Chapter 7
MOLLY
I last exactly eleven days.
Eleven days of brisk professionalism, eyes forward, spine straight, perfectly calibrated workplace composure.
Eleven days of walking past Pavel’s office like it’s just a room, like nothing of naked consequence has ever happened inside it, like I am a woman completely unbothered by the memory of his hands.
On the twelfth day, I go shopping.
I tell myself it’s overdue. My work wardrobe has gotten safe, repetitive, and there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel good in what I wear.
This is a completely normal, completely unrelated decision that has nothing to do with Pavel Strakov.
I come home with four fitted dresses, two silk blouses, and a pencil skirt that my sensible inner voice immediately describes as a liability.
I wear the pencil skirt on Thursday.
The thing about Pavel is that he notices everything and shows nothing.
I have watched him receive genuinely alarming news without his expression shifting by a single degree.
He is the most controlled person I have ever met, which makes it extraordinarily satisfying when his eyes drop to the hem of my skirt as I lean across his desk to hand him the Vasiliev file.
Just for a fraction of a second, then back up to my face, blank and composed.
But I saw it. I straighten up and smile like I noticed nothing at all. “The revised projections are on page four.” His voice is perfectly even when he thanks me. I walk out on steady legs, turn the corner, press my back against the wall of the corridor, and grin at nothing for five full seconds.
Then I go back to my desk and start planning tomorrow’s outfit.
It becomes a game I play only with myself, which is the most dangerous kind. The new dresses come out one by one. I find reasons to stop by his office that are technically legitimate. A signature needed, a call to relay, a scheduling conflict that could have been handled by email but isn’t.
I time my coffee runs to coincide with his, an exercise in casual engineering that I am mildly ashamed of and not remotely ashamed enough to stop.
On a Tuesday afternoon, I squeeze past him in the narrow corridor between the file room and the back stairwell, turning sideways in the tight space, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off him.
He goes very still.
I murmur an apology, keep walking, and do not look back because I have learned my lesson about looking back. I think about his stillness for the rest of the day.
Staff meetings become exercises in peripheral vision.
I’m acutely aware of where he is in any given room, the quality of his attention when it moves in my direction.
He’s better at hiding it than I am. He’s not perfect at it, which is the most encouraging thing that has happened to me in several days.
It’s a Wednesday evening, and when the office empties out to just the two of us, the real game begins.
I’m at my desk when he comes out of his office. I hear him pause in the doorway, and I keep my eyes on my screen and my breathing even and tell myself I am a professional woman doing professional work, right up until his footsteps cross the floor toward me and stop just behind my chair.
“Molly.” His growl raises the room’s temperature.
I swivel my chair to face him.
He’s looking down at me with those pale eyes that are not cold at all, not even slightly, and the expression on his face is the one he almost never lets out.
Except that one night.
He sounds grumpy. “You have been trying very hard to make my life difficult.”
I muster the most innocence I can at the moment. “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”
“The skirt.”
“Is it some kind of dress code violation? Because we don’t have a dress code, sir.” I’m enjoying toying with him too much to stop now.
His nostrils flare. “And the corridor on Tuesday? The way you brushed past me… inappropriate.”
“How else was I supposed to get through there? The corridor is narrow. It’s always been a problem, but you didn’t want to remodel when I brought it up. Have you changed your mind, sir?”
His jaw sets. “Molly.”
“Yes?”
There’s a silence that lasts approximately one second before his hand curves around my jaw, and the last few weeks of careful professionalism dissolve completely and without apology, as he pulls me to his mouth.
This is worse than the first time. The first time was shock and want colliding, the recklessness of a thing you didn’t plan. This is different, forbidden. Makes it consuming in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
The press of him, the way he lifts me onto my desk irrespective of my laptop, paperwork, pens, none of it matters more than getting him inside of me. He hitches my skirt up carefully—I was smart enough to make sure all my new clothes stretch—and it’s the last careful thing he does to me.
Underwear? In shreds.
Heels? Clattering to the floor.
He doesn’t even bother to get my blouse off before he thrusts home.
My legs flail behind him until he lifts them up while he bends forward over me.
It’s seconds before all my morning yoga pays off, and my ankles are by my ears.
His cock grinds against my G-spot with every stroke, his pelvis mashing my clit, and all I can do is grip the edge of my desk behind me and take it.
“You are trouble, pet.”
Folded up like this, I can barely speak. But I manage to pant, “Yes!”
He growls low, then holds my hands over my head, pinning them there as he pounds into me. His massive weight—all that muscle—holds me down too.
Not that I want to escape.
My core twists around his cock until I explode, and he drives harder, faster, making it last. The lack of oxygen is enough to make my vision go black, but then he backs off enough that I breathe automatically. More like a strangled gasp than a breath.
He eases off, kissing down my body as he goes, until he’s kneeling on the floor. His head is between my thighs at the edge of the desk, and he drinks me in long, slow licks. I can’t hold still—too sensitive. But he wraps his arms around my ass to keep me where he wants me.
And then his tongue twirls around my clit, and I’m on fire.
I dig my fingers into his silver hair. Need something to hold on to. One stroke, another, and then his fingers join the party, hollowing me. I ignite again, coming all over his face and fingers.
The thing that undoes me completely is the reverence.
The way he handles me like I matter, like I am, against all the available evidence of his life and his world, something worth being careful with.
This isn’t just a hookup—hookups don’t go down on you after the sex. At least, not in my experience.
I’m in serious trouble, and I know it, and I stay anyway.
He turns me over, entering me from behind as he grips my ass.
He mutters in Russian while our bodies slap together.
When he’s close, I feel it in the way he thickens inside of me.
Then I feel his pulse there, and it triggers something deep in my core.
I launch from his orgasm, and he groans as he comes.
His hips jerk forward as he does, like he can’t stop himself.
After that, two mistakes become three. A pattern develops, so I stop pretending.
At least, I don’t pretend when it’s just us.
No one at the office knows. In meetings, he treats me with the same exacting professionalism as always, and I match it, and the only evidence of anything is the occasional weight of his gaze across a conference table and the fact that I have developed a very detailed familiarity with the ceiling of his office.
And the copy room. And each of the conference rooms.
The affair is not a gentle thing. It is not candlelight and whispered endearments. It is intensity and edge and the honesty that surfaces when two people have dispensed with pretense entirely.
He learns exactly what undoes me with the focused efficiency he applies to everything, and I find I’m not remotely embarrassed by this, which tells me something about how far gone I already am.
On a Thursday evening, he has me pressed against the length of his desk, his voice low at my ear, deliberate in the register he uses when the answer matters to him. His hand is on my throat—not squeezing, but claiming. “Say you’ll keep this between us.”
Not a request, not quite an order, something in between.
Ropes burn around my wrists and ankles, each bound to part of his desk as I lean back to accommodate the rope.
It’s a tight pose, but I like it. I am naked and utterly at his mercy.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played like this, but I never added interrogation or conversation into rope play before, and the combination is doing something interesting to my subspaced brain.
“I will,” I pant, still close to my climax. He’s halfway in me, and I want the rest of him. I’d say whatever he wanted to get that.
“Promise me,” he grits out, and his hand tightens, and the city lights swim at the edges of my vision. He gives me another inch.
“I promise,” I tell him, and I mean it completely.
He pulls back just enough to look at my face, and something moves through his expression beneath the satisfaction.
Something heavier, something that looks almost like a relief.
“Good. The secret will keep you safe,” he says quietly, like he’s saying it to himself, and then doesn’t say anything else for a while, and I stop thinking about words altogether the moment he gives me what I want.
He arches back, his cock digging into me just right. There’s sweat on his brow now—we’ve been at this particular game for a while. I didn’t know he wanted to take things this far, but I like it.
I like it a lot.
He bends forward just enough to take my nipple between his teeth as he fucks me in long, slow strokes. Heat flushes through me, concentrating in my middle. This won’t get me off—we both know it. But he’s playing my body like an instrument, and I don’t have it in me to complain.
I’m too lit up. Too far gone.
“I like you like this,” he snarls around my nipple. “Helpless. My private fuck toy.”
“Yours. Only yours,” I groan.
Was that too far?
He releases my nipple and loosens my leg restraints, then brings my shaking legs around his waist. “They stay there, pet.”
I don’t know how I can keep them around his waist when they’re so weak, but I’ll try.
Then he wraps his arms around me, hands under my ass, which pulls my arms back harder. I can’t touch him, and it’s killing me. But then he adjusts the angle, and my arms are the last thing on my mind.
I come in two strokes. He comes in ten.
Afterward, I lie still in the quiet of his office and stare at the ceiling and let the evening settle. He said it so naturally, woven into everything else, and at the time I’d let it wash over me. But now, in the stillness, the specific shape of his words surfaces and stays.
Not keep us safe. Not keep this safe.
The secret will keep you safe.
I’ve worked closely enough with him to know that every word he chooses is the exact word he intended, and safe is a word with a specific shape, and that shape implies something specific is not safe, or that something is threatening it, or both.
He’s a private man with a complicated life, and the need for secrecy has a hundred practical explanations. It’s part of the intensity he brings to everything, the way he holds things close.
I don’t blame him for wanting privacy.
But keep me safe? Safe from what, exactly?
Pavel is already back at his desk, jacket on, a document open in front of him as though the last hour was simply something that needed attending to.
I sit up, reach for my dress, and locate my professional composure, which has been through a considerable amount at this point and deserves some kind of commendation.
“I should head out.”
He looks at me with those pale, careful eyes. “For the night?”
I nod once. “It’s late.”
“Very well.”
As I reach for the door, I feel a shift behind me.
And then he’s on me, spinning me so my back hits the door just before he pins me to it in a vicious kiss.
I wrap my leg around his and grind against him, unable to stop myself.
He’s hard again—I feel it. His hand coasts over my body until it settles at my throat, and he breaks the kiss, forehead resting on mine.
“See you in the morning.” Then he pulls back, turns me around, swats my ass, and guides me out the door.
“But you’re… I mean…” I motion downward with my eyes.
He smirks ever so slightly. “Do you think I’m ever not hard when you’re around, pet?”
My breath catches in my throat at the thought. “I… that sounds like a problem for the staff meetings.”
He throws his head back and laughs once, real and shocked. Maybe because he almost never laughs. “Go on, pet. Get sleep. Eat something good. You’ll need your strength tomorrow.” He turns for his office.
So, I head out. I’m not naive about what Pavel is.
I have never been naive—not since the day I was hired and understood with quiet clarity that the legitimate business was only one layer of what I was walking into.
I stayed because the work was good and the pay was better, and I told myself that what happened on the other side of that line had nothing to do with me. I was an employee. It was not my world.
The lie held, and I was safe on my side of it, and everything was clean and simple.
That was a reasonable position when I was simply his office manager. It feels less reasonable now that his hands know exactly where to find me in the dark.
He’s a pakhan, Molly. His world isn’t yours. Proximity to him is not without—
I know. I know exactly what he is. I have always known. Knowing a thing and acting on it are two entirely different problems, and right now I only have the energy for one of them.
I know exactly what he is. I just can’t seem to make myself care the way I should. The sex is too good.