Chapter 49 Slava
SLAVA
The silence after sex has never felt like this.
I pull out of Bella and watch a bead of cum roll down her inner thigh, catching light from the city below. She slides down the glass wordlessly, panting and shaking.
A trail of sweat and condensation follows. Her handprints and the ghost shape of her ass remain on the window.
I step back with a ragged and uneven breath. My cock is still half-hard and slick with her. The penthouse air feels too cold after the furnace-heat of her body, and I desperately want to pull her back, wrap her in something warm, and press my mouth to hers in apology.
But instead, all I say is, "Was that what you fucking wanted?"
I mean for the words to sound cold, like that of a pakhan. But all I hear is a man who just destroyed something precious and is desperate to know if it can be rebuilt.
Bella doesn't answer. She's still catching her breath, her forehead pressed against the glass, her body is a canvas of marks from my hands, my mouth, and my teeth.
“I asked you a question, malyshka.”
She glares at me through a shock of messy dark hair, and then pushes herself off the floor.
Fuck.
She's not done.
She crosses the distance, her feet slightly unsteady. Before I can stop her, her hand is pressed flat against my chest. The pressure is light and gentle, not nearly enough to move me. But my feet retreat as she steps forward, until my back hits the edge of my desk and I'm half-sitting on it.
"Bella—"
Her hand wraps around my cock—still sensitive and wet—and draws a ragged gasp from my throat. Then, she starts to stroke, and my vision whites out at the edges.
"Not by a fucking long shot," she hisses.
She’s working me with a ruthlessness that borders on violence, her grip too tight, her rhythm unforgiving, her eyes locked on mine like she's daring me to stop her. Like she knows I’m powerless to stop her.
I get hard again because my body has never been able to resist her, even when my mind is screaming warnings that if I let her take control, it’ll be the death of us both.
"Bella." I breathe. "Wait—"
"Lie back."
She pushes against my chest, and I’m falling down, down, down, until the desk meets my back. Her hand gives my cock a temporary reprieve, just long enough for her to climb onto the desk, and straddle my hips.
Her makeup is ruined—mascara tracks down her cheeks like war paint, her lipstick is smeared across her jaw where I kissed her too hard, and her eyeliner is bleeding at the corners.
Her hair is a wreck, half-escaped from how hard I yanked it over and over again.
It’s tangled and wild around her face. There are bite marks on her shoulder.
She looks like she's been through a war.
I did that.
Something twists in my chest. Not satisfaction. Not the cold triumph I should feel at seeing my enemy brought low. Something worse. Something that feels horrifyingly like regret.
She looks beautiful, fierce, and utterly destroyed.
And she’s not done.
I reach for her without thinking, hoping to touch her face, smooth her hair, and do something gentle that might balance out the destruction. But she catches my wrists, forces them above my head, and pins them to the desk with a strength I didn't know she had.
"I told you to fuck me like you hate me," she says, and her voice is steady even though her lower lip is trembling. "So fuck me like you hate me."
Then she sinks down onto me in one brutal motion, taking me to the hilt, and starts to ride.
She’s neither gentle nor careful as she fucks. Not like in the hunting lodge when I felt something in my chest cracking open at the thought I might’ve lost her. This is punishment. This is revenge.
This is two people trying to destroy something they're terrified to keep.
I try to move my hand to grab her hips, but she tightens her grip on me. Her knees pin me by my side, and her hips roll with a ferocity that I know will break us both.
"No," she says. "You don't get to control this. You don't get to make this something it's not."
What is it? I want to ask. What is this, if not two people who can't stop wanting each other even when they’re trying to kill each other?
But there’s no way I can stop her, even if I want to stop her. So, I let her take what she needs. I let her use me the way I used her, because maybe that's the only fairness left. Maybe this is the only honest conversation we can still have.
Sweat drips from her forehead onto my chest. Tears, too—I can see them tracking through the ruined makeup, catching light, and falling like rain.
"Fuck you," she says, grinding down. "Fuck you."
Again and again. There’s a rhythm to her anger, and it’s everything I fucking deserve.
"Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you."
But the thing is…
She's not saying it like she means it at me. She's saying it like she's trying to convince herself. Like if she says them enough times, they'll become true.
Each “fuck you” sounds like a confession she can't afford to make. And with every repetition, they sound suspiciously like three other words wearing a disguise.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I need to make some sound, I need to let her know that she’s not the only one who feels this way. When she releases one of my hands, I reach up immediately. But before I can touch her, she reaches me first.
She slaps me across the face.
The crack of it echoes through the penthouse. My head snaps to the side. For a moment, all I can hear is my own heartbeat and Bella's ragged breathing.
When I turn back to her, there's a dark wildness in her tear-soaked eyes.
She raises her hand to do it again.
I catch her wrist. Sit up in one fluid motion. In her surprise, she loosens her other hand just enough for me to regain control. My body sits up, my newly freed arm wraps around her back, and I pull her against me so we're chest to chest, eye to eye, and breathing the same wrecked air.
She's still moving. Even held like this, her hips haven't stopped, grinding against me in small, desperate circles that are going to ruin me before I'm ready.
"Fuck you," she says through clenched teeth. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck—"
My fingers find her hair, give it a tug, and bury my face in her neck.
This time, I press my mouth to the spot where her pulse is racing, and I breathe her in. Sweat and sex and the soft delicious taste of her that I can never name but can never forget. She smells like every terrible thing I want and am not allowed to have.
She smells like mine.
"Fuck you," she whispers, but her voice breaks on it.
I tug her hair harder, and lick down to the delicate architecture of her collarbone, the places where her pulse beats hardest.
I kiss her there, scraping my teeth gently across the sensitive skin as if that’s enough to rebuke the violence we've been trading. I lick the sting away, kiss the skin again and work my way back up the hollow of her throat to the tender skin beneath her ear.
Bella moans.
Not the sharp, defiant sounds from before. Something different. Something that sounds like her armor cracking.
"Fuck you," she says again, but it's a whisper now, and her hips are moving differently—slower, deeper, chasing something that feels less like punishment and more like need.
My hand tightens in her hair. The other grips her breast, thumb circling her nipple, feeling it harden under my touch. Even though I'm holding her and have my fist in her hair and my mouth on her neck, she's the one in control.
She's always been in control, I realize. Since the moment she walked into my life with her cover story and her false name and that fire burning in her brown eyes. I thought I was the one who could play her like a piece on the board, but she played me first.
She played me better. She played me so well that I fell in love with her, and now…
Now we're both losing.
I feast on her neck, her collarbone, every inch of skin I can reach. Kissing, biting, licking—a map of devotion written in marks she'll wear for days. Bella's moans are changing. The fight is leaving her voice. The defiance is bleeding away.
And what's left underneath is soft, vulnerable desire.
This is no longer the performance she's been giving me. Nor is it the weapon she tried to make of her body. This is only Bella, wanting me the same way she has always wanted me.
"Slava," she breathes, and it's not fuck you.
It's worse than fuck you.
I'm not strong enough to pretend I don't hear it, so I press my lips to her and kiss her so hard that it becomes impossible for me to know where I end and where she begins.
Her first shudder is almost undetectable. A tremor that runs through her like an electrical current, barely there. The second is unmistakable. Her entire body tenses, and I feel her inner walls fluttering around me.
And when the third comes, I can't tell if it's her or me. We're so tangled and fused at every point of contact, that our pleasure blurs together like watercolors bleeding on paper.
"Look at me." She breaks the kiss and begs.
I do.
"Look at me when I come for you."
I pull back just enough to meet her eyes.
My hand releases her hair, comes around to cup her jaw, tilting her face toward mine.
We're inches apart and tasting the air of each other’s lungs.
We’re close enough that I can see every emotion swimming in her big brown eyes, see the swirl of tear tracks on her cheeks, and hear the tiniest of sounds caressing her trembling lips.
She's beautiful, and she's breaking, and it’s all because of me.
"Yes," she whimpers, hips rolling faster now. "Yes, yes, yes… I'm coming, I'm coming for you—"
I want to tell her to let go. Want to tell her I've got her, that I'll catch her, that whatever falls apart I'll help her rebuild. But I can't promise any of that. I'm the one who broke her in the first place. I'm the one who took everything she ever showed me and turned them into weapons.
So instead, I just hold her, and press my forehead to hers as control slips away from both of us and do my damnedest to wish that we could’ve stayed forever in that hunting lodge, when everything was different.
When I still believed we might survive this.
"Come for me," I whisper, voice cracking. "Please. Please. Please."
With one final roll of her hips, she takes me all the way down—so deep that I know no other man has ever touched her there—and then she's coming, clenching around me in waves, her whole body arching, a sobbing sound escaping her throat amidst a hoarse scream.
I follow her over the edge. I can’t stop even if I tried. I bury myself inside her and let go, coming so hard my ears are ringing while my hands grip her like she's the only solid thing in a world that's tilting off its axis.
The orgasm strips everything from us—every mask, every wall, and every carefully constructed lie we've been telling ourselves and each other.
For one perfect, terrible moment, we're just two people who love each other, shaking apart in each other's arms.
Then the moment passes, and reality floods back—cold and brutal and inescapable.
The warning I whispered in her ear the first time we came together under that shower returns in my ear, and I hate myself more than I ever can.
If you ever betray me, malyshka, you'll wish you were still my enemy.
Bella slides off me first without a word. She just lifts herself up, lets me slip out of her, swings her leg over and slides off the desk. Her knees buckle when her feet hit the floor. She catches herself on the edge of the desk, steadies, then collapses on the ground.
She doesn't look at me as she lies there, naked and wrecked. Her hair hides her face, and her shoulders are rising and falling with breaths that sound like they hurt.
I need to say something. I need to do something other than lie here on my own desk, softening cock still wet with the evidence of what we just did and staring at her back like it holds answers I've forgotten how to ask for.
But when I shift and get ready to stand, she breaks the silence.
"Leave."
Bella's voice is flat and stripped of all emotions. She's already accepted that this is the end, that this is over, and that whatever existed between us died somewhere in the last hour and there's nothing left to do but accept it.
I sit up. The desk creaks under me. Papers rustle.
"Bella—"
"I said leave."
An apology forms in my throat, and no word is adequate. I want to crawl across this floor and gather her up and tell her that none of it was real, and that the monster she asked for isn't who I am.
But she doesn't want my apology.
She wants my hate.
And dammit, I can't give her that either. Because even the hate was always a lie. The hate was the mask I put on when I found the thumbprint in the safe. The hate was the performance I gave because it was easier than admitting that she'd broken something in me that I don't know how to repair.
I don't hate her.
I love her.
But it’s too late to tell her that.
So, I do as she commands me to.
I leave.