Page 27 of His Prince
I press a hand to his warm chest and he grabs it, squeezing tightly.
“I’ll be fine.”
He reluctantly lets me go, and I stride toward the house, telling myself I’m not going to look for Mikhail, not going to confront him. I’m only going in to make lunch for the guys. Since dawn, they’ve been up working. They’re hungry. They deserve my best. I can do this for them.
When I enter the kitchen, Nina is standing there watching me approach, her lips pursed.
“You made him mad.”
“Good,” I reply, moving to the pantry and grabbing the loaves of Russian black bread, and cured meats and salted fish from the fridge.
As I’m putting everything together, I hear a door slam, and I peer over at Nina who is washing some vegetables—because I’ve insisted on them eating something green with each meal—and wordlessly berating me.
“You’re going to pit brother against brother,” she says, and I turn to look at her.
“Who’s his brother?”
“Ivan.”
My movements halt as I place the knife down and glower at her. “And no one thought to tell me this?”
“I thought you knew.”
“I know nothing,” I whisper, feeling my eyes start to sting. I fucking know nothing. At all. Not the man I married. Not the people I work with. I don’t even know myself anymore.
Nina comes to a stop near me and her hand falls on my arm, squeezing roughly, her fingernails digging into my skin, making me gasp.
“Pull yourself together, boy. Don’t let him see you cry.”
I sniffle and nod, swallowing roughly, before schooling my features and getting back to work.
I can cry later when I’m alone.
Where no one can see. Not even myself.
6
MIKHAIL
“Ido not want to hear your shitty words from your shitty mouth,” Ivan says to me as he glowers over his computer at me. His glasses are crooked and smudged and his hair is a mess.
We are nothing alike, we don’t even look like siblings. Granted, we’re half-brothers, his mother a whore my father kept for years.
But I digress.
“When was the last time you left this place?” I ask, taking in the smell permeating from the garbage can.
I take in the plates of food and the crumbs lining the floor and my jaw tightens.
“Several days. I’ve been busy, brother.”
“Too busy to see what my husband is doing to this place?”
He eyes me from behind his glasses and blinks at me. “I do not know what you speak of.”
“Ivan, the entire house is fucking destroyed. My office wall is gold. And you know I hate thatcolor.”
He snorts and adjusts his glasses, succeeding in making them even more crooked. But he seems unbothered by it all.