Gilded Cage: A Russian Mafia Romance (Kovalyov Bratva Book 1) by Nicole Fox (best books for 20 year olds .txt) 📕

his lips. I can see it right there. Right on the verge of being spoken.

So close…

But the words don’t come out.

Maybe some pain is too deep to ever see the light again.

Instead, Artem reaches for the whiskey instead and takes a long draw. When he puts the bottle back down, he looks even more troubled than he did when he picked it up.

I understand that reaction instinctively. He thinks the alcohol will save him from facing his trauma. Thinks it will quiet his demons, blunt his pain.

But for some reason, it’s not working today.

Part of me pities him for that. It can’t be easy to live with grief constantly threatening to tear you apart. Everyone needs a coping mechanism.

But the bigger part of me wants to tear that mechanism out of his hands and make him reveal his pain to the light. To me.

That’s the only way anyone can ever heal.

“Tell me their name,” I say softly. I sidle a little closer to him.

He stiffens.

“I’ve lost too many people to name,” he rumbles.

“That’s a cop-out and you know it.”

“It’s all I’m giving you.”

I sigh tiredly and stare out at the ocean for a while. This man is so fucking frustrating. My hair flutters in the wind, long dark ribbons tossed across my face.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks after a minute has passed.

“Just wondering if things would have been different if my brother were here.”

“Meaning what—he could have saved you from me?” he practically snarls.

I don’t cringe back from the venom in his words the way he thought I might.

Instead, I just nod. “Maybe.”

“Then you’re more naïve than I thought.”

That gets the reaction he wanted. A pang of hurt lashes through me. I pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them for what little comfort I can find.

“You didn’t know him,” I say in a whisper.

“I didn’t have to,” Artem growls back.

“Meaning what?” I snap, throwing his own words back at him. I keep my features calm but I can’t keep the undercurrent of fury out of my voice. “You would have killed him like you killed my father?”

I thought I wasn’t moved by Papa’s death. That maybe I was even happy he is gone. “Relieved”—wasn’t that the word I’d used?

It’s not until this moment that I realize it’s much more complicated than that.

I hated my father. A part of me was scared of him—rightfully so.

But he was the constant presence in my life that had been snatched away in the same kind of violence that had taken my brother.

Artem stares at me. Like he’s weighing what to say next. Whether to keep lying, keep hiding…

Or to finally start giving me answers. The truth I can handle. The truth I deserve.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “I would have killed him like I killed your father.”

“Or maybe he would have killed you.”

“Is that what you dream of at night when you get into bed?” he demands. “Do you want to see me dead?”

I suck in my breath. “That’s not what I said.”

“It was implied.”

I get up suddenly and brush the sand off my legs. Then I look down at Artem where he sits hunched over on the white beach.

“I’m not like you,” I hiss at him. “I don’t wish death on anyone. Even people who may deserve it.”

Then I turn away from him and start walking down the beach, my feet displacing little tufts of sand with every step.

I hear motion behind me, but I don’t look back.

Until, a second later, Artem seizes my arm and whirls me around.

I spin fast and stumble into his chest, but the contact just pisses me off further, so I place my hands on his torso and shove him away from me as hard as I can.

“Don’t touch me!”

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he murmurs.

“Bullshit,” I retort, and I hate that my voice trembles as if I’m close to tears. “Everything you do is to upset me. You’re addicted to your fucking power games.”

“Esme—”

“No!” I scream, trying to shake off his hand. “I wish that you’d just leave me alone!”

“Do you?”

The question slices through the air between us and lingers there.

I stare at him, forehead wrinkled in confusion. “I… what the hell does that mean?”

“It means that I can see through your tough façade, Esme Kovalyov,” he says, deliberately using the name I now bear as his wife. “You want to hate me, but you don’t. You can’t.”

I swallow hard. He struck a nerve. I should go. Should turn my back on this son of a bitch for good.

“I…”

My words break off in a whimper. The sound of my own grief, my rage, my despair, my desperation… it all reverberates inside me like a dull echo.

I feel so powerless. More so than ever.

I can’t even fight back against my own emotions.

I raise my eyes, searching Artem’s face like there are answers written there. But all I can see is confusion.

“It was that night at The Siren,” I whisper. “That night… it messed with my head. It’s still messing with my head. I thought you were someone different.”

“You thought I was your knight in shining armor,” he guesses correctly. “But it turned out I was just another monster.”

I cover my face with both hands for a moment. He twitches forward like he wants to peel them away. Before he can, however, I remove them myself and fix him with a gaze that’s equal parts desperate and defiant.

“Are you, Artem?” I ask in a muted voice. “Are you a monster?”

“Aren’t we all? At the end of the day, we’re all just beasts.”

That’s a coward’s answer. He knows it. I know it.

I want more truth.

“And what kind of beast are you?”

“The kind that would die to protect you.”

Then he crosses the space between us and pulls me to him, his mouth slamming down on mine with the intensity that’s been building between us for weeks.

I let out a strangled moan, but my hands are already on him, clawing at his shirt. My