He’s become the equivalent of Alek to me in the past four weeks. Nothing more. We are friends, but it appears as if I can’t even have that.
“Hey, slow down, talk to me.” Aaren grabs my arm before spinning me around to face him. Blood floods his face when his eyes bounce between mine before he snarls out in a fake Russian accent. “What did he do to you?”
“Nothing. I’m fine. He did fucking nothing.”
“This doesn’t look like nothing?” I feel giddy when he lowers his thumb from my hairline. It is coated with blood. But that isn’t my sole concern. I swore, and Kirill just disclosed he has more than men watching me. “Whoa. Don’t go fainting on me.”
Before I kiss the floor, Aaren gathers me in his arms then walks me into the closest bathroom. It happens to be mine since I almost made it to the safety of my room before he caught up to me.
“In the second drawer,” I announce when his hunt for the first-aid kit starts on the wrong side of the bathroom.
“Used this more than once the past month?” he asks, assuming the cuts in my wrists are recent since Kirill’s rough grab reddened them up.
I shake my head. “This is the first time.”
Aaren uses my shock against me. “What about the bruise on your cheek your first night here?”
“I raced onto the gangway a little too eagerly.”
He arches a blond brow, unknowingly showing off his icy blue eyes. They’re the same color Ghost’s were when he didn’t shelter them with an angled chin. “You still running with that?”