8. Ivan
IVAN
Outside, the city is doing its early morning thing—a truck somewhere, pigeons on the ledge, the distant pulse of a world that doesn’t know or care what happens in my bed. I’m about to ease out from under her arm when she shifts.
Her hand finds my chest. “Stay,” she murmurs, barely conscious, the word loose and blurred with sleep.
I stay.
She comes awake slowly, the way she does everything—unhurried, unbothered, as if the world will wait for her and she knows it. Her mouth finds the back of my neck first, just a press of lips, warm and deliberate. Her hand slides down my stomach, and I catch her wrist.
“Luna.”
“Mm.” Not a question. Not an answer. Just acknowledgment that she heard me, that she’s not stopping.
I turn over.
She’s half-buried in my pillow, black hair across her face, and she looks up at me with those green eyes still soft from sleep, and something in the angle of her mouth says she knows exactly what she’s doing. “Good morning.”
“Is it?”
She smiles at that, and her hand moves again, and I stop talking.
We take our time. There’s no reason not to—the morning is going nowhere. I pull her under me, and she goes easy, stretching out against my sheets like she’s been here a hundred times, like my bed is a place she belongs.
Her legs wrap around my hips, and she makes a low sound that does something permanent to my composure. I press my mouth to her throat and feel her pulse jump against my tongue. She arches into it.
“Ivan.” My name in her mouth, rough with sleep.
I work my way down—her collarbone, the curve of her breast, the soft skin below her ribs where she sucks in a breath when I bite gently. She buries her fingers in my hair and doesn’t pull me up.
I take my time there too, tasting the inside of her thigh while she twists against the sheets and says my name again, less steady this time. I feel the pull of satisfaction in my gut that I haven’t felt since I was much younger and cared more about things like this.
I pull her thigh over my shoulder and taste her, slow and thorough, until she’s twisting against the sheets and cursing at the ceiling in a voice that’s lost all its sleep-roughened calm.
Her taste. Fuck. I can’t get enough.
I feel the tension building in her as her thighs tremble against my ears, and I don’t let up, not until she says my name in that wrecked and breathless way and her whole body goes tight and then loose. I give her about four seconds to breathe.
Then I devour her, every inch, every fold. When my tongue dips low, she yips to the ceiling, her heels digging into my back. The moment I make contact with her clit this time, her breath freezes in her lungs, and she goes still.
Until she doesn’t. The woman rides my face, gripping my hair, writhing, and then, she breaks, gushing down my neck, gasping.
I’m done waiting. When I move back up her body, she’s flushed from throat to chest, her eyes half-closed, and she reaches between us to guide me home.
We move slowly at first. The kind of slow that’s almost unbearable, that gets her digging her fingers into my back and exhaling against my jaw in these short, broken increments that I feel in my spine.
I keep the pace deliberate—unhurried, controlled—until she makes a sound that strips the control right out of me, and then neither of us is being slow about anything.
The moment she comes on my cock, I know one thing for certain. Luna Ambrose is making an addict out of me.
“Again,” I growl, arching myself deep as I pin her wrists to the pillows.
Her breath catches as her eyes roll back and she looses a ragged sigh that makes time stop. There’s only her. Only her moment. Only this climax.
When she returns to her body, her legs clasp my hips to force me deeper with each thrust. The green in her eyes shines with determination. Her voice is coated with command. “Come for me, Ivan.”
My body erupts, plunging deeper into heaven, and I lose the last of my self-control inside her body.
After, she lies with her head on my chest. I can feel her eyelashes against my skin when she blinks.
She yawns. “You have a very good mattress.”
“Thank you.”
“Is that weird to compliment?”
“Everything about this is weird.”
She laughs at that—a real laugh, short and surprised—and I feel it against my ribs. She doesn’t ask what I mean. Maybe she already knows.
Darya is in the kitchen when we come out.
She looks at Luna like she’s already decided her opinion and is simply waiting to be proven right.
Darya has told me to my face that I’m difficult, that I eat poorly, and that I should replace the runner in the front hall.
She’s the only person in my organization who speaks to me that way and lives comfortably.
She sets down two cups of coffee without being asked. She gives Luna the one with the painted handle—the good one, the one she uses for guests she respects. She gives me the plain one, same as always.
Luna doesn’t know the significance. She just wraps both hands around the cup and says, “Thank you, this smells amazing,” and Darya makes a sound that in her dialect means, ‘you’re welcome and I approve of this one.’
We eat at the kitchen table. Eggs, dark bread, sliced cucumber. Simple.
Luna asks Darya, “Is the bread from the bakery on Semyonova Street?”
Darya stares at her for a moment. “Yes. How do you know that bakery?”
“I own a candle shop not too far from it, and I try to frequent as many small businesses as I can. I was in the neighborhood one day, and I followed my nose to the shop. Their breads are a revelation.”
My housekeeper almost smiles, which, for her, is a smile. “They are. The owner is a friend of mine from back home…”
I drink my coffee and watch the two of them chat about bread and feel something that I have no word for.
Comfortable, maybe?
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt at ease enough to know what that word truly means, but it’s comfortable here. That’s the thing. It’s comfortable in a way my kitchen has never been comfortable—not in this apartment, not in any of the places before it.
I’ve had women at my table before. There was always a quality of performance to it, on both sides. They were charming. I was gracious.
We were both waiting for it to end.
This is something else. Luna leans back in her chair and asks me if I always make Darya cook or if I ever cook myself, and when I say I make decent borscht, she looks skeptical in a way that makes Darya snort into her coffee.
Alas. There is work to be done.
Armin arrives at ten, which he texted me about and I forgot to mention to Luna, so when the buzzer goes, she raises her eyebrows.
“My associate. Meeting. It will be an hour, maybe two.”
She considers this. “Do you have books?”
The shelf in the sitting room has forty years of accumulated reading—history, military strategy, an embarrassing number of crime novels I will not explain. I show her, and she walks along it with her coffee, head tilted, and pulls out a battered Bulgakov without asking permission.
“I’ll be on the couch,” she says.
“Don’t you have a shop to run? I don’t want to distract you.”
She blinks at me. “I have days off, you know.”
I never considered that staying here would be an option she would select. Neither the book nor the couch time. Not any of it.
I’m not entirely sure what to say. “Enjoy the book.”
Armin is waiting for me when I come to the office. “Jaba.”
“I assumed.”
Armin pulls a breath through his nose. “He’s been difficult since the Tbilisi thing.
Mouthy. Getting into arguments with the other captains over nothing.
” He pauses. “He set off on Mikhail two weeks ago at the warehouse. Over a scheduling dispute. I managed it, but Mikhail was ready to put him through the wall.”
“Jaba’s always had a temper.”
“This is different.” Armin looks at me steadily.
“He’s not just angry. He’s loud. Sloppy-loud.
He’s been drinking at Petrov’s bar four nights a week, running his mouth, and I don’t think he’s choosing his company carefully enough.
” He shows a picture on his phone. A man I don’t recognize at a corner table, two seats from Jaba, both of them mid-conversation.
“I can’t confirm who this is. But I don’t like what it could be. ”
I look at the photograph for a long moment.
The man is nobody I know. The angle is wrong, face partially obscured, but the posture is off—too alert, too still for a casual bar patron. I’ve sat across from enough law to recognize a man who’s listening professionally.
“Has Jaba done anything actionable?”
“Not yet. Not officially.”
“Find out who this is.” I push the photograph back. “And pull Jaba out of anything sensitive until we know more. I don’t want him near the Volkov discussion.”
“Already done.” Armin stands. He has the efficiency of a man who solves problems before he’s asked to. “One more thing. He’s going to notice he’s been sidelined.”
“Da.”
“He’ll make noise about it.”
“Let him make noise.” I meet Armin’s eyes. “Controlled noise is better than the alternative.”
Armin nods once, picks up his phone, and goes.
The sitting room is quiet when I come out. Luna is on the couch where I left her—or she was. At some point, she tipped sideways into the cushions, the Bulgakov open on her chest, pages down.
She’s asleep.
Her black hair fans across the armrest and the white streak at her hairline catches the afternoon light that’s started to come through the high windows, that pale ribbon luminous against the dark. One hand is curled near her face. She breathes evenly.
I stand in the doorway for longer than is sensible.
She’s asleep on my couch with my book, with my housekeeper’s good coffee cup still on the side table. She didn’t try to leave. She asked about my books. She had a conversation with Darya about bread.
What is this?
I’m used to a particular kind of response from people. Wariness. Deference. I’ve made peace with it. It’s the cost of what I am and how I built it. You do not get to be what I am without becoming something people don’t relax around.
Yet, Luna is asleep on my couch.
I get a blanket from the hall closet—the good one, the heavy linen—and I bring it back and lay it over her without disturbing the book on her chest. She doesn’t wake. Her face in sleep is very young and very peaceful, and I look at it for another moment longer than I should.
Then I go back to my office, and I don’t think about what it means that I stood there watching her, or about Darya’s coffee cup, or about the word stay said half into a pillow in the gray early morning.
I don’t think about any of it. I certainly don’t fight thinking about it for the next hour.