Page 50 of The Brutal Arrangement

It seemed so backward to wonder why Damon was dismissing me. This was what Katerina had hinted at. She hadn’t told me the truth about my having to have sex with my husband, but shehad told me more than once that the Ivanovs would let me into the building then ignore me.

But what is the point?

Some strategy had to be at play, but while I wasn’t harassed, bothered, under gunpoint, or taken brutally with a gag in my mouth and a binding on my hands, I wanted to relax and accept that for the first time in my life, I was simply cared for. All my needs were seen to. I didn’t have to worry about where food was coming from. I didn’t have any tasks to complete or rooms to clean.

If I were stupid, I’d lower my guard, but I just couldn’t ease up that much.

If he said I could give him heirs… then…

Shaking my head, I cringed and tired of walking so aimlessly.

Everything felt aimless,tooaimless. Idleness didn’t suit me, but wishing for something to do seemed like I was wanting Damon to dome.

With this idleness, my mind kept wandering back to what it felt like when I was with him.

This morbid curiosity about how he could make me feel so good couldn’t be healthy. Women weren’t supposed to want to be gagged and tied up. We weren’t good feminists and independent females to desire a man who’d do that. Yet, no matter how much I scolded myself for enjoying it, I couldn’t own up to the fact that it was so wrong.

Every time I heard someone approaching, I couldn’t help that my heart picked up faster. In anticipation of seeing him again, I struggled to distinguish whether I was excited to be near himand experience that wicked desire or I was scared to be within his reach where he could make good on that death threat.

God, this issonot normal.

Rubbing my hand on the back of my neck, I worried whether this would ever make sense.

My life had never been “normal”. After my father passed away and left me with just my mom, I felt like we were both enslaved to the rat race of making money to live on without him providing for us anymore. Then with my mom’s diagnosis, I had no life at all outside of working.

But this?

This is supposed to be my life?

I shook my head. It wouldn’t last. And I despised myself every time that I wondered if it could.

Quit this stupid Stockholm syndrome crap, Luce.

I rolled my eyes.

This isn’t a real marriage. Thisiscaptivity. It’s abuse. It’s not right. And there is nothing sustainable about this waiting game.

Because that was what I was doing.

Waiting.

And waiting some more.

Damon wouldn’t have decided to keep me here if he didn’t plan to ever do anything with or to me again. I knew that as a fact,somehow, and so, each day passed the same. Tense and full of another waiting game.

I sighed, leaving his apartment floor to go down to the main level where a library of old books might help entertain me. They were all classics, looking too expensive to touch, and none of them caught my interest, but at least it was something to look at. Something to distract myself with as I took in all the titles on the spines in languages I didn’t understand.

Is he trying to get me to relax and lower my guard before he shows up?

Is he too busy doing… whatever scarred Mafia men do?

Questions went unanswered in my mind. No matter how much I dwelled on it all, I would be no closer to any truth if I couldn’t speak with anyone.

In the library, I tried to stay out of the way of the maid dusting in there. She lowered her head when she saw me, but I tried to smile as pleasantly as possible to show her I wasn’t a threat. And I wasn’t one ofthem, to whom she’d need to look invisible. This woman was likeme. I’d fit in more with her than anyone else.

Hey, maybe I can ask to be hired as a maid here, too. Then I wouldn’t be so anxious and bored and doing freaking nothing.

“Sometimes if you twirl it,” I said after watching her dust with a feathery contraption, “it collects and holds more dust.”

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