Page 57 of Her Vicious Angel

Of all the melodramatic-ass bastards.

That’s the stupidest billionaire shit I have ever heard, but mostly I’m offended.

If he’s so into the chase,why did he never make me run?Why did he never want to chase me?

Why was he so insistent that he would never involve me?

31

ANDREI

If I don’t find Cerise soon I am going to start clawing the skin off my body. That’s how painful it is having her gone.

I have had my men comb the streets around my father’s home over and over again, breaking into hotel rooms and apartment buildings to look for her, checking surveillance cameras, and asking if anyone saw an American woman that night.

No one saw shit.

It’s like she melted away, like she doesn’t exist.

Iknowshe fucking exists, because my hard, engorged dick every time I think about her spread-eagled for me, or fucking my face, is a painful reminder.

I’m downing scotch after scotch in the library, hoping to dull the raging impotent fury I feel at not being able to find her, when Vladimir knocks tentatively at the door.

Everyone has knocked tentatively around me ever since Cerise left. Because the night I came back I killed everyone who was on guard duty that night.

Vladimir comes in and stands respectfully before me on the carpet.

“What?” I ask, my voice leaden and heavy.

“There’s a worker at the train station,” he says. “She’s been on vacation this week. But she says she remembers an American woman that night. She asked how to get to a couple of different places and seemed to be trying to hide.”

I’m suddenly on my feet, shaking the alcohol out of my system.

If I knew which direction she ran in at least I’d have a starting point.

On my way over to the train station, I sit in the back of the limo looking at her social media profiles and school profiles.

I linger over Cerise’s profile at the school where she did her PhD. Her face is bright, happy, open. My mouth twists up thinking I would never guess from this profile how many dirty, wrong things she wants me to do to her.

Something pops up that I hadn’t noticed before. A little button that says, “read dissertation.”

32

CERISE

One day about two weeks after I ran away from Andrei I was on my knees in the herb garden. I was kneeling in the dirt pulling weeds. This chore was actually fun, and my cheeks were flushed with the exertion. Maybe if I kept doing this hard physical work I’d stop desiring him.

If only.

I had woken up that morning with my thighs slick with arousal, my body craving his rough touch. I imagined those big hands on my ass and my stomach clenched with need.

I had just reached trembling fingers down to my pussy when Sister Elena snapped on the lights.

“Time to get up, lazy girls!” she barked, glaring at me as if sheknewI was lying in my bunk lusting for a man.

I readjusted my veil for the dozenth time that day, trying to cram it down further on my head.

I heard some mild commotion on the other side of the metal grate into the garden but I didn’t even look up, ripping and tearing at the strong, milky weeds with satisfaction. There are a surprising number of dramas at a nunnery full of postulants trying to pretend they aren’t horny.

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