Caterina
Ilay there, facedown in the blankets, for what feels like a long time after Viktor leaves the room.
I’ve never felt so humiliated. So ashamed.
I’m hurt. I’m afraid.
And I’m also terribly, terribly aroused.
“What iswrongwith me?” I let out a small cry, my mouth against the bunched-up duvet as I lie there, my ass red and throbbing and my thighs sticky with the arousal that Viktor glimpsed and threw in my face.How could that have turned me on?
I’ve never been spanked in my entire life, not even as a child. To have Viktor throw me across the bed like that, using his belt again and again until I felt like my skin might catch fire, should have been nothing but the most humiliating pain.
And it was.
But it also turned me on in a way that I’ve never, ever felt before.
“What is wrong with me?” I ask again, mumbling to the empty air, but of course, there’s no response. I’m alone in the house again, which should be a relief, but it isn’t. I can’t stay here forever.
I have a choice to make.
Tell Luca that I’m done with my sham of an arranged marriage, or go back to it and everything that entails. No more fertility treatments, no more doctor’s appointments, no more injections. Just Viktor doing his best to get me pregnant the old-fashioned way, and I have no doubt that he’ll try as often as he’s able.
Between our wedding night and what happened today, I have no doubt that I’ll enjoy it no matter how hard I try not to. That Viktor will pull me down into some dark spiral, arousing my body to want things that it shouldn’t, dragging me into his depravity along with him.
Slowly, painfully, I push myself up from the bed. It’s not the first time I’ve had to pull myself together from the aftermath of violence. Not the first time that I’ve been terrified of my husband, shivering with fear while I take the punishment for my perceived flaws.
But something about this time was different.
For one, I know I was in the wrong, deep down. I needed to get away from Viktor, but I also know I shouldn’t have taken the girls with me. I think some small part of me wanted to scare him, to make him feel the same fear that the fathers of those women that he sells must have felt when their daughters went missing, but I also know it was wrong to use Anika and Yelena in that way. They’re innocent in all of this—they never asked to be born into this life, or to lose their mother, or to be given a new one from a fraught marriage of convenience. I shouldn’t have involved them.
So in a way, for the first time, I actually deserved what my husband meted out.
But also, Franco punishing me neverturned me on.
Franco never spanked me. He would grab me, slap me, throw me around, punch me, force me to bed with him. But it had never occurred to him to spank me. If he had, I still don’t think it would have had the same result.
Viktor turned me on because, deep down, the same brutal depravity, the Bratva in him, the things I most despise, I’m also aroused by.
I’m terrified of and horrified by and attracted to my husband all at once. It’s the most confusing fucking thing I’ve ever had to confront in my entire life.
And now I have to decide whether to go back to Viktor and truly face it, make a marriage with him regardless of the consequences and regardless of my own emotional turmoil, or I go to Luca and tell him I want it annulled.
There will be consequences to that, too.
Bloody ones.
If I leave Viktor, he’ll be furious. He won’t hesitate to go to war with Luca, with Liam even, to resurrect all the old grudges and all the old hate. And that will be my fault because I couldn’t deal with what it meant to be married to a Bratvapakhan, a bargain that I agreed to. I made vows, and even if I didn’t know the full extent of who my husband was, what he did, I knew the rumors. The stories.
I knew that there were parts of him that were not good. Dark corners, terrible sins. But there’s not a man I’ve ever known in this life who doesn’t have some of that haunting him. Certainly, my father did. Even Luca does.
So what do I do?
How can I forgive Viktor for any of it? Go to bed with him, be a wife to him, live out my days married to him? Knowing what I know, how can I not resent him for it, even hate him?
But at the same time, how can I walk away?
And why thefuckdo I want him so badly, even after all of this?