Page 99 of His Prince

He makes me fucking rage.

By the time I’ve showered and brushed my teeth, he’s still not in bed, and yet there it sits. A picture of her on my pillow.

I pick it up, the offensive image of Katarina glaring back at me.

My chest tightens and I press against my frantically beating heart.

I crumple it in my hand, tossing it onto the floor where it belongs.

“Blyad!” I shout and then send my fist through the wall. I don’t know how he found this or what he’s thinking, but none of it’s good.

None of it.

21

ANGEL

I’ve gotten angrier the longer I sit with it, the longer I hold it in. By the time day seeps into night, I’m in a full-on rage. I want to burn the entire house to the ground, not that I will. But Mikhail. My husband. A liar. The worst of the worst. I want to burn him.

I want him to feel the pain I feel.

I want him to cry with it.

Maybe I’ll let Diablo cut off his toes. Maybe his ears. And then let my father loose on his tongue.

Maybe then he’ll apologize for tricking me, for never loving me.

For ruining me.

“Where is he?” Mikhail bellows, stomping around the first floor of the house. His shouts echo loudly through the hallways, and I wince. Thankfully my dad and Tatum, as well as Diablo and Skylar, are sequestered in their bedrooms upstairs while I’m hiding downstairs, exhausted from the emotional turmoil of the day, but unable to drag myself up to our bedroom.

I don’t want to see him.

I despise him.

I can’t believe I was fooled. I married a man who killed his wife, a wife I didn’t even know about. What else has he lied to me about? What else has he kept hidden?

I don’t even know if I care to know anymore.

The door swings open and Mikhail stands there, rumpled with bloodshot eyes. He looks half drunk and slightly insane.

Good. I hope he’s just as angry as I am.

“Where the fuck have you been?” he growls and almost seems to grow in size in the doorjamb.

I stare back at him, unafraid, ready to burn the house down with him in it. If he tries to hurt me, he won’t live another day.

I guarantee that.

“I don’t want to see you,” I say and he stalks toward me, the door slamming shut behind him.

“Why?” he asks. “Is it because of…her?”

The way he says that last word is disparaging, hateful. No wonder he killed her. He didn’t like her. Not at all. And what about me? Am I next? He’s never loved me, not even in the beginning. If I stayed, would I end up buried somewhere on his property, discarded and forgotten?

I don’t respond to his question, silence pinging off the walls of the room, digging into my chest and making my heart bleed.

“It’s because of her,” he finally says, and then he throws a wadded-up piece of paper at my feet. The photograph of her, so easily tossed aside.