Page 62 of The Bratva Betrayal

"Don't care."

"I think you don't want my brother," he continues anyway. "I think you want access. I think you want distance. And I think you're very good at pretending those two things look like affection when they need to."

"And I think," I reply carefully, "that you've spent too much time in my apartment."

His gaze drops briefly to my mouth.

"I don't think I have."

I should tell him to move. I should stand up and put the desk between us. I know how to remove men from rooms. I've been doing it since I was nineteen years old and figured out that the fastest way to control a situation is to control where people stand in it.

I stay where I am. I look at him, and he looks at me.

He's looking at me with a slow, unhurried attention. Except this time, it's different. This time there’s something in his expression that isn’t strategy, assessment, or careful observation.

This time it just looks like want.

And the real problem I've been avoiding since the moment he walked into my life is that I recognize it because I feel it, too, and I hate that more than I hate everything else about this situation.

"You're staring," I mutter. "What do you want from me?" I ask.

His next words cause a pool between my legs that has my thighs clenching.

"I want you to fuck me."

13

Artem

I've given her no reason to believe me.

The words hang between us in her office, thick and deliberate, and I watch the way her lips part, and the way her breath catches. She's trying to process what I've just said, trying to find the angle, the manipulation, the lie. But there isn't one. Not right now, at least.

I want her to fuck me.

It's the truth, raw and unvarnished, and it's left her speechless in a way that all my careful maneuvering over the past weeks hasn't managed. Cady Gallagher, the Irish princess who's been playing my brother like a fiddle, who's been digging through his life looking for cracks in the Volkov bratva's armor, is finally, beautifully silent.

I've been watching her for longer than she knows. Every keystroke on her laptop, every text message, every late-night search through databases she thinks are secure. I slipped into her digital life the same way I've slipped into her physical one—quietly, thoroughly, and without leaving a trace. Her cameras, her phone, the expensive MacBook she uses for her real work and not the sanitized bullshit she shows Misha—all flow through my systems now, a steady stream of intelligence that tells me what she's after.

Or rather, what she was after.

Since I inserted myself into her life, started showing up at her apartment and her office and everywhere else she thought she could hide, she hasn't searched for a single piece of information on Benedikt or the bratva. She's been so focused on me, on figuring out what I want and why I'm here, that she's forgotten her mission.

It would be amusing if it weren't so fucking inconvenient.

Benedikt wants updates. Misha wants reassurance that his new girlfriend isn't going to break his heart. And I'm stuck here, babysitting an enemy operative who looks at me like I'm either going to save her or destroy her, and who can't seem to decide which one she wants more.

I can't stay here forever. I have work to do, obligations that don't pause just because I've found myself fascinated by a woman who doesn't belong in my world.

But before I return to the violence and the blood and the endless chess game of mafia politics, I want to know how much pressure it takes to make Cady Gallagher break.

She's still staring at me, her blue eyes wide and uncertain, and I see the war behind them. She wants to slap me, to scream at me, to do something that reasserts the control she's been losing little by little since I walked into her life.

But she just sits there, frozen, and I know I have her.

I move deliberately, lowering myself to my haunches in front of her. The expensive wool of my suit pulls across my shoulders, but I don't care. All my attention is on her, on the way her breathing has gone shallow, on the way her hands have curled into fists at her sides.

"Artem…” Her voice is barely a whisper, and it lacks conviction.