Champagne Venom (Orlov Bratva, #1)(54)

I pause for a moment to watch her. When I’m not around, she looks so at peace here. That ever-present furrow in her forehead is smoothed out. She looks like she belongs.

I walk over and set the food down on the dresser to her right. My shadow falls across the wall, and she gasps.

“Jesus!” she exclaims, clutching her heart. “I didn’t even hear you come in.”

Her earbuds fall out and I can hear the tinny sound of her music blaring. “How could you have, with your music playing so loud? You could damage your eardrums.”

“Okay, Dad.” She rolls her eyes and then spies the food I’ve brought. “You’ve come bearing gifts.

You should’ve led off with that.”

“How’s the nausea?”

“It was bad this morning. But right now, that smells good.”

“Given the way you devoured the repulsive fare at the vegan place, I figured hummus and tabbouleh would be your speed.”

“Bless you,” she breathes. “Maybe you’re not so evil after all.”

I start unpacking containers. I spoon a few different things onto a paper plate and pass it to her. She accepts it gratefully, tearing into a seared chicken skewer the second she has it in her hands.

I sit down next to her, and she tucks her legs in to make room. Something about this domestic dance feels strangely soothing. Like coming home and taking your tie off, getting that first full breath of air you’ve had in hours.

“Where were you all day?” she asks between bites.

“Working.”

She raises her eyebrows. “How descriptive. At Orion or… in the field?”

I almost smile at her evasiveness. It’s charming. “The latter.”

“Ah. Are you going to tell me about it?”

“Wasn’t planning to.” The less she knows, the safer it will be for her. That’s the idea, at least.

She sighs and looks down at her food. “You didn’t have to uproot the entire greenhouse, you know.”

“You said you were deathly allergic.”

“If I ingest some, I’ll get killed. But if I touch it, I’ll just get hives.”

“And now, you won’t get either. You’re welcome,” I say. “How did you even find out you were allergic?”

She sets the skewer down and wipes at a smear of grease on her lip. Her eyes go fuzzy with remembering. “It’s not really an interesting story. We had a chamomile plant growing at the edge of the trailer park. Clara and I used to play close to it a lot. I would get hives and started itching.

Eventually, I put two and two together.”

Of course, she’s twisting the pendant between her fingers, her gaze fixed on some distant point far beyond this room.

“And you decided to eat some, just to see what would happen? Hives seem like a good enough reason to steer clear.”

“That would be my mother’s doing,” she says dryly, her tone dropping an octave or two and withering into something bitter and dark. “She didn’t understand why we stopped hanging out there. When I told her, she didn’t believe me. She thought I was being dramatic. ‘Allergies are for cowards. You just need to go outside more.’ Those were her exact words to me.”

I raise my eyebrows, and she shrugs. “So I decided to show her just how allergic I was. I grabbed a handful of the plant and ran back to our trailer. I had hives by the time I got back inside, but she still told me I was being dramatic. So I started to eat the flowers.” Her expression gets dreamier, more

distant and detached, refusing to connect with the memory and all the pain associated with it. “To be fair, I just thought my hives would get worse or start exploding or something. I didn’t realize my throat would close up the way it did.”

“Neither did she, I assume.”

She takes a deep breath. “Yeah, well she figured out I was serious when I passed out. She called the ambulance. My trip to the emergency room cost almost two thousand dollars. I think my parents were more upset about the bill than my near-death experience. Actually, I know they were. They said it.

Multiple times.”

She meets my gaze, her eyes sadder than I’ve ever seen them. “As far as they were concerned, I’d done it to myself. I was being spiteful. I was just trying to hurt them.”

I see the beginnings of a tear forming in the corner of her eye. Another man, a better man, a proper husband, might take her hand and try to comfort her.

But I don’t move.

She blinks a couple of times and shakes her head. “I don’t know why I just told you that.”

“Your parents sound like assholes.”

She smiles. “Yeah, they kinda were.”

“I know an asshole parent when I see one.”

“Your mother?” she ventures tentatively. “Is that why you haven’t told her about us?”

The way she asks the question betrays how much it bothers her that my family still doesn’t know about our marriage. She feels hidden—and to be fair, she is.

But not for the reasons she suspects.

“Not my mother. My father,” I say. “He was a monster, to put it mildly.”

“Did he eat all your cereal on nights when he was drunk so you were forced to go to school without breakfast?” Her eyes are lighter now. Maybe the fact that I admitted to having a bastard of a father like hers has created some sort of bond between us.