Chapter 10 #3
He paused. The server approached, saw the expression on Daniil’s face, and redirected toward another table.
“By the time I asked myself whether I wanted it, the question was irrelevant. I was thirty. I spoke the language. I knew the routes, the captains, the accounts, the alliances. I was the only person who could do it. Wanting didn’t enter the equation.”
“That’s not an answer,” I said quietly.
“No.” He looked at me. “It’s the explanation for why I don’t have one.”
“You can’t even imagine it?”
“No. To be me is to be this person. I can’t separate myself from the duty. We are one and the same.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then:
“Dover Street. The house. That was mine. One of the few choices I made because I wanted to, not because someone needed me to.”
“Why that house?”
“I could hear the sea from the garden.”
I reached across the table. I took his hand. Not the way he had taken mine—I covered his palm, pressed my fingers over his knuckles, held him the way you hold something you’ve just been given that you know is fragile.
The server brought the check. Daniil paid without looking at it. I put my coat on and he held the collar and his fingers brushed the bare skin of my back and neither of us mentioned it.
We walked to the car. Columbia Street was quiet—the bodega was closing, the print shop was dark, the streetlamps threw long pools of amber across the pavement. Ilya stood by the car, his back to us, giving us the particular privacy of a man who was paid to be invisible.
I stopped on the sidewalk.
“Was tonight another one?” I asked. “Like Dover Street. A choice you made because you wanted to.”
Daniil stopped. He turned to face me. The streetlamp caught half his face and left the other half in shadow.
“Every part of it,” he said. “And not just the night. You. Us. The way our relationship is changing—growing. It’s what I want.”
I kissed him. On the sidewalk, in the amber light, with Ilya’s back turned and the street empty and the restaurant behind us still glowing
We played the game. The game of two people who knew, without any doubt, that they were destined for sex.
On the drive home, we sat quiet, but I could feel it between us. The inevitability. I wasn’t in control of my body. I felt my pussy throb, my legs tremble as we drove. I’d never been more ready, never been more nervous.
Any time I stole a glance at him, I saw those pale blue eyes, hungry, practically eating me alive.
When we arrived home and the car was gone, I took his hand and he led me upstairs.
In my bedroom the lamp was on. I had left it on before dinner—a small, deliberate act of optimism I had not admitted to myself at the time. The amber light fell across the bed. Misha sat on the pillow. I moved him to the nightstand without breaking stride.
I turned. I kissed my husband.
He answered.
The eagerness was immediate and total. His arms came around me—both of them, fast, his hands spreading across my bare back where the dress opened, and his mouth opened against mine with a hunger that made the previous night newly, devastatingly comprehensible.
He had held me on this bed and kissed me with patience and restraint and left without touching me, and the cost of that restraint was in this kiss.
All of it. Every suppressed impulse, every deliberate withdrawal, every measured goodnight—it was all here, in his mouth and his hands and the sound he made against my lips, low and rough and involuntary.
I pulled him closer. My hands found his sweater and gripped the fabric at his shoulders and I felt the hard muscle beneath, the tension coiled in his body.
He walked me backward until my shoulders met the wall beside the door.
His mouth left mine and found my jaw, my neck, the place below my ear where my pulse beat against his lips.
I reached for him. My hand moved down his chest, his stomach, lower. I found him through the fabric of his trousers—hard, thick, the length of him straining against the material. I pressed my palm against him and rubbed.
He groaned. The sound vibrated against my throat. His hips pushed forward—involuntary, the first uncontrolled movement I had felt from him, and the power of it—the raw, physical proof of what I did to him—sent a pulse of heat through me so sharp my knees buckled.
His hands found the dress. The ink-blue silk that he had told me to wear, the fabric he had said he wouldn’t want to wait to rip off.
He didn’t rip it. He was more careful than that—his fingers found the hidden zipper at my side and drew it down with a precision that told me he had been studying the architecture of this dress all evening, mapping the fastenings, planning the removal.
The dress fell. It pooled around my feet in a whisper of silk.
I stood before him in nothing but my underwear. Black. Simple. Almost nothing between his eyes and my skin.
He looked at me.
The weight of his gaze was physical. I felt it on my collarbones, my breasts, my stomach, my hips. This was a man looking at something he wanted, and the wanting was visible in every line of his body.
“You’re beautiful,” he said. Not the same words from the hallway. These were lower. Rougher. Stripped of composure. “So. Fucking. Beautiful.”
He stepped forward. His mouth found my shoulder. The hollow of my throat. The curve of my collarbone. Each kiss landed on bare skin and each one left heat behind it, a trail of warmth that moved down my body.
His mouth reached my ear. His lips brushed the shell of it. His breath was warm and unsteady.
“I want to lick your pussy,” he said. “Until you come on my tongue. I want to bite your nipples until you make that sound—the one you made on the promenade. I want to spank your ass until your skin is pink and warm and you’re wet enough that I can feel it on my fingers.”
I moaned. The sound came from somewhere deep—not performed, not managed, pulled from the same place the dream had come from.
Each admission landed in my body. Lick. Bite.
Spank. Pink. I felt each word in a different place—low in my stomach, sharp in my breasts, deep between my legs where the ache had lived since the dream.
“I want to hold you down,” he continued, his mouth against my jaw, “and fuck you until you can’t remember your own name. I want to hear you say mine. I want to feel you come around my cock.”
“Daniil—”
“I’ve wanted you for years.” His voice cracked on the last word. “I’ve dreamed about this. About you. About having you beneath me, above me, in every way I could imagine.”
His hands were on my waist. My hips. His thumbs traced the edge of my underwear, back and forth, the pressure maddening.
I reached for him. My fingers found his belt—the same buckle, the same heavy brass I had unfastened in the library. I opened it. I unbuttoned his trousers. I pushed my hand inside and found him—hot, hard, the size of him filling my grip. I wrapped my fingers around him and held.
He inhaled. Sharp. His forehead dropped against mine.
“I want you to do exactly what I say,” he said.
The words were quiet. Close. Spoken against my mouth with the same low, controlled authority he used for everything — commands, security briefings, dinner conversation — but here, in this room, with my hand around his cock and his hands on my skin, the voice became something else entirely.
“Yes, Daddy.”
The word settled between us. I had chosen it. Not from the headspace of the lavender pajamas and the coloring book — from the full, deliberate, adult awareness of a woman who knew exactly what she was offering and to whom.
His eyes found mine. The ice-blue was nearly gone, swallowed by something darker, something that looked at me from behind the composure and recognized what I had given him.
“Good girl,” he said.
The praise moved through me. My hand tightened around him.
“Lie back,” he said.
I did as he asked.
The bed was warm beneath me. The amber light from the lamp fell across my body, and I was aware of every inch of skin he could see—my breasts, my stomach, my hips, the dark fabric of my underwear, my bare thighs. I did not cover myself. I lay where he had told me to lie and I waited.
Daniil crossed to the closet. He opened it with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything, and I heard him move hangers, search.
He returned with a silk scarf I had forgotten I owned—a long, narrow strip of deep green that had been a gift from Anton years ago, shoved to the back of the closet and never worn.
He sat on the edge of the bed. He took my right wrist and raised it above my head.
He wrapped the silk around it—twice, three times—and secured it to the iron bar of the headboard.
The knot was firm. Not tight enough to cut off circulation.
Not loose enough to slip free. He took my left wrist and did the same.
“Too tight?” he asked.
“No.” I tested the bindings. My arms pulled. The silk held. “Perfect.”
He looked down at me. My arms above my head, my body stretched across the bed, the last of my clothing still in place. His eyes moved over me with focused attention, and his attention was not polite.
He started at my collarbones.
His mouth traced the line of them—left to right, then back, his tongue dipping into the hollow of my throat.
His hands followed—palms flat against my ribs, fingers spread, mapping the architecture of my body.
He kissed the swell of my left breast above the bra line.
Then the right. His thumb found my nipple through the fabric and pressed.
I arched. The sensation went through me—sharp, electric, connected directly to the place between my legs where the ache had been building since the dream.
He pulled the bra down. Not off—down, the cups pushed beneath my breasts, the fabric tight beneath them, lifting. He put his mouth on my left nipple. Warm. Wet. His tongue circled, then he bit.