Chapter 32 Bella
BELLA
The nightmare shakes around me, and Don Leo’s fat fingers are hooked into the neckline of my one-piece, his breath stinking against my face as the sea breeze chokes the air amidst crashing waves.
“Tell me, ragazza, did this Russian prick ever tell you what he did to my poor Gia?”
I thrash against the hands holding me down, but they’re everywhere, and he’s too strong.
“You’re about to find out, Bella.”
Hands tighten instead of releasing, and I scream harder, clawing at whatever I can reach.
“Bella! Look at me!”
A pair of gray eyes swim into focus in the dark, followed by familiar sharp cheekbones. The smell of the sea is gone, and the waves are replaced with the steady hum of the airplane A/C.
I’m not there on the yacht.
And the shaking is just turbulence.
“It’s a nightmare,” Slava says, his voice low and steady. “I got you. You’re safe.”
I’m gasping for air like a fish out of water. My heart slams against my ribs so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t crack through the bruised bone. The jet shudders again as we hit another pocket of rough air.
Just turbulence. Just a nightmare.
My hands are still shaking and I can’t quite close them for some reason. When I look down, I realize that Slava’s fingers are interlaced with mine.
Was he holding my hand the entire time as I slept? Was that how he knew I was having a nightmare? Or did I reach out for the safety of his touch in my panic?
He follows my gaze down to our joined hands, and then he starts to pull away.
“Don’t.” The word escapes my lips. “Please.”
He stills.
“Hold me,” I whisper. “Until we land.”
I don’t have the energy to pretend I’m anything other than exhausted and terrified and desperately, pathetically human.
Slava hesitates for a brief moment. Then, he slides his arm around me, encases me in the fiery embrace of his touch, and pulls me closer.
I close my eyes at the relief of not being alone in the dark.
My cheek finds the hollow of his shoulder.
His heartbeat is steady beneath my ear and slower than mine.
And with every mingled breath, my heart steadies just a little bit more until my pulse gradually stops trying to escape through my throat.
“I was on the yacht,” I hear myself say, unprompted. “With Don Leo.”
Slava’s arm tightens around me and he pulls me even closer. “He won’t reach you here.”
I lean back into his reassuring heat as the turbulence smooths out, and nod. But there’s still just a final root of doubt that’s dug itself deep into my mind. I bite my lip, wondering if this is the time to ask.
But what if the answer isn’t what I want it to be, but further confirmation that Slava really is the monster I believed him to be?
Huh, I think. Believed. Past tense.
Then, as if sensing the conflict in my mind, Slava moves behind me. He tucks away a strand of my hair behind my ear in an impossibly gentle gesture and holds me even closer.
“What is it?” he whispers against my ear.
I close my eyes. “Do you remember asking what Nico told me at the fundraiser gala?”
“I do.”
There’s no turning back now. “He told me you raped and murdered his younger sister.”
The words come out like floodwater from a burst dam, and as they come, I’m powerless to stop them. Slava tightens slightly behind me, but he lets me continue.
“And on the yacht,” I say, my voice whisper quiet. “Do you remember Don Leo asking me if you ever told me what you did to his Gia?”
“I do.”
“Now I’m asking you.” I take a breath and turn to look him in his eyes in the dark. “Did you? Did you rape her? Did you kill her?”
“No,” Slava’s jaws clench and his voice is bitter. “And Nico is a fucking liar. Gia was his older sister, not younger.”
His words confirm what I found in the obituary, and it feels as if a physical weight lifts off my chest.
I shift further so that I can see his entire face, and find his eyes holding an infinite grief, like a man who’s been carrying something heavy for a very long time.
When Gia died, Ludmilla whispers in my head. A part of Slava’s heart died with her.
“What really happened to her?” I ask softly. “How did she die?”
He blinks, and the heaviness doesn’t go away. Here, in this enclosed cabin hurtling its way across the dark open ocean, it feels like something is finally starting to crack between us.
Finally, he says, “Because she got too close to me.”
The words sink into my skin, bury themselves in my veins, and settle deep in my bones.
I thought him telling me that it won’t happen again when I settled into bed. I thought it was nothing but a cruel rejection designed to push me away and keep me at arm’s length so that I can’t see whatever he’s hiding.
But maybe it wasn’t a threat at all.
“Is that why you walked away from me?” I ask. “In the shower?”
“Yes.”
I blink hard as my eyes begin to burn with salt, and I try my damnedest to will the tears away. But they gather anyway because of how utterly unfair everything is.
If you’d told me last month that I’d be sitting here in Slava Romanov’s embrace on his private plane, crying about the reality that we can’t be together, I’d have said you were out of your mind.
And yet here I am.
“Maybe it would’ve been better,” I trail off and look away, not sure how to give name to the shapeless thing that’s been growing between us. “If we stayed as enemies.”
His fingers find my chin. Tilt my face back toward him.
“Do you really want that?” he asks.
I look into those gray eyes, and see the winter storm clouds swirling around tender feelings that’d been buried so deep in the snow.
“No,” I say. “But it would be awfully convenient.”
“I don’t want things to be convenient.” There’s a roughness in his voice. “Not with you.”
His thumb traces the curve of my lower lip. The touch sends electricity skittering across my skin, and burning me up from the depth of my soul.
My breath catches. “Do you want it to happen again?”
“Yes,” he admits.
Then he kisses me, cradling the back of my skull and tipping my head to a better angle so he can deepen the kiss. His tongue strokes against mine in a rhythm that makes my hips want to move.
I moan against his lips and turn in his arms without breaking the kiss until I’m facing him. His hand reaches up and tugs me by my hair. Then, the two of us are falling together into the bed.
“Oh…” I gasp when he breaks the kiss to drag his mouth down my throat. His teeth graze my pulse point, and I shudder. “Oh yes.”
He murmurs in Russian against my skin, and then his hand slides beneath the hem of my borrowed shirt until his palm is hot against my bare stomach and I forget the nightmare that landed me here in the first place.
I forget a lot of things, actually.
I forget that this man represents everything I was supposed to hate. I forget my own promises of vengeance. And as his hand finds my breast and gives it a long and insistent squeeze, sending a burst of heat spreading deep in my chest, I forget my own surging jealousy.
Right now, there’s only his hands and his mouth and the slow, excruciatingly beautiful way he’s taking me apart.
He pushes the shirt up over my head, and I sigh as the cool air of the cabin kisses my bare skin. His hand unclips my bra, and strips me down to just my underwear.
And even though darkness shrouds all around us, I feel seen.
“Lie back,” he murmurs against my collarbone.
I obey without thinking, sinking into the sheets, my hair fanning out against the pillow. He kneels over me, still fully dressed while I’m nearly naked.
I can feel his gaze traveling down my body as sure as if it’s his hands. And then I feel the fire of his touch joining in, and my blood boils in rhythmic pulses in my throat, under my scalp, and along the tips of my fingers and toes.
“I have you, Bella,” he whispers, and then crushes his lips to mine until not a single molecule of oxygen is left.
I whimper, then moan, and then cry out into the kiss. His tongue pushes into my mouth to coax with mine, and each slow dancing swirl leaves me wetter and wetter.
My own hands reach down, find my thighs, and pull back to open myself up to him.
When he breaks the kiss, all I can do is fight for breath.
But he offers me no respite. His teeth scrape my neck, past the sensitive spot by my collarbone, and then finally down, down, down along my sternum. Wet fire follows in its wake.
“Slava—”
“Don’t say my name like that, Bella.” He kisses my belly. “Unless you want me to stop being careful.”
I don’t know what careful means. I don’t know what any of this means. All I know is that his mouth is trailing lower, and his hands are pushing my thighs further apart. As he does, every nerve in my body screams for more.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my underwear and pauses. My eyes flutter open and I feel his gaze in the dark looking up at me between my legs.
He’s waiting for my permission.
“Yes,” I breathe. “Take it. It’s yours.”
He pulls the underwear aside and then his mouth closes around me.
God.
His tongue finds my center with long, slow strokes. Each sweep of his tongue is hot and insistent as he follows along the entirety of my soaked slit. He drinks me down from the bottom, and sucks my clit when he reaches the top.
My eyes roll into the back of my head at how good it feels and I think—no, I know—that he must’ve been thinking about this exact moment as much as I have fantasized it.
My back arches off the mattress. Sweat beads and then rolls down my ribs.
I grab a fistful of silk sheet and he closes a hand around my breast, kneading the tender flesh and rolling my nipple between his long fingers. I fist his hair, and he pushes his tongue inside of me to taste me at my source.
Every coherent thought I’ve ever had is evaporating under the relentless pressure of his mouth.
“Oh, fuck—”
He hums against me, and the vibration nearly makes me levitate. His free hand clamps down on my thigh, spreading me open to keep me from squirming away from the overwhelming pleasure of his mouth. He eats me like he’s been starving for years and I’m the most delicious thing he’s tasted.
The orgasm builds. I can feel it coiling at the base of my spine, and tightening in my belly. I want to chase it as much as I want to run from it. Unable to figure out which one I prefer, I roll my hips into his mouth, and let him take control.
“I’m—” I gasp. “I’m going to—”
He doesn’t slow down. If anything, he doubles his efforts. His tongue works in perfect rhythm while his hand leaves my thigh, moves past the one punishing my breast, and slides into my mouth for me to suck.
And when I do, I come apart.
The orgasm crashes through me. My body shakes violently. I’m dimly aware that I’m moaning—loud and desperate—but I don’t stop. Heat rushes up my face, spreads down my neck, and concentrates between my legs and his relentless mouth.
He works me through every aftershock until my moans turn to screams. He keeps going until my throat is raw, and my limbs become languid and useless.
When I finally open my eyes, he’s watching me with an expression I can’t read.
I expect him to climb over me. To take what I offered. To fuck me into the sheets until I forget my own name, forget Luca, forget everything except the feeling of him inside me.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, he pulls the covers up over my body. Lies down beside me. Slides his arm around my waist and pulls me close until my back is pressed against his chest and his breath is warm against the top of my head.
“Sleep,” he says quietly.
“But you didn’t—”
“Sleep, Bella.”
I want to argue. I want to understand why he gave without taking, why he held back when I would have let him have anything. But my body is soft with pleasure and my eyes are heavy from the steady beat of his heart against my spine.
And I fall into a long and dreamless sleep.
Two hours before landing, I stand in the shower while my skin turns pink and I try to process everything that happened.
He ate me out and then he held me while I slept.
I kept expecting that he’d fuck me right then and there, the way I know he’s wanted to fuck me ever since I felt his pulse on my fingers after the shooting at the Bellamy gallery.
But he didn’t.
I turn off the water and reach for the towel, drying myself quickly before pulling on a fresh change of clothing.
As I adjust the waistband, I catch the smell of the perfume again. The scent curls in my nostrils, sweet and cloying, and suddenly the tender way he held me feels less like affection and more like a trap.
Now, armed with just enough confirmation from Slava, I dare to wonder.
Did these clothes belong to Gia?
What did he mean she died because she got too close to him?
And if getting close to him killed a princess of the D’Ambrosio Family, what might happen to an ordinary girl like me?