Chapter 29
ELLIE
I’m pissed.
I let myself feel it clearly, which I don’t always do. I tend to sand the edges off anger before I’ve finished feeling it, to forgive too fast.
Not tonight. Tonight, I curl in my bed in my room and let the rage seep from my pores.
He let me walk into this house, sign a contract, settle into a routine, start to care about his daughter, and sleep in his bed and think… Damn it … think that we were building toward something. That’s what my heart thought. And the whole time, this. This is what was underneath.
And when I finally asked, when I stood in his office and demanded the basic human courtesy of an explanation, he looked at me like I wasn’t worth the answer.
You’ll stay because I want you to stay.
I don’t sleep.
My body is running on whatever fuel anxiety produces when it’s been burning for six hours straight, and my mind is processing too much to stop.
The darkness in my room feels different tonight. Heavier .
The house is quiet, and a strange feeling of being watched comes over me. I turn over in bed, and my breath catches.
The door is partly open.
He’s in the corridor.
Behind him, a subtle wash of moonlight shapes his looming silhouette.
My heart twitches, flutters, then drops into stillness.
I sit up slowly. “Rolan?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. With a slow creak, the door opens wider.
“Wh-what are you doing?” I rasp, pulling the covers up over my chest.
He doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he comes in slowly and sits on the edge of the bed.
I watch him. The cut above his temple. The set of his jaw. The emotion barely contained behind his burning eyes.
“You can’t ask me about my business,” he says. His voice is controlled, low. “It’s too dangerous.”
It takes me a second to shake off the sleep and shock to realize what he’s saying. It takes another few seconds to understand that this is the closest thing to an explanation this man is capable of producing. The anger shifts.
“Is it always this dangerous?” I hear myself asking.
He pauses for a moment, then nods.
I swallow.
“And what if I can’t handle the danger?” My voice comes out quieter than intended.
He reaches over. His fingers find my chin, tilting my face up, and he stares into my eyes.
“There’s no choice,” he says. “Not anymore.” His thumb moves along my jaw. “Don’t be scared, moya koroleva. ”
I have no idea what moya koroleva means, but it doesn’t matter when he kisses me.
The terrible thing is, I only hesitate for a moment. The anger is still there, but I kiss him back anyway, and it feels like the most honest thing I’ve done all night.
He’s slow, at first. His hand is still at my jaw, cupping rather than gripping. Then his hands move — down my neck, my shoulders, finding the hem of my sleepshirt and pulling it over my head in one smooth motion.
His mouth finds my throat. Then lower — the curve of my shoulder, the top of my chest, moving with patience. When his mouth closes over my breast, I squeak, and I feel him respond to it — the slight tightening of his hands, the shift in the quality of his attention.
He takes his time. Both sides, methodical, his tongue tracing patterns that short-circuit my ability to think. I have my fingers in his hair. His hands roam over my ribs, my waist.
“Rolan—”
“I know,” he whispers against my skin.
He works his way down, leaving kisses along the way until he’s between my legs. His tongue makes my back arch against the bed.
By the time he’s done, I’ve stopped being a coherent person.
“Fuck me,” I gasp, dizzy with need.
“With pleasure.”
I pull at his shoulders, and we rearrange ourselves until he’s on top. Only when he’s finally inside of me do I feel everything is right where it belongs.
We move together slowly.
It feels amazing. He feels amazing.
Why does he have to feel so good?
Slowly, the anger in me finds its way up.
I push against his chest to get on top of him. His hands find my waist.
I press my palms flat to his chest. His heartbeat thumps under my right hand, faster than his face would suggest .
“If I’m stuck here,” I say, my voice unsteady but certain, “then you’re stuck with me too.”
A fire flashes across his face. Unguarded. Gone in an instant.
I set the pace, slower than he would, slower than I want, slow enough to tease. His jaw tightens. His hands flex at my waist.
The power of it goes to my head. I’ve never had this, not with anyone, not like this. And the idea that Rolan Belov is lying in the dark coming apart because of me is a climax all its own.
But I force myself to stay together.
“Is this strong enough for you?” I pant, my voice dropping huskily. “Is this what you wanted?” A beat. “Am I?”
He glares up at me. Those pale eyes, fully open, nothing managed in them. Just him, looking at me.
“You’re perfect,” he says. Rough. The word costs an empire to release. “That’s the fucking problem.”
His hands tighten at my waist.
The roll is effortless. One motion, and I’m on my stomach, his hand at my hip pulling me up.
His chest against my back. His mouth at my ear.
“Hold on tight, princess,” he growls.
I do.
He takes me apart. Thoroughly.
I stop thinking about anger or plans or basements or anything that exists outside this room, and his hands, and the thunderous sounds he makes against my shoulder as I make him come undone with me.
When I unravel, it’s complete. The kind of pleasure that starts deep, radiates outward, and doesn’t stop until the last pulsing waves have long retreated.
Then, he follows me. I feel it — the tightening, the exhale against my neck, his hands holding me through it, the new wetness covering me. For a moment, neither of us is managing anything at all.
Afterward, we stay in the dark for a while. His arm around me, my face against his chest, the warmth of him and the sound of his heartbeat.
Then he shifts. He lifts me and carries me through the door and down the corridor and into his room, where he places me gently down into his bed, then gets in beside me.
“This is where you belong,” he says. “Understand?”
My head finds his chest. But I hesitate to respond.
Deep within the airiness he’s pounded into me is a growing understanding of just how fucked up this is — of just how fucked up I am for giving myself over to it, to him.
His hand finds my hair.
There is no version of this that makes sense alongside everything else I know. The blood on his hands and the bodies on his floor — none of it is compatible with how safe I feel right now.