Chapter 18 #2
That thought surges heat into my balls and sends me skyrocketing. Hot blood launches through me, and I’m coming harder than I knew I could. A roar pours out of my mouth and into hers as we become one.
Salt. It’s the first thing that registers after I left the planet for bliss. Sweat on her upper lip—that’s what I’m tasting. I blink to find her still gasping. Hard to read her face in this darkness, but what I can see reads like contentment.
She reaches up, clearing sweat from my brow. “Hello, husband.”
“You keep saying that word, and that’s how you ended up full of my cum.”
“I’m very aware of how I ended up this way. Husband.”
As my cock hardens again, I realize it will be a very long night.
In the morning, we begin moving Molly to my estate. Moving her there serves multiple purposes. She will be more secure there than in her apartment. Even with Vet and the cameras and a rotating surveillance, it is not enough.
Moreover, the move means I can watch my men while they work.
The moving operation is handled by a crew of eight, drawn from the mid-tier of my organization—men who have been with me long enough to be trusted with proximity to my personal life but not so deeply embedded in the inner structure that they would be the obvious choice for an informant.
And then there is Vladimir.
Vladimir Cheski has been with me for four years, which is long enough to know better and not so long that I’ve had occasion to test him thoroughly. He’s good at his job—competent enough to be useful, careful enough to avoid the kind of obvious errors that would give me a clean reason to act.
He carries boxes with the same efficiency as the others. He says the right things when addressed. And yet.
There’s something in the way he watches.
Not the property, not the logistics of the move—he watches the margins.
The tree line, the access road, the position of the other men relative to the house.
He does it with the practiced casualness of someone who has learned to observe without appearing to observe.
He also talks too much when he’s not being observed closely, and what he says when he talks—the low complaints about compensation, the commentary about women that makes the men around him shift with discomfort, the grievances that a man uses when he believes the world owes him something it has not delivered—all of it builds into a portrait of a man who feels entitled to more than he has.
If Vladimir is the informant, moving against him now will tell Fedor that I have identified him, which closes one door and opens several others. Better to let him remain where he is and control what he sees.
He can paint a picture for Fedor, but I will be the one deciding what that looks like.
I find Igor near the end of the afternoon, when most of the moving operation is winding down, and the men are loading the last of the larger pieces. “Watch Vladimir. Not obviously. I want to know his movements, his communications, who he contacts outside of work hours. Full coverage, starting now.”
Igor’s eyes move briefly in Vladimir’s direction and back. He nods once. He does not ask why, because he doesn’t need to—he has been watching the same man I have been watching and has likely arrived at similar conclusions. This is why he has been my sovetnik for eleven years.
Molly’s reaction to the house is something I was not prepared for.
She was quiet in the car, and I didn’t comment on it because I know what today is for her. It’s the day she loses her autonomy in more than just name or ceremony. I’d rather she process this now rather than later.
Then we turned through the gate and came up the drive through the tree line, and the house came into view, and she said, very quietly, “Pavel.”
“Yes?”
“You live here.” It was not a question.
“When I can.”
She looked at it for a long moment through the windshield—the old stone, the wide windows, the way it sits in its landscape with the settled authority of something that has been in one place long enough to belong there—and something moved through her expression that I found myself sitting very straight to watch.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, and the simplicity of it landed with more force than an elaborate assessment would have.
I felt something I had no prepared category for—a warmth that moved up through my chest and had nothing to do with strategy or management or the careful maintenance of a position. Pride, I identified after a moment.
Not the pride of a man displaying an asset. Something more unusual than that. The satisfaction of having something that a person you love finds beautiful, the pleasure of their pleasure.
I wanted her to like it. I find that I want her to like all of it—the house and the grounds and the room I had prepared for her, fresh peonies she didn’t ask for, and a window that faces the direction the morning light comes from because I know she likes morning light.
I wanted all of that to land well, and watching her face as it did—watching her move through the rooms, trailing her fingers along the spines of books on the study shelf, turning to me at one point with a look that was equal parts wonder and something softer—all of it filled something I had not known was empty.
She makes me want to be seen. I am, of course. I am pakhan. Everyone sees me.
But she makes me want to be bare with her. Vulnerable. I find it strangely addicting to show her who and what I am.