♛Chapter Thirty two♛
Lola
I sit on the couch with one of his shirts hanging off my shoulder.
It still smells like him: his cologne, his sweat, his sin.
A fruit bowl rests on the coffee table, and I stab a strawberry with the tip of a steak knife—the only knife in Mikhail's kitchen—watching the red juices leak out like blood.
Mikhail sits beside me, laptop balanced on one knee, eyes glued to whatever business he’s handling. He’s working from home today because he wanted to spend the day with me. I hold the strawberry out to him on that gigantic knife, and he leans in to take a bite.
Yesterday, I threw a tantrum. I tore through half the designer stores in the mall, tried on every ridiculous thing I could find, shoved his card into the hands of terrified cashiers. Yet, he didn’t snap or leave or say a word that would stick in my head for years.
No.
He followed me around with a hard cock.
Tell me—what’s a bigger sign we belong together?
I stab another piece of fruit. Feed it to him. His hand rests on my thigh now, tracing lazy circles, and I don’t even think he notices he’s doing it.
He gets it. He knows I’m not some unfeeling psycho. I’m just calculated. I know what I want. I protect what’s mine. And no, I’m not soft. I’m not sweet. But I’m not the monster they made me out to be, either. Morally gray, maybe. Human, definitely.
There’s a knock at the door. Loud. Sharp. No rhythm to it. With how this person is knocking, there better be something burning on the other side. I move to stand, knife still in hand, but Mikhail presses me back down with one palm to my shoulder.
“I’ve got it.”
I follow anyway.
When he opens the door, we’re greeted by the sight of my sneering father. He looks exactly like he did last time. Back then, I stood in this same apartment, in the same damn shirt, and he was at the door with that same disgusted look on his face.
Déjà vu.
“We need to talk,” he spits at me, barging in without permission. The door slams against the wall so hard I think it might crack.
“You little brat,” my father yells, face flushed red with fury. “You’re doing commission work now?” The words are poison in his mouth. “Your allowance is more than enough—more than most of the board makes in a year—and you’re out there working? Like a peasant?”
He steps closer to me, menace dripping off him, but it’s nothing compared to the violence brewing in Mikhail’s eyes.
“My colleagues keep bringing it up,” he snaps. “Do you know how humiliating it is to be laughed at because my daughter’s running around like a desperate little—”
“Enough,” Mikhail hisses, pushing my father back, making him stumble. “Keep your fucking voice down.”
I lift a hand without looking at him. Just to say: I’ve got this. My father acts like Mikhail doesn’t exist. He’s so pissed at me, it’s like I’m the only thing that exists in that moment.
“You’ve always thought you were so clever. So above it all. You were always a weird little girl, Lola. Always quiet, always off. I have always known something was wrong with you.” He starts pacing now.
He doesn’t notice how Mikhail seems to be bursting at the seams, or how my patience is wearing thin.
“You were never right in the head,” he continues. “All you had to do was look pretty, take my money, and smile when I told you to. That was your only job. And even that, you managed to fuck up.”
Mikhail lunges and drives his fist straight into my father’s face. My father stumbles back, hits the floor with a thud, blood pouring from his broken nose. Mikhail looms over him, his voice guttural when he snarls, “She’s perfect. You’re the one who’s fucked in the head.”
Yet again, my father doesn’t even look at him.
Want to know why? Because he’s scared of him.
Terrified of him. He thinks he can pick on me because I’m his “little girl,” but he doesn’t stand a chance against the six-foot-five beast that is Mikhail.
Seems like my father forgot just how scary I can be.
He spits blood out of his mouth, ruining Mikhail’s white carpet. The punch to his face only makes his tongue looser. “I know you had something to do with Tina’s death. Don’t think I don’t see it. That sweet woman—”
“Your mistress,” I correct, coolly. “She was your mistress.”
“I loved her more than I ever loved you or your mother. I spent years pretending you were normal. Do you know what that did to me?” He laughs, short and bitter.
“Having to sit at dinner tables, raise a glass, and talk about my daughter while knowing you murdered the only person who ever gave a shit about me? While knowing you were ecstatic when I got my cancer diagnosis?”
Mikhail moves again, fury in his limbs, but I stop him with one hand around his waist, fingers curling into his shirt.
He looks at me, chest heaving, eyes wild.
And I say nothing. I just stare at the man on the floor and wonder how much more it’ll take before he’s finally fucking silent.
At this moment, I regret not inducing cancer in him again after he recovered.
I thought once would be enough—that he’d see how close death is and regret the way he used to talk to me as a child like I’m a monster, or the way he treated my mother. I was wrong.
“Every time I looked at you, all I saw was blood,” he sneers. “Darkness. Emptiness. A mistake I never should’ve made. Maria couldn’t even give me a decent child. Not one fucking thing she did was right. You’re just like her. Broken. Pathetic. A waste of a womb.”
Something snaps. The steak knife is still in my hands.
No one disrespects my mother, or anyone else I care about.
I lunge like a child mid-tantrum. What I lack in form, I make up for in fury.
The first stab lands just beneath his clavicle, between the muscle and bone.
It slices through the skin with a wet crunch, the blade grinding past cartilage as he screams. His face is a picture-perfect embodiment of shock.
I pull back and stab again, this time angling lower.
It goes through the soft pad of his stomach.
I feel the resistance. Then give. Muscle tears.
The knife grinds deeper. A hot gush of blood splashes across my forearm.
He grabs my wrist and tries to push me back, but I twist, bite into the side of his hand, and drive the blade higher into the side of his neck. It slides in under the jaw, scraping against bone. The sound is hideous, wet and sticky, like a boot in mud.
“Don’t talk about her,” I scream, animalistic. “Don’t say her name. You don’t get to say her fucking name.”
I stab again. And again. My arms shake from the exertion, my grip loosens, my knuckles slip against blood-slick skin. His mouth opens—another insult, maybe. A plea. I don’t care.
And then Mikhail is there. His arms wrap around my waist, anchoring me. I’m shaking so violently I don’t even realize the knife has fallen until he plucks it from the floor. He brushes the blood-soaked hair from my face, presses a kiss to my temple.
“No one talks to you like that,” he growls. “No one. You want justice, baby? You get it. But let me get mine, too.”
He turns toward the barely breathing form of my father on the floor and picks up where I left off.
My father—still conscious, barely. Moaning low, gurgling through the slick warmth pooling in his mouth. His eyes are wide, pupils blown, flickering between terror and disbelief.
“I’m going to make you regret every word that came out of your filthy throat,” Mikhail growls.
He grabs a fistful of what’s left of my father’s shirt and jerks him up by it.
He groans, breath rattling, struggling for words.
He angles the blade beneath the jawline, where the skin stretches soft and vulnerable.
Presses hard, slicing through the platysma first. The shallow muscle splits open.
Blood spills out in thick, steady waves.
My father gags, twitches, fists curling.
Mikhail doesn't stop. He drags the blade through the trachea, splitting cartilage, vessels, and the vocal cords with a wet, gritty crunch. The moment they sever, the sound stops. The gurgling, the pathetic moans, they go silent. His windpipe is open now. A fluttering mess of pink tissue and cartilage. My father’s mouth opens again, lips trembling around nothing.
No scream. No voice. Just a red, wet gape.
After he's done, Mikhail crouches beside me. He smells like metal and sweat and fury. His breathing is heavy, but controlled, always controlled. Unlike me, he doesn’t lose himself in the storm.
He is the storm. He wipes blood off my cheek with the back of his hand, smearing it more. “No one touches you. No one gets to break you but me. And I won’t even let that happen.”
“I didn’t mean to lose control,” I whisper, shame crawling into my chest. I don’t give a shit that my father is dead, but the fact that Mikhail saw this part of me—raw, unfiltered—makes something burn under my skin.
“You didn’t lose anything,” he says. “You got your justice. You were brilliant.”
I shake my head. “You saw what I did. What I’m capable of. Aren’t you disgusted?”
He holds my gaze, then shifts slightly, unzipping his pants and pulling them down. His cock strains, red-tipped, veins bulging. “Does this look like disgust to you?” he asks.
My lips part. Something dark and satisfied curls in my stomach.
We are both too far gone to be saved. His words settle something in me I didn’t even know needed calming.
I glance at my father’s body, disgust rising.
His head lies twisted at an unnatural angle, mouth frozen mid-snarl. I shove it aside with my foot.
“He’s ruining the mood,” I mutter.
Mikhail laughs and slides closer until our knees touch. “You’re the most perfect woman I’ve ever known. There is no line you could cross that would make me turn away. You are mine. In the blood, in the violence, in the silence after.”
His mouth brushes my ear. “Tell me to stop, and I will. But if you don’t—if you want to let go—I’ll make you feel worshipped. Filthy, and worshipped.”
He reaches for the buttons of his bloodstained shirt clinging to my skin, but I beat him to it. I grab the bloody knife still lying beside my father’s corpse and slice the shirt clean off. “Take me,” I whisper. “Right here. With him there. You said I was perfect? Prove it.”
I don’t know where my skin ends and his begins.
There’s blood on both of us, my father’s blood, dried in sticky streaks.
My thighs are streaked with it. So is his chest. But none of it matters.
Mikhail comes down on me like a man starved.
His mouth trails my neck, teeth scraping, tongue tasting the ruin of my rage.
His hands shove my legs apart, and he thrusts in with no warning. I’m wet and ready.
“Look at you… Look what you do to me… Fuck, Lola…”
I arch into him, dragging my nails down his back. He hisses but doesn’t stop. The knife I held rests just inches from my hip, still warm from my grip. That only makes him harder.
“This is what you are,” he says, voice dark and gravel thick. “Not crazy. Not broken. Just mine.”
“Say it again,” I breathe.
“You’re mine. My girl. My fucking queen. And if the world wants to call you insane, I’ll burn it down for you.”
I wrap my legs around his waist, dragging him deeper. I use him the same way he uses me. There’s no romance in it. It’s war. Every grind of his hips says I’m yours . Every moan I let out screams I want more . We move like we’re trying to carve our names into each other’s bones.
My hand finds the knife again. I press the cool blade to the back of his neck.
His hips stutter. “Lola…”
Mikhail looks at me like I’m holy and godless all at once. “Are you scared?” I ask, my voice steady but laced with the weight of my fear. “That this insane girl might do to you what she did to her father?”
His hands slide to my waist, careful, like I’m porcelain.
But we both know I’m anything but. “No. I know you’d never hurt me.
I know you want to protect me as much as I want to protect you,” he murmurs.
“But even if I didn’t, my soul is already yours.
If you ever decide to be my grim reaper… I’ll die smiling.”
That’s all I need. I throw the knife aside.
The clatter as it hits the floor doesn’t even register, not over the noise between us.
He goes wild. It’s filthy. Feral. His thrusts become brutal, desperate.
We fuck like we’re trying to erase everyone who ever doubted us.
My father’s body lies just feet away, forgotten.
Irrelevant. He never saw me. Never understood.
But Mikhail?
He sees me.
He’s buried so deep, I swear I feel him in my ribs. And when we finally break, when the world snaps and all that’s left is breath and blood and the echo of our ruin, he doesn’t pull away.
He rests his forehead against mine, breathing hard. “You were made for me.”
I nod, smiling through the mess. “And you were made to handle me.”
He chuckles. “You stab the person who wronged you. I cut him. We fuck in his blood.”
“True love,” I whisper.