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“Are you sure about that?” Andrei raised a hand and caressed my cheeks very softly. “You’re blushing so much that I’m afraid you’ll turn into crimson flames.”
I was caught. He must’ve known how good his sexual skills were that it didn’t matter what lie I told him. If only he’d try to make his heart skilled with a little bit of kindness too. “I need to use the bathroom.”
I tried to raise my body, but it fell back down and an unexpected pain shot through me. So much for a good fuck.
“Are you okay?” I must’ve been hallucinating because something appeared on Andrei’s face and it looked like concern…for me.
“No, I’m obviously not okay.” I grimaced. “Thanks to a certain sex animal.” My joke disappeared in the air as his face was still drawn together in worry.
“I was too rough.” He examined every part of me, from my back to my thighs, then my hands and neck. “I should’ve been gentler.”
My heart melted with his words. Andrei-freaking-Levov, king of the Bratva mafia and notorious crime leader, felt guilt for hurting me. I needed to record this and keep it safe because I was certain the odds of it happening again were very unlikely, just like the odds of my heart melting for him again. “Don’t act like that, it’s annoying. Plus, I’m tougher than I look.”
“Sure you are.” His eyes were on my back. I could tell the marks from my papa’s whips still disturbed him. I could tell he was curious to know what really happened, but I wasn’t ready to tell him, not yet at least. So I asked something I thought would lighten the mood.
“How long have you had your tattoo?”
He removed his gaze from me. “It’s been twenty years.” He ran a finger on it. “There’s a woman I knew, she was an artist.”
There’s a woman. The notion that he had a permanent souvenir from another woman left an unsettling feeling in my stomach. “Was she your lover?”
A lazy smile played on his lips. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was probably remembering all the happy memories he had with her, all the times he’d fucked her like he’d fucked me last night. “She was more than a lover.”
Venom seeped into my heart. “A wife?” Come to think of it, I found it strange he was not married at forty-two; most men in the mafia married early and produce kids to carry on their sick legacies.
He did not see it fit to answer my question because he muttered, “You’re one curious cat, malysh,” brushing off my question like it was a mere disturbance.
I wasn’t going to back down though. “Why do you have my name on your chest?” I thought of a way to bait him into giving me an answer. “Or is it her name?”
“It was a name dear to her,” was all he said before climbing out of bed. “Let Maria know if there’s something you need, I have a meeting this morning.”
“I want a tattoo.” I wasn’t sure why I blurted that out considering I had never even thought of getting a tattoo before now; my papa said they made women undesirable. “And I need new clothes.”
“As long as you promise to behave.”
I nodded. “I will.”
“Mikhail will take you,” he said picking up his towel from the floor. “There’s a card in the lower drawer, it’s limitless.”
“Good, because I’m a good spender.”
“I don’t care how much you spend as long as you stay out of trouble,” was the last thing he said before disappearing into the bathroom.
I had an eerie feeling that Andrei and I were about to become more than enemies. It made me anxious for some reason because one of us needed to die for the other to live.
Chapter 15 - Adrienne
Andrei definitely chose Mikhail to chaperone me out of spite, that much I was sure of. The man hadn’t moved his eyes away from me since we entered the tattoo shop, but that was less of a problem compared to the fact that he hadn’t spoken a single word to me for the past three hours since we left the house, not even when I asked what type of tattoo his brother would like.
Truthfully, I’d only asked because I wanted the exact opposite of what Andrei would like, but when Mikhail returned my question with a glare more terrifying than death itself, it made me feel like I was being ridiculous. He was probably one of the old-school kind of guys that thought women had no right to tattoos. Most men in our world were like that, closed-minded and misogynistic. Ewww!
“They’re so pretty,” the tattoo lady said to me with a beam. “How did you think of something so lovely?”
I glared at Mikhail standing by the door like a mannequin made for the gym and then gave the tattoo lady my kindest smile. “I got the inspiration from someone…awful.”
She let out a loud laugh that tried to conceal her anxiousness as she tried to figure out if I was being serious or sarcastic. “Whoever it is sure has a style.”
I scoffed. “His style is not smiling or wearing shoes, you know how the Russians are,” I replied, simply to annoy Mikhail. I knew how exasperated Russians get at that misconception, though I knew the shoe one was a lie. But I kind of believed the smiling one because the living evidence of it was standing in front of me while the other had fucked me last night.
