Chapter 16
ELLIE
He pours vodka into a crystal glass, drinking it in one motion — no sip, no pause, no wince. Just the tilt of the glass, the swallow, and the glass set down on the counter with a soft click. As if vodka is water.
I turn back to the stove. My hand is steady, which is a minor miracle considering that my pulse kicked up the moment he appeared in the doorway and hasn’t come down since.
He has a full bar in his office. I saw it — the glass cabinet, the bottles. He has every drink he could want, twenty steps from his desk.
But he’s here. In this kitchen. At this hour. Again.
His house. His rules. His kitchen. His vodka.
His reasons which he doesn’t owe me, and I don’t ask for.
The silence stretches. I stir and decide, consciously, that avoiding this man in a house I can’t leave is a strategy with a limited shelf life.
We live here, both of us. Under the same roof, in the same corridors, breathing the same controlled, surveilled air.
I can nod at him in hallways for the next however many months, or I can be a person.
“You look tired,” I say casually .
The silence changes shape. I feel him register the words, the first voluntary sentence I’ve offered him since the office, the first crack in the wall I built with nodded acknowledgments and averted eyes.
“I lost a friend today,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I say. And I mean it. Whether he’s Russian or something else, losing someone hurts the same in every language and culture.
I expect him to sit. To lean against the island the way he did last time, with his glass and his silence, occupying his side of the kitchen while I occupy mine. The arrangement we’ve established.
He doesn’t sit.
He moves toward me, narrowing his eyes.
My heart rate spikes. The déjà vu is physical — my body remembers the office before my brain catches up. The proximity. The dropping voice. The way the air thickens when he enters a radius I haven’t consented to.
He stops close. Too close, only inches away. Close enough that I have to tilt my chin up to hold his gaze, and the angle sends the same message it sent twelve days ago: I am small, and he is not, and the difference is the point.
His eyes find mine. The grief I heard in his voice is nowhere on his face. It’s sealed, locked, buried beneath the surface, the way everything about this man is buried. But his eyes are different tonight. Darker.
“Do you,” he says. Low. A voice meant for this distance and no other. “Mean that.”
“Mean what?”
“That you’re sorry.”
“I — yes. Of course.”
He takes another step, and my body makes the decision to take a step back. My lower back hits the edge of the counter. I feel the cold through my sweatshirt.
There’s nowhere else to go.
“Do I make you nervous?” he asks.
“No.”
The lie is spectacular. An act of defiance so transparent that a child could see through it.
My breath is shallow. There’s a flush climbing my chest that I can feel and he can probably see, and my hands — my stupid, traitorous hands — are gripping the edge of the counter behind me with a force that’s turning my knuckles white.
“No,” I repeat, as if saying it again will make it true.
His expression changes.
“Your body,” he lowers his voice, “tells a different story.”
He moves closer. His hands come up slowly and land on the counter behind me. One on each side. Arms bracketing my body. He’s not touching me, but the cage is built.
I should push past him, duck under his arm, run out of this kitchen and go straight to my room, where I should lock the door.
But his nostrils flare. His jaw tightens. His eyes go darker.
He can smell me. Not perfume, I’m not wearing any. Not soap or shampoo or the lavender lotion Angelina left in my bathroom. So, what else is there?
My cheeks flush as I consider the possibility that it’s the scent of my arousal.
“Say it again,” he says.
“Say what?”
“That you’re sorry.”
I don’t understand what he wants, where this is going. But his voice has a weight that growls do it, and my mouth obeys before my brain can intervene.
“I’m sorry.”
He bites his tongue for a moment before deciding, “That’s not enough.”
“I don’t — what do you want me to?—”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
His gaze drops as the question hangs, traveling from my eyes to my mouth, to my throat, to the hem of the sweatshirt, to the waistband of my shorts and lower, and the path his eyes take is slow and unhurried and thorough — tracing an invisible line down my body, leaving heat wherever they land.
“Take them off,” he says.
The air leaves the room.
“What?”
“The shorts. Take them off.” His voice hasn’t changed. Same low register. Same calm.
“If you’re sorry,” he says, “take them off.”
I should say no. I should?—
My hands are on my waistband.
I don’t decide this, my hands do. My fingers hook the elastic and pull downward. The motion is slow, and my eyes are fixed on a point over his left shoulder.
The shorts slide down my thighs and past my knees and pool at my feet on the cold marble floor.
The air hits my skin. All of it. Every inch.
I’m not wearing underwear.
Hours ago, when I got ready for bed, I chose comfort over modesty. Now I’m here, completely bare, standing in Rolan Belov’s kitchen with nothing below my waist except socks.
I stare at the shelf behind him. I will not look down. I will not look at his face. I will not acknowledge what is happening or what I’m experiencing or the wetness that I feel — God, I feel it — gathering between my thighs with a frankness that makes me want to disappear.
“Look at me.”
His hand leaves the counter and reaches my chin. His fingers are warm. The grip is firm without being forceful, a controlled pressure that tilts my face up and holds it there.
I have no choice but to meet his eyes.
His eyes that are focused on mine with an intensity that makes the kitchen lights feel dim by comparison. His jaw is tight and his pupils are wide.
He’s as affected as I am. The difference is that he’s choosing it and I’m drowning in it.
“Sit on the counter,” he says.
He wants to humiliate me. This is punishment.
This is where I should stop. Instead, I lift myself onto the counter.
The marble is ice against my bare skin. I flinch, and he tenses, almost like he’s ready to reach out and catch me. But I don’t fall and he doesn’t move until my legs are hanging over the edge.
My fingers grip the lip of the counter on either side.
“If I put my hand between your legs,” he rumbles, “are you going to be wet for me?”
My heart skips a beat.
The question is obscene… Th e answer is leaking down my thighs and probably staining his marble.
I don’t speak. I can’t. My throat has sealed shut.
His hands leave the counter. They move slowly toward the space between my knees, giving me time to see, to anticipate. His fingers land on the inside of my thigh, applying light pressure.
I open my mouth. Close it.
What am I going to say? No? And be dismissed from the job that keeps me from Landon? Do I even want to say no? My body is screaming. It sounds nothing like refusal.
It’s been so long since anyone touched me…
His fingers find me.
Two fingertips against the center of my pussy.
The sensation is so acute that my vision blurs and a whimper escapes my throat.
The mask cracks. A tightening of his jaw. A darkening of his eyes. And then a smile.
The smile that says he received the answer to his question.
“You’re soaked.”
I close my eyes. Shame floods through me, hot, total, a full-body blush that starts at my chest and climbs to my hairline.
“Say it again,” he says.
“I’m sorry.”
“Like you mean it.”
His fingers move. Not the light, exploratory touch from before — a direct, purposeful stroke. I fight the urge to shudder.
“I’m — I’m sorry?—”
“That’s a good girl.”
His finger pushes inside me in a single, fluid motion that fills me so completely that the air I try to pull in isn’t there.
My back arches.
He uses the other hand to spread my knees wider. The pressure of his palm against the inside of my thigh is warm and powerful as he opens me to him completely.
He builds it slowly. His finger working with patience.
When I gasp, he slows. When my breathing evens, he deepens. He’s conducting me, drawing the response out, extending it, pushing me toward the edge.
Higher.
Closer.
My thighs are shaking. My hands are white on the counter. The edge is right there — right there — I feel it building, feel the gathering heat, feel the peak?—
He stops.
His finger goes still inside me.
“No—” The word escapes before I can catch it.
“No, what?” he asks. As if his finger isn’t buried in my pussy. As if I’m not shaking on his counter with my legs open and my pride on the floor next to my shorts.
I press my lips together and close my eyes. I will not say it. I will not give him the words he craves. He’s taken enough of my composure, my dignity. He doesn’t get the words, too.
“Are you being a naughty?”
His finger moves again. Slowly. Rebuilding what he dismantled.
“Fuck,” I gasp, a raspy whisper.
“Very naughty…”
Higher. Higher. The edge again. The gathering. The almost?—
He stops.
I choke on the sound, and my eyes fly open. He’s watching me with the face of a man who is in complete control of a situation in which I have none.
“No, what? ” he repeats.
The silence stretches. My body shakes.
“No. Don’t stop,” I concede.
He doesn’t move. His hand is still. His eyes are on mine, waiting.
Fuck, he is going to make me beg ?
“Please.” The word comes out cracked. “Please don’t stop.”
He watches me for one more second. Two.
“That’s what I thought.”
Then he moves, adding another finger, stretching me, filling me, and the rhythm is no longer patient.
His thumb finds the spot that makes my vision white, and my breath catches in my throat. My hands leave the counter and grip his forearm. The muscle underneath is iron, and his skin is warm.
He takes me apart.
The edge arrives, and this time he doesn’t stop. He drives me over it, and the fall is not graceful — it’s a detonation. My body convulses around his fingers while a moan rips from my mouth that I will never, for the rest of my life, be able to pretend didn’t happen.
It lasts longer than it should. Longer than my body has the right to sustain, wave after wave, his hand still moving, still drawing it out, until I’m empty and shaking and my forehead drops against his chest.
His chest is warm. Solid. The shirt is soft against my skin. I feel his heartbeat — faster than his face suggests, faster than the calm exterior would allow. The idea that his body is not as controlled as his expression sends a final tremor through me.
His fingers slide out of me. The absence is sharp, sudden. A loss I feel in the center of my body.
I’m still breathing against his chest. Still holding his forearm. Still shaking.
“You’re forgiven,” he says.
Then he steps back.
His hands leave the counter. He adjusts his cuff and turns, walking out of the kitchen.
No word. No look. No indication that anything happened,
The kitchen is empty.
I don’t move. I can’t. My hands are gripping the counter’s edge, and my breath is still ragged.
What happened?
What did I just let happen?
After what feels like an eternity, I finally manage to slide off the counter, my legs barely holding me upright. I shakily pick up my shorts from the floor and step into them. The fabric against my skin is a shock, a return to the normal world.
The chocolate is almost cold by now.
Why did he leave?
That’s the question that breaks through the static.
Not why did he do it — I don’t have the capacity for that question yet.
But why did he leave? He was hard. I saw it — thick and insistent and undeniable — when my forehead was against his chest, when the distance between us collapsed to zero.
He was as affected as I was. And he left.
He got what he wanted, and he left.
I was the transaction. The release. The thing he needed tonight, after losing a friend, after whatever is going on that I can’t see. He used me the way everyone does.
And the worst part, the part that makes me press my forehead against the cold stove and close my eyes and wish I were someone else, is that I wanted it. Every second. Every command. Every humiliation. I wanted it, and he knew it.
I go upstairs, legs still fighting the good fight against a hurricane of nerves. The corridor is empty.
I deliver the chocolate to Anya and go straight to my room, where I lock the door behind me.
My hands are still shaking, and my body is still humming with the aftershocks.
I press my palms against my face.
I don’t know what happened.
I don’t know what happens next.
I don’t know if I’m shaking because I’m trapped in a house with a man who did that to me, because he walked away after, or because some dark, honest, irreducible part of me is already wondering when he’ll do it again.
The room is quiet, and I am here alone in the dark with the taste of please still on my tongue and the ghost of his hands still between my legs.
I don’t sleep.
I don’t even try.