Deceitful Vows (Marital Privileges #2)

69. Zoya

69

ZOYA

I dunk my head under a heavy flow of water, willing myself to pull up my big girl panties and handle my mistakes myself for the third day in a row. It isn’t Nikita’s job to continually bandage my boo-boos. And it isn’t her husband’s either. I objected at Aleena’s wedding before running the ruse that I’m pregnant, so I need to suffer the consequences of my actions.

It isn’t like I have long. Andrik said yesterday that the annulment will be processed within a week. Then I’ll be as free as a bird—and most likely still unable to take the edge off without Andrik’s involvement.

After swallowing enough water to drown my wish to squeal, I poke my head out of the heavy flow of water. The wetness clinging to my lashes reminds me that I don’t need to carry this burden alone. I objected, but I was coerced into making that decision. Ano is as much a part of this as I am, and he doesn’t have my number blocked like Aleena does.

He won’t be able to help me with the itch I haven’t been able to ignore since Andrik’s spanking, but he can offer some comical relief to my overstressed head.

I tried to call Aleena a dozen times today, and over a hundred yesterday when the man in the background of every scene of late announced who lured the security officers out of their nook with a damsel-in-distress routine a Disney princess would be proud of so our mother could interrogate Zakhar.

I’m not angry at Aleena’s tactics. She’s been under our mother’s thumb for seven years longer than I had to endure, and she can make Stockholm syndrome seem endearing. I just wish there was a way I could get her to listen to me without involving Nikita’s husband.

Kidnap is not above me when it comes to keeping my promises.

Murder may not even be.

The email I sent last night after unearthing the footage of Aleena on her knees in front of Andrik is proof of this. It made it seem as if money is the answer to everything, but the guilt it is bombarding me with now is horrendous.

Morals have me wanting to say I’m striving to get Zakhar a new heart because he deserves one—no child should endure what he has the past twelve months—but in reality, it is because I don’t want Andrik to use Zakhar’s health battles to excuse his rollercoaster moods.

I need him to be honest and upfront.

He can’t do that with his son’s sickness hanging over his head.

I went about it the wrong way, though. Not just for Andrik and his family, but Nikita as well. The email I sent went to someone high up at the hospital where she is undertaking her residency. I don’t think she has a clue the board at Myasnikov Private is letting people buy their way to the top of the organ donor list.

She wouldn’t work there if that were the case, and she would be looking into the donation of her mother’s organs more studiously. It occurred under the name of the doctor I emailed last night.

Needing to make things right, I switch off the faucet, wrap a towel around my body, and then enter the main part of my room. I veer my steps for the drawers closest to the door, mindful I dumped my phone there after exchanging numbers with Konstantine.

“If you ever feel the need to hack my security system again, I’d rather you go through me than my competitors,” he said while punching his number into my cell. “We all have to eat.” He laughed like his paycheck is more important to him than Andrik. He’s a terrible liar. “Even her,” he murmured while handing me a tablet frozen on a grainy image timestamped after the footage I’d stumbled onto yesterday.

Aleena left Andrik’s room with red cheeks and glossy, dilated eyes. I know her well enough to decipher what her expression meant.

She hadn’t been bedded by a god.

She had been rejected by one.

Her devastation mimicked the pain that crossed her face anytime our mother told us we were unworthy of anything more than an arranged marriage. She was hurting, and I witnessed our mother deepening her wounds with a ton of unkind words only feet from Andrik’s room when Konstantine hit play on the tablet.

Her dressing-down proved that Andrik didn’t touch Aleena. He merely refused to let her leave his room until the people watching his every move believed he had.

Learning that is another reason I am showering earlier tonight than normal. It is hard to remember your objectives when you’re being swamped by euphoria.

“Where the hell is my phone?” I murmur to myself when my search of the drawers near the door comes up empty. I swear I left it there before showering, but it is nowhere to be found in any region of my room.

My brows furrow when I realize my phone isn’t the only item missing. The laptop I used to hack into Andrik’s home security system is also gone, and so are the instructions I jotted down when Maksim’s hacker, Easton, showed me how to override the firewall of the home server. It was a simple infiltration since no one expects to be hacked from inside their dwelling.

Konstantine made out that Andrik appreciated my help, so why would he confiscate my belongings as if I am a child?

The theories in my head piss me off.

So much so, I am done playing nice.

After releasing a big breath, suffocating the scream I am desperate to release, I charge out of my room and make a beeline for the west wing as if I am wearing more than a towel. I can’t confidently declare that Andrik demanded I sleep in the east wing because it was the furthest from his bedroom, but my hunches are usually accurate, so I run with it.

He wants distance between us. Lots of it, and I will give it to him— after I’ve given him a piece of my mind.

“Andrik?” I call out while trampling over a pricy hallway runner and veering past paintings by world-renowned artists.

Andrik’s level of wealth reveals why my mother was so eager for Aleena to sink her hooks into him, and why her ruse seems to have started years earlier than Andrik realized. An average man would struggle to dream of this type of net worth. Yet Andrik achieved it by his thirty-fifth birthday. It almost makes me proud of him until I remember that I am meant to be angry.

“Andrik!” I shout again while opening door after door after door.

I stop dead in my tracks at the last door on the left when my senses tingle. They caution me to slow my roll. I don’t listen. I never do. It is a bad trait of being impulsively stubborn.

After another big exhale, I push open the door with force and storm inside. “I want my belongings back. Now! They’re not mine, and Maksim won’t take kindly to you confiscating his things.”

As my eyes shoot around a bedroom as manly furnished as the room I saw Aleena kneeling in, I swallow down the bile burning my throat. Nothing happened between them, so that isn’t the cause of the bitterness surging from my stomach to my throat. It is the dozens of photos spread across Andrik’s bed.

Why does he have multiple images of my childhood nanny?

I step closer and gasp.

Stasy isn’t the only person featured in the exposé of my family’s secrets. Zakhar is there too.

“Oh, Mother, what did you do?” I murmur to myself when I notice the similarities between Zakhar and Stasy. She looks just how Zakhar said. Me but twenty-plus years older.

Wet hair slides against my back when I jackknife to the left. A noise sounds from the bathroom. It isn’t the creak of old waterpipes. It sounds like a man in pain— or ecstasy .

Too curious for my own good, and somewhat a sucker for punishment, I step closer to the bathroom.

Trickling water sounds louder the further I walk, lengthening my strides.

I’ve never been more ashamed of my body’s needs when the quickest glance through a crack in the door has my clit beating out a mariachi tune.

A trillion theories roll through my head, though they seem inconsequential compared to the visual of Andrik in the shower, stroking his cock.

The heavy stream of water pumping onto the glass partition means not a single speckle of the awe-inspiring visual is hidden from my sight. I can see every ridge of his cock. Every throb of the vein feeding his fantastic manhood. I can even see the droplet of pre-cum his precise pumps cause to the end of his cut penis.

I should look away, but no matter how hard my brain screams at me to do precisely that, I can’t. I drink in the way his manly hand doesn’t deter from the size of his cock, and how his lips part more with every strangled pump.

I watch the frustration that crosses his face when he takes his anger out on his cock, and with that, learn that even the most unethical scene can be the most beautiful.

When my eyes lower to the wide girth of his cock pumping in and out of his fist, my thighs press. He must be close to finding release. I’m on the verge of climax, and I am only watching. I can’t feel the way his cock flexes when he balances his free hand on the tiled wall above his head before he flutters his eyes closed, or feel the smoothness of the pre-cum he drags down his shaft with his thumb, but nothing weakens the wave building low in my stomach.

Instinctively, my body seeks a way to lessen the tsunami that’s been brewing in my core for days.

As I pant along with Andrik, I glide my hand beneath my towel before brushing my fingertips over the opening of my pussy.

Electricity blisters through me when my thumb finds my clit.

I roll it at the same frantic pace Andrik uses to stroke his cock. It is a fast, needy speed that doubles the size of the wave about to crest in my womb.

A soft groan seeps through my lips when I slip two fingers between the folds of my pussy. I’m wet. Actually, more like saturated. I am as drenched now as I was when Andrik spanked me over the sofa in his den.

Slickness coats my fingers, and the undeniable aroma of lust fills the air as the movie of his punishment rolls through my head. It goes a little longer than the actual scene and includes both his hands and mouth soothing the rush of euphoria prickling my skin with goose bumps.

When the raunchy exposé ends, I stuff two fingers inside myself, my pussy needing something to cling to when I return my eyes to the crack in the door. The visual of Andrik’s fat cock sliding in and out of his hand increases my recklessness.

After adjusting the span of my thighs, I thrust my fingers inside myself urgently. Desperately. I finger fuck myself like they’ll achieve the same level of euphoria they would if it were Andrik’s hand between my legs.

My muscles pull taut when Andrik’s pace quickens like he knows how scandalous his show has become. He bends his knees and then tilts his hips upward, matching the incline my fingers make as they surge in and out of my pussy.

While biting my lower lip to lessen my moans, I pretend my fingers are his cock and that my palm slamming against my clit is the arrow of his fantastic V muscle.

I grip the door handle with my spare hand, too shuddering in a lust frenzy to trust my legs to keep me upright. Tingles race through my core when Andrik adjusts his position until he is almost facing me front on.

The fatness of his cock and how much pre-cum it leaks makes my pumps even more desperate. I stuff my fingers in and out, in and out until the fire in my belly roars to life.

Its burn is brutal, even more so when white streams of cum shoot from Andrik’s cock and land halfway up the subway tiles.

But before I can fully topple in ecstasy, the rug is cruelly pulled out from beneath me.

“Arabella…”

What?

I yank my hand away from my pussy and take a step back, certain the name I just heard didn’t leave Andrik’s mouth.

He wasn’t thinking about my sister while he was stroking his cock. Surely not.

They have no spark.

No connection.

He turned her down while she was naked and kneeling in front of him.

He also didn’t seem the slightest bit attracted to her. We look the same even though we’re different. Our personalities make us different. Don’t they?

I step back again when the name I would give anything not to hear seeps from Andrik’s mouth for the second time. Then I toss my hand over my mouth to ensure the dinner I scarfed down under Anoushka’s concerning watch remains in my stomach.

Confident I am seconds from losing the fight not to vomit, I snatch up my towel and sprint into the corridor.

I only just make it into the downstairs washroom before I lose more than dinner.

My sanity exits right along with it.