Chapter 19 #2
The corner of his mouth moves, barely, his start of a smirk. “You are welcome to make the rest of it.”
“It loses something if you’ve already conceded.”
“Then perhaps we use the time differently,” he says, and his hand comes up to my face with the careful deliberateness that I know, the touch that is asking before it is taking, and I feel the shift in the room the way you feel a change in pressure—pervasive, immediate, the whole atmosphere of the conversation turning into something else.
Something better.
I should tell him the other parts of the argument. I worked hard on them all day long.
But he kisses me, and the remaining argument evaporates with the completeness of things that are replaced rather than abandoned.
I stop thinking about informants and trifles and the frustration of being managed by a man who means well but is also wrong.
As his tongue brushes over mine, I think about nothing at all, which is what he reliably does to me and which I have stopped pretending to resist.
Pavel’s hand raises the hem of my skirt. Slowly. “I vow to you, wife, that I will tell you everything directly related and tangentially related to you and anything you care about.” His fingertips graze my inner thighs. “On two conditions.”
I’m nearly breathless. “What’s that?”
“First, you spread your legs for me.”
I’m doing it before I can think to do it.
“Excellent. And you keep wearing these stretchy skirts.” His large hand cups over my underwear. Not yet moving. Claiming. “They make my life better.”
I swallow. “Then I’ll buy every stretchy skirt I can find.”
“Good girl.” His fingers slip past the edge of my underwear and into me.
I bite my lip before the loud gasp escapes, and it turns into a moan. “Your men. They might hear—”
“Do you think I care?” His fingers hit that spot that makes me weak, and I nearly lose my balance.
But he wraps an arm around me. Pavel would never let me fall. It’s why I can let go with him—I know he has me, no matter what.
“That’s it, wife. Do you feel the way you soften for me? How wet you are, even when I’ve barely gotten started with you?” He talks while he’s working me over—two fingers inside, a thumb on my clit. The magic combination.
The whimpers I let out are weak things, but I don’t want his men to hear us. This is private. Just for us.
His stubble scrapes my cheek a little just before he whispers in my ear, “Your body is mine. The next orgasm you have, the one my fingers will give you… that’s mine too.
Your body knows it. Has known it for a long time.
I will give you anything you desire, because it’s the same as giving it to myself. ”
“You will?” I gasp, climbing to something unstoppable on his fingers.
“Of course. The thing is, our bodies knew we were married before I ever proposed. That’s why I was always hard around you, and you were always wet around me.
We were destined to end up here, pet. And now, you’re shaking.
Your pussy throbs on my fingers. Once you’ve come for me like this, I’m going to ravish you on my desk. ”
“Yes—”
“And tonight, in our bed, I’m going to take your ass.”
The thought startles me from my orgasm, then throws me straight into it. I cling to him, coming hard on his fingers, and I bury my face into his shoulder so my scream doesn’t reach other ears. I’m completely and uselessly lost in it—
The door opens.
Igor comes through it, anger and something else twisting his face. “Vlad—shit.” He turns away. “I am—”
“Say it,” Pavel says, in the voice that is entirely the pakhan, assembled from nothing in the space of a single breath.
“Vladimir is dead. He has been hanged in the open rock garden.”
“Fuck.” Pavel removes himself from me, and I straighten my clothes. “Lockdown—”
“Already did. No one in or out. But they’ve already escaped, or they’re one of ours. We did a sweep.”
Pavel moves immediately toward the door, and I move with him, and he turns to me. “Stay inside.”
“No.”
“Molly—”
“No!” I meet his eyes. “This is the world my children will grow up in. I won’t look away from it.”
He looks at me for a long moment, but then he nods once, and we go.
I don’t remember night falling, but the courtyard is lit by the security lights that have come on with the darkness.
They are very bright against the white and gray stone, and several of his men are already there, standing in the solemn moment.
The rock garden is at the center—carefully maintained, the stones pale and arranged with an aesthetic intention that the man who tends them takes seriously.
Vladimir dangles above it.
I look, because I said I would, and I meant it. But I’m regretting that now. It’s not like the movies. He is—he’s gone, in the way that is unmistakable and final. His eyes stare at nothing, and his face is a little purple, and his neck is weirdly fat from the rope around it.
There’s nothing around that he would have willingly kicked away, were this self-inflicted. Which means either he did it by jumping down from the branch that the rope hangs from, or someone did this to him. My money’s on the latter.
Every part of this sends a message. Fedor knows who Pavel suspected, and he killed him here to show us we are not safe in our own home. Not even in the well-lit, well-watched courtyard.
Whether he was actually Fedor’s spy, we will never know.
I stand in the courtyard light and look at what has been done and think about two heartbeats inside me. This is the world they will inherit.
It is not the world they must inherit.
I’m not showing yet, but I will be soon.
It’d be easy enough to dye my hair and get on a bus and go somewhere no one knows me.
I don’t think anyone gets out of a twin pregnancy without gaining a lot of weight.
Getting fat could be a great disguise, and I’m not skinny to begin with, so it’ll be quick.
But then Pavel’s hand finds mine in the dark, and we stay silent, taking in the sight of what happened to Vladimir.
I can’t tell him what I’m thinking, because I don’t know if he’d beg me to stay or shove a bus ticket in my hand. Instead, I mutter, “He didn’t deserve this.”
“No, I don’t believe he did.”
Which means we still have a spy.