Chapter 10
Ksenia
Iwoke with my hand between my legs and Daniil’s name in my mouth.
The room was dark. The pillow smelled faintly of his cologne, something warm and cedar-dark that had transferred from his neck while I slept against him. He was gone. The mattress beside me held the faint depression of where he’d been, but the sheets were cool.
The dream was still inside me. Not fading the way dreams usually do—pulling apart at the edges, dissolving into fragments I couldn’t quite hold.
This one stayed. Specific. Visceral. His hand in my hair, pulling my head back, his mouth on my throat.
His cock driving into me with a force that made the bed shake against the wall.
I could still feel the ghost of it—the fullness, the stretch, the relentless rhythm he’d set and that I’d had no control over.
I had come. In my sleep, in the dark, in the bed where he’d held me without touching me, my body had taken over and I’d climaxed so hard I’d bitten through the pillowcase to keep from crying out.
My jaw ached from the pressure. Between my legs I was wet—still wet, the orgasm hadn’t fully released the tension, it had only sharpened it.
The part that made me press my face into the pillow.
In the dream, he’d turned me over. His hands on my hips, lifting.
His mouth against my ear, low and rough, telling me he was going to take my ass.
And I’d wanted it. Not politely, not curiously—desperately.
The wanting had been so fierce it had frightened me even inside the dream.
I’d said yes. I’d pushed back against him. He’d—
I squeezed my eyes shut. My face burned in the dark.
I was a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a graduate degree and a professional practice and I was lying in a damp patch on my own sheets, blushing about a dream.
A dream in which my husband—my husband, who had sat on my bed fully clothed and kissed me goodnight and left without touching me—had fucked me in ways I hadn’t even put on the checklist.
I hadn’t put it on the checklist because I hadn’t been ready to admit I wanted it.
I lay there for another minute. Then I got up, stripped the sheets, and put them in the hamper. I showered. The water did nothing to settle the low, persistent ache that the dream had left behind.
I dressed for work. Black trousers. A fitted blouse in pale grey. My hair up. Normal. Not the clothes of a sexually desperate freak. I went downstairs.
Voices from the kitchen. Daniil’s—low, measured, the cadence I now recognized as his operational voice. Nikita’s, lighter, faster, carrying the edge of a complaint. Arkady’s, a rumble beneath both, contributing what sounded like a single-syllable disagreement.
I heard something, Nikita’s voice. “The joint loads are moving through Maspeth on schedule,” Nikita said. “No refusals.” Then, I entered the kitchen.
Daniil stood at the counter with a coffee in one hand and his phone in the other. Nikita sat at the island with a tablet. Arkady leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded, eating an apple.
All three looked up.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning,” Nikita said. Arkady nodded around a bite of apple.
Daniil looked at me. His eyes moved across my face, my hair, the collar of my blouse. I felt the inspection on my skin—each point of contact warm and specific. He set down his phone.
“Nikita. Arkady.”
He eyed them both, but didn’t give any instruction. Seems like none was needed.
Nikita closed his tablet. Arkady dropped the apple core into the bin. They left through the kitchen door without protest, though Nikita shot me a look over his shoulder that contained an entire editorial.
The door closed. The kitchen was quiet.
Daniil poured a second coffee. He placed it on the island in front of the stool beside him.
“Sit.”
I sat. I drank. The coffee was good—strong, dark, full-bodied. I wrapped both hands around the cup and let the heat seep into my fingers.
“Did you sleep?” he asked.
“Some.”
The dream flickered behind my eyes. His hand in my hair. His mouth. The things he’d said. The things I’d said back. I drank more coffee.
“I have a question,” he said.
“Only one?”
“Do you have plans this evening?”
I set down the cup. The question was casual. His tone was not. There was something beneath it—a deliberateness, a weight that the words themselves didn’t carry.
Tonight. We were going to have sex tonight. I could feel it. My pussy could feel it.
“No.”
“Good. Because I’m taking my wife to dinner.” He paused. “Provided she accepts.”
“Your wife.” I let the word sit between us. “Is this a diplomatic event? Should I brief Anton?”
“No captains. No clients. No security briefings over the antipasto.”
“Then where will the captains be sitting?”
“Somewhere else.”
I looked at him. He was standing close—closer than he usually stood in the kitchen, closer than the morning required.
His sleeves were rolled to the forearms. The t-shirt from last night was gone, replaced by a dark sweater I hadn’t seen him change into.
He must have come back early, showered, dressed.
“Seven o’clock,” he said. “I’ll choose the restaurant.”
“And what should I wear?”
His eyes held mine. The ice-blue had darkened at the edges, the way it did when he was being careful about what he said next because what he wanted to say was not careful at all.
“Something sexy,” he said. “Something I won’t want to wait to rip off.”
The sentence landed low in my body. The ache from the dream pulsed once, hard.
I stood. I set the cup on the counter. I stepped into him—one step, the distance closing—and I kissed him.
Not the morning kiss from yesterday, the one the car horn had interrupted.
Not the patient, measured kiss from the sofa.
I kissed him with the frustration of a woman who had woken up biting a pillow, who had spent ten minutes in a shower that accomplished nothing, who had been told to wear something he wanted to rip off and was already calculating which dress would make him forget his own name.
“I want you,” I said. “I want you now. Right here.”
His hand came to my waist. His fingers spread across my hip. He held me—not pulling me closer, not pushing me away. Holding me in place. His mouth opened against mine, and for three seconds the kitchen was the only room in the house that existed.
“You’ll get me, devotchka. But not now. When I say.”
I pulled back.
“This evening,” I said.
“Seven o’clock.”
I picked up my bag. I walked to the door. I did not look back, because if I looked back I was going to cancel Harbor House and drag him upstairs and the dress would never get worn.
Ilya was already outside. The car was running. I slid into the back seat and stared out the window as the row houses of Dover Street slid past.
The ink-blue dress. Backless. Low-cut. I had bought it two years ago for a gallery opening in SoHo and never worn it because the open back had felt too exposed, too much, too direct.
I had tried it on in the fitting room and looked at myself in the mirror and thought: this is not a dress for someone who is managing.
It was a dress for someone who wanted to be seen.
I was going to wear it tonight. And I was going to watch his face when he saw it, and the wanting was going to be on both sides of the room, and tonight—tonight—I was not going to be sent to bed alone.
I pressed my forehead against the cold window glass and smiled.
Icame downstairs at seven.
The dress was the most deliberate thing I owned.
Open back, cut low enough that the fabric began just above the curve of my spine.
The front dipped below my collarbone—not aggressively, not the kind of neckline that announced itself, but enough that the hollow of my throat and the line of my sternum were visible.
The fabric moved when I walked. It was heavy silk that caught light and held it, and in the mirror upstairs I had looked at myself and thought: this is either the best decision I’ve made in this marriage or the most reckless.
I had pinned my hair up. I wanted the back of the dress to have the stage.
My heels marked the staircase—a slow, measured descent, each step deliberate. I held the banister with one hand. My other hand was empty. No bag, no phone, no folder of dispatch records. Just me, in a dress I had never worn for anyone, walking downstairs to meet the man I had married.
Daniil stood at the front door. A guard I didn’t recognize—broad, dark-jacketed, the particular stillness of hired vigilance—occupied the space beside him. They were mid-conversation, Daniil’s phone in his hand, something about a route change and a checkpoint on Hamilton Avenue.
He looked up.
The conversation stopped. Not trailed off—stopped. The sentence died between his mouth and the air. His hand lowered the phone to his side. His eyes moved from my face to my shoulders where the silk ended and my bare skin began. The assessment was not subtle. It was not meant to be.
The guard cleared his throat and found urgent business on his phone.
I stood on the bottom step and let him look.
I let the silence fill the hallway. I let him see the dress and the bare back and the pinned-up hair and the low neckline and I did not fidget or adjust or reach for a wrap.
I stood there and received his attention and the receiving was its own kind of power.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
His voice was lower than usual. The words came out stripped of the composure he wore like a uniform.
He crossed the hallway. He stopped in front of me.
He put his hand on my bare waist — the first time he had touched the skin there — and he kissed me.
Not a greeting. A claim. His mouth pressed against mine with a directness that made my toes curl inside my heels.
His palm was warm against the silk at my hip.
His fingers spread across the low curve of my back, just above where the fabric began.
He pulled back. His eyes were dark.
“Turn around,” he said.