Chapter 11 #2
“If you stop fucking me right now, I swear to the Goddess, I will string you up by the bloody balls, you wanker.”
He shoves his face into my neck and buries his teeth into my skin, causing me to clench around him. He guides a hand between our bodies and strums my clit in time with his thrusts.
Konstantin pulls his head back and stares at me with feral eyes. “Come all over my dick, Lisichka. Smother me with your scent. Burn me with your heat. Mark me as yours. Fucking own me, wife.”
I scream as I shatter all over him. His wicked roar as he shoots me full of his cum has my cunt spasming around him again.
And through it all, his mobile continues to buzz.
Persistent and relentless.
He groans, his dick still twitching inside of me. “If that’s not someone dying, I’m going to kill them anyway.”
I laugh breathlessly, still riding the high of his fingers, his cock, and everything he just made me feel against the side of a literal crypt. “You’re very dramatic, you know that, monster man?”
He sighs and pulls the phone from his pocket. His body is still flush against mine when he answers with a clipped, “What?”
The second I feel him tense, I know something’s changed.
Tension spikes in the air around us, and his entire frame goes still. Not the I-want-you-so-bad-I-can’t-breathe kind of way. This is something colder, something sharper.
His jaw is granite from his teeth clenching together, and then there’s a slow tick in the muscle of his cheek as a quiet storm rolls in behind his deep blue eyes.
“Where?” His voice drops, no-nonsense now as he pulls out of me and tucks himself away.
I push off the wall, adjusting my dress, grimacing as his cum drips down my leg. I try to steady my pulse as I watch him transform right in front of me. The man who just made me fall apart in his arms vanishes, and the Bogeyman takes his place.
He listens for another beat and then hangs up.
“Talk to me,” I say.
Konstantin doesn’t speak right away. He’s already moving, checking his suit, adjusting the blade tucked at his side, and slipping back into his role as if he never left it.
“There are two unmarked trucks near the eastern border,” he says finally. “Misha confirmed they’re the Giselda’s people.”
Her name is still a needle in my throat, and just hearing it sends a chill down my spine.
She’s too close.
“I’m coming with you,” I say, grabbing his arm.
“No.”
One word. Final and absolute.
I pause and blink. “Excuse me?”
“You heard correctly. I said no.”
“Don’t start that caveman shit—”
“I said no,” he repeats without remorse.
Anger flickers up my throat like a flame. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“I do when it comes to this,” he says, his voice cutting like a knife.
It’s sharp, low, and deadly calm, which should have warned me of the landmine I was walking in.
“I’m not some porcelain doll, Konstantin. You don’t get to tuck me away every time things get dangerous.”
“You think this is about fragility?” he asks, his eyes locked on mine.
“Isn’t it?” I challenge.
“No,” he growls, eyes flashing. “It’s about me not trusting what we’re walking into.
It’s not that I don’t think you’re capable.
It’s that I won’t put you in that kind of danger.
Not when I can stop it. Giselda’s not just poking the beast anymore.
She’s testing our response. She wants us to get messy, reactive.
And by now, surely, she knows you matter to me. I don’t trust her with that knowledge.”
“You think locking me in a tower while you go storm the gates is going to make this better?” My voice sharpens. “She betrayed me, Kon. She used me. She was my friend, my sister, and she destroyed that. That makes this my fight too.”
“And it still doesn’t fucking matter,” he snaps. “Because if something happens to you, I lose more than just the woman I’m bonded to. I lose the only person who’s ever made me feel something real.”
I freeze, his words landing like a sucker punch to my chest. And that stops me more than the argument does.
He exhales roughly, dragging a hand through his hair. His voice drops lower, rough around the edges. “You want me to be logical about this? I can’t. I won’t. I’m barely holding it together, knowing she could hurt you at any moment. If I take you out there and anything happens—”
He cuts himself off.
And that silence hurts.
The bond pulses between us, thick with everything he can’t say out loud. His fear. His rage. His desperation to protect what’s his.
I swallow. “So, you’re going to shut me out.”
“No,” he says, softer now. “I’m going to keep you safe. There’s a difference.”
I hate it. I hate that I understand. And I hate how much I want to argue against it. But I see it—the way his shoulders are wound so tight they might snap. The look in his eyes says that if he doesn’t go now, he won’t be able to breathe knowing she’s still a threat against me.
The part of me that wants revenge on the person who betrayed me is still no match for the part of me that knows what it’s like to lose someone.
“I don’t like this,” I whisper.
“You’re not supposed to.”
Closing my eyes for a second, I exhale deeply and then nod once, clipped and reluctant.
“You better come back.”
Konstantin gives a faint, wicked smile. “Planning on haunting me if I don’t?”
“No,” I purr, already pulling my own mask back on. “I’ll just find a way to bond with your enemies and make them dinner instead.”
His laugh cracks the tension just enough to let him lean in and kiss me. It’s slow, dark, and full of everything we can’t say yet, but I hear it and feel it anyway.
His hand slips down to squeeze mine. “I’ll come back to you.” His voice is a dark promise and quiet prayer. “I swear it.”
And then disappears into the night. A shadow vanishing into deeper ones, leaving the scent of smoke and sin and his warmth in my chest like a brand.
I lean against the mausoleum behind me, my heart racing and my throat tight.
Because here’s the thing—I don’t trust fate, and I definitely don’t trust Giselda. Not after everything I’ve learned recently.
But I have faith in Konstantin and, surprisingly, the bond that hums steadily in my chest.