“Yes!” she snapped. “Cammie, I wouldn’t have called you if I wasn’t being damn serious.”
That stung, but I got it. I’d left her when she needed me the most, but I’d had to think of myself. I’d have been as little use to her as Abramovicz’s child bride as I was incognito at the Satan’s Sinners’ MC compound.
At least after a stint there, I was alive. As Abramovicz’s wife, I’d probably have hurled myself down the stairs by now.
“Have you told Eoghan?”
Because he’d asked me to steal her one of Mama’s favorite necklaces for a birthday present, I had some insight into their relationship. I knew Eoghan wasn’t a bad husband—well, bad in our world was a little different than the regular one—but only someone who gave a fuck about their woman would bother to do something like that.
Which was exactly why I’d done it too. The danger to myself be damned. I loved my sister. It fit that Eoghan did as well, and that we’d worked together to make her happy.
“No,” she growled under her breath. “Why would I tell him?”
“Because he’s your husband?” I retorted. “Aren’t man and wife supposed to share things like this?”
“I just wish I’d let him wax me,” she wailed. “That would have been less painful than this.”
“Inessa, if it’s that bad you need to tell him, for God’s sake.” My hands tightened around the steering wheel, forcing a shiver out of me as pain whispered along my nerve endings like the sweetest of caresses.
“I can’t!”
Whatever I’d expected today, without a shadow of a doubt, I hadn’t thought I’d be talking about my sister getting her vajayjay shaved by her husband. Did she have to be so stubborn about this?
“He might need to take you to the ER,” I pointed out.
“I refuse to go to the ER over a—”
“A, what?” I countered, even though I got it. Well, not entirely, but Iwasa woman. No one wanted to go to the ER over something like this.
“You know what,” she snarled, and in her voice, I heard humiliated tears that made me annoyed at myself for being amused earlier.
Uncertain about what to do, especially when we were this far apart and knowing she was really desperate to be calling me, I said, “I’ll tell him. Let me break the news. That’ll spare you.”
“You’re kidding, right? Then he’ll know I told you I let him shave me last night. H-He—” A sob escaped her, one that was quickly choked back.
“Malyshka,” I soothed. “What is it?”
Her gulp was so loud, it was audible. “H-He doesn’t want anyone to see my vagina. That’s why he shaved me.”
I blinked, then rolled my eyes. Then winced as a wave of misery hit me.
The green kind.
I’d have loved for Nyx to feel that way about me.
To not want anyone to see my pussy.
To feel that possessive of me that not even an esthetician could prod me between the legs.
That was how things had gotten so complicated, and gone so wrong. I’d thought he wanted more from me, more than any other woman when he’d told me no other brother was allowed to fuck me. I just hadn’t realized he did that with all the clubwhores he’d slept with.
He used them exclusively until he was bored with them.
Just like he’d grown bored with me.
Squeezing the wheel again, the physical pain easier to deal with than the emotional, my throat clogged with tears as I rasped, “Is it really that bad?”
Silence.