Chapter 14 Maksim #2
"So responsive," I murmur. "Have you thought about this? About my hands on you?"
"Yes." The word comes out strangled. "Every fucking day for four years."
The confession makes something dark and possessive surge through me. Four years. Four years of watching me, wanting me, never acting on it. Four years of maintaining distance while desire burned beneath the surface.
I lower my head.
I take him into my mouth.
The sound he makes is obscene—a broken moan that echoes off the cabin walls, louder than the storm outside.
His hips buck involuntarily, and I press them down, holding him in place as I work him deeper.
He is hot and heavy on my tongue, the taste of him salty and musky, and I want more. I want everything.
I swirl my tongue around the head, teasing the slit and tasting the precum that leaks from him. He tastes clean and aroused. I take him to the root, swallowing around him and forcing my throat to open. His hands tighten in my hair to the point of pain, fingers tangling and pulling.
"Maksim—fuck—I cannot—"
I pull off with a wet sound, a string of saliva connecting us. I look up at him, my lips swollen and slick.
"You can," I say. "You will take what I give you."
His eyes widen. Something flickers across his face—surprise, arousal, the realization that he is not in control here. Then he nods, a jerky motion, and I reward him by taking him deep again.
I work him with my mouth and my hand, alternating between fast and slow, finding the rhythm that makes him fall apart. His thighs tremble against my shoulders. His stomach clenches tight. Every breath comes out as a moan or a plea, my name repeated like a prayer he cannot stop saying.
When I feel him getting close—the telltale tightening of his hips, the way his breath hitches—I pull back.
"No." He almost sobs. "Please, I need—"
"I know what you need." I strip off the rest of my clothes, kicking them to the floor. My cock is hard, aching, pulsing with the need to be inside him. "And you are going to get it."
I find the lubricant in the nightstand drawer—Ivan is always prepared for contingencies—and slick my fingers. He watches me with dark eyes, his chest heaving, as I press the first finger against his entrance.
He flinches, then relaxes. I press inside.
He is tight. Hot. His body clenches around me, and he hisses through his teeth, then rocks back against my hand, demanding more. He spreads his legs wider, giving me access, surrendering to me completely.
"More," he demands.
I give him more—two fingers, working him open, stretching him slowly. I curl my fingers, hunting for his prostate. When I find it—a small, firm ridge—I press into it.
He cries out, his back arching off the bed, his cock jerking against his stomach.
"There," he gasps. "God, right there."
I keep working that spot, stretching him, preparing him. He is wet and hot around my fingers, clamping down and releasing in spasms. I know I could make him come just from this—just from my fingers inside him and the pressure on that spot.
But that is not what I want. I want to be inside him. I want to feel him come apart around my cock, to know that I am the one who destroyed his control.
Three fingers now. He rocks back against my hand, fucking himself on my fingers, all pretense of composure abandoned.
"Ready," he gasps. "I am ready, Maksim, please—put it in."
I withdraw my fingers, take my cock in my hand, slicking it with the fluid from inside him and more lube. I line up at his entrance.
For a moment, I pause, looking down at him.
Ivan Baranov. The man who holds the city in his fist. Spread beneath me with his legs wrapped around my waist and his eyes begging me to take him.
The man who made me. The man who owns me.
Except he does not own me. Not anymore. Not after tonight.
I push inside.
The heat of him is overwhelming. He is so tight, clenching around me as I sink deeper. I have to grit my teeth to keep from thrusting too hard, too soon. I go inch by inch, stretching him, filling him, until I am fully seated inside him, my hips pressed against his.
We both freeze, breathing hard, adjusting to the sensation. It feels impossibly intimate. Impossibly right.
"Move," he whispers. "Maksim, move."
I move.
I pull back almost all the way, then drive forward.
The thrust drags a moan from both of us. The second makes him dig his nails into my shoulders, leaving marks that will last for days. By the third, we have found a rhythm—hard and deep, nothing gentle about it. The sound of skin slapping against skin fills the room, wet and heavy.
His body is a furnace around me. Every thrust sends pleasure cascading through my spine, building and building toward something I cannot control. The friction is perfect. The tightness is perfect.
I shift my angle, aiming for that spot I found earlier.
He screams.
It's a raw, broken sound. His head throws back into the pillow.
"There," he gasps. "Right there, do not stop—"
I do not stop. I pound into that spot relentlessly, watching him come undone beneath me. His face is flushed, sweat slicking his skin. His eyes roll back. His hand wraps around his own cock, stroking himself in time with my thrusts, desperate for release.
I grab his wrist and pin it to the mattress above his head.
"Not yet," I growl. "Look at me."
He forces his eyes open. They are glazed, wild.
"You are mine," I say against his throat. "Say it."
"Yours." The word is barely intelligible. "I am yours, Maksim, I—fuck—"
I let go of his wrist. He grabs my shoulders, pulling me down, his mouth finding mine in a desperate, messy kiss.
I drive into him harder, faster. The pleasure is white-hot, blinding. I feel him tighten around me, spasming.
"Maksim!"
He comes with a shout, spilling over, his body clenching so tightly around me that I see stars.
The sensation triggers my own release. I bury myself deep, grinding into him as I empty myself inside him, pleasure whiting out everything except the feeling of him around me, beneath me—completely and utterly mine.
The aftermath is quiet.
We lie tangled together in sheets that smell like sweat, sex, and the cedar of the cabin's timber walls.
The storm is beginning to fade, the rain softening from a roar to a steady rhythm against the windows.
Ivan's head is on my chest, his breath warm against my skin, his hand tracing idle patterns on my stomach.
I can feel his heartbeat against my ribs—slower now than it was, settling back into the rhythm of a man at rest rather than a man coming apart in my arms. My own heart has found the same cadence; the two of us are synchronized in a way that has nothing to do with training, conditioning, or the careful engineering that brought us together.
The cabin creaks around us as the wind dies down.
Somewhere in the distance, I can hear the lake lapping against the dock, a sound so different from the city noise I have grown accustomed to.
There are no sirens here, no traffic, no constant hum of electronics and infrastructure—just the forest, the water, and the man breathing against my chest.
I should feel something—regret, maybe. Or uncertainty. The knowledge that what we did has changed everything and that there is no going back to the dynamic we had before.
But I do not feel regret. I do not feel uncertainty.
I feel whole.
For the first time in thirty-one years, I feel like a complete human being. Not a number. Not a subject. Not a weapon waiting to be aimed. I am a man who wanted something and took it, who gave pleasure and received it, who held another person in his arms and felt the weight of genuine connection.
Ivan shifts against me, tilting his head up to look at my face.
"What are you thinking?" he asks.
I consider the question. There are so many things I could say, so many truths I am still learning to accept.
"I am thinking," I say slowly, "that the file was wrong."
He stills. Waits.
"You wrote that I was conditioned to seek approval through service, that my loyalty was a product of manufactured dependency." I tighten my arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer. "But this was not service. And what I feel is not dependency."
"What is it, then?"
I look at him—the man who designed me, broke me, and put me back together in a shape neither of us expected.
The man who yielded to me in the darkness, who trusted me with his body and his surrender, who looked at me as if I were something worth wanting, even knowing everything about how I was made.
"It is mine," I say. "You are mine. And I am not letting you go."
His eyes soften. A flicker of relief crosses his face, followed by something deeper—an emotion I do not yet have a name for, but I recognize it because I feel it too.
"Good," he replies. "Because I was not planning to let you leave."
The storm fades to silence. The darkness wraps around us like a blanket. And for the first time since I read that file, since the world I thought I understood collapsed into chaos and betrayal, I close my eyes and feel something other than fear.
I feel safe.
Not because Ivan is protecting me, but because we are protecting each other.
And nothing—not his uncle, not the organization, not the conditioning that shaped us both—will ever take that away.