11. Lena #2
Petrov’s men arrived within minutes. Raphael’s security detail, the one I had stopped fighting.
They moved with an efficiency that seemed inhuman, coordinating without speaking, positioning themselves at exit points and asking questions in clipped professional tones that I could barely process.
One of them was already on his phone, speaking Russian in a low voice, and I knew without being told who he was calling.
I retreated to a back hallway, trying to breathe through my mouth because the smell of blood had followed me, was everywhere, was in my hair and my clothes and my lungs.
My hands pressed flat against the cool plaster, and I focused on that sensation, the solidity of the wall, the only thing that was real.
Someone did this on purpose.
The thought crystallized through the shock. Winston in that box, months ago, his rhinestone collar still attached. The heating system sabotage that had nearly killed half a dozen guests. Now blood in the fountain, pumping through the jets, filling my hotel with the smell of death.
Escalating. Targeting. Someone wanted me terrified, and they were succeeding.
By three o’clock, the police had taken samples and statements.
The fountain was being professionally cleaned by a hazmat crew in white suits, and the lobby was closed to guests.
I sat in my office with the door closed, staring at the wall, a draft press statement open on my laptop that I couldn’t seem to write.
The cursor blinked. I had typed “The Hughes Palace Hotel regrets” and nothing else.
Clara called at four.
“I just heard.” Her voice was tight. “Are you okay? Are you safe?”
“I’m fine.” Another lie. I was shaking again, couldn’t seem to stop. The tremor had settled into my bones like a fever. “The police are handling it.”
“Come stay with me. Get out of that house. This is insane, Lena. Someone is targeting you, and you’re living with a man who might be—”
“No.”
The word came out harder than I intended. Clara went quiet on the other end of the line.
“I’m not leaving.” I didn’t know why I was saying it. The manor wasn’t safe. Raphael wasn’t safe. Nothing about my current situation was remotely safe. But the thought of going somewhere else, being somewhere he wasn’t, sleeping in a room where I couldn’t hear his footsteps in the hallway below me…
I didn’t finish the thought. Couldn’t.
“Just… I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said, and hung up before she could argue.
The drive home was silent. I sat in the back seat and watched Paradise Peaks scroll past the tinted windows, the cute shops and the tourists and the normal people living normal lives, and none of it was real.
The manor appeared through the trees, and I waited for the familiar clench of resentment at the sight of it. The stone facade. The iron gates. The prison that wasn’t supposed to feel like anything else.
The clench didn’t come.
His car was in the drive. Home early. The sight of it should have made me angry. Instead, the tension in my chest loosened, just slightly, just enough to notice.
I went straight upstairs. Alice brought food that I couldn’t eat.
I showered, scrubbing until my skin was raw, but the copper smell lingered in my sinuses, in my hair, in the back of my throat.
Three showers and I still smelled it. The ring felt heavier than usual, the band tight around my finger.
I paced my room, unable to settle, unable to think about anything except the blood pumping through the fountain and the way Michael had been so ready to take over and the fact that somewhere in this town, someone hated me enough to do that.
Downstairs, I heard him moving. The creak of his study door. Footsteps crossing the hallway toward the foyer.
Then nothing. The silence stretched, weighted with intention, as if he were standing below my room and waiting to see if I would come down.
My heart was loud in my ears. I stood frozen in the middle of my bedroom, one hand pressed to my chest, and listened to him listen for me.
He went back to his study without coming up.
I tried wine. Tried reading. Tried the breathing exercises Sophie had taught me during the spa’s opening week.
Nothing worked. The terror was still there, crawling under my skin, and I needed it gone.
I needed to feel something other than afraid.
Other than helpless. Other than the woman who had stood shaking in a back hall while someone else handled her crisis.
Clara’s voice in my head. Use him.
If I was going to be trapped in this marriage, I might as well take what I wanted from it.
The anger was still there. Good. I needed it. And underneath the anger, a shameful truth. I was already wet. Had been since I heard his footsteps cross the foyer. My body wanted him even when my mind screamed betrayal.
I was moving before I made a conscious decision. Down the stairs. The railing cool under my palm. Through the hallway. The study door opened without resistance under my hand.
He looked up from his desk. The lamp threw shadows across his face, catching his eyes, making them gleam strangely in the low light. Something almost amber beneath the gray. He didn’t speak. Just watched me cross the room toward him, waiting.
The silence stretched. He didn’t fill it.
“I don’t want to talk,” I said. My voice sounded steadier than my hands. “I don’t want comfort. I don’t want you to be patient.”
He was very still. The kind of stillness that reminded me of the dinner, of Dmitri and Viktor and the coordinated silence that made my instincts scream things I couldn’t name.
“I want you to help me forget today happened.” I stopped in front of his chair, close enough to touch, close enough to see the slight dilation of his pupils. “Can you do that?”
He studied me. The lamp light caught his face, and hunger moved in his expression. Dark. Barely held under iron control. When he spoke, his voice was low and rough.
“You came to my study already wet for me.” His nostrils flared, and something predatory sharpened his features. “I could smell you the moment you walked through the door.”
Heat flooded my face. Shame and arousal tangled together, my body’s betrayal called out for both of us to acknowledge. I should have been humiliated. Instead, my pussy clenched at his words.
“Yes,” he said. “I can do that.”
Nothing else. No questions. No hesitation.
I kissed him.
Hard. More teeth than tenderness, my hands fisting in his shirt, pulling him up from the chair.
The anger came with it, the fury I had been choking on all day, at him, at the stalker, at my father, at everyone who had ever made me feel small and helpless and trapped.
At my own treacherous body for craving the man who had ruined me.
I poured it into the kiss like poison, and he drank it down without flinching.
He let me lead. His hands stayed at his sides, fingers curled loosely, until I grabbed them and put them where I wanted them, on my hips, gripping hard enough to bruise.
He strained with the effort of holding himself back from taking whatever he wanted.
He could have taken over at any moment. Could have flipped us, pressed me against the desk, done whatever he pleased.
Instead he held himself in check and let me have the reins.
“You want me to be a good girl, Raphael?” I bit the words against his mouth. “You lost that right when you lied to me.”
The edge of the desk hit my back. “Harder,” I demanded.
He obeyed.
His hands hiked my skirt up around my waist, rough and efficient.
Mine tore at his belt, his zipper, impatient and graceless.
When he lifted me onto the desk, the wood cold against my bare thighs, I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him closer.
When he pushed inside, I made a sound that was more anger than pleasure, and I didn’t care.
“You can hate me all you want,” he growled against my throat. “Your pussy tells a different story.”
It wasn’t tender. It wasn’t romantic. It was exactly what I had asked for, burning away the terror, feeling powerful instead of afraid, using his body to exorcise my own demons.
His mouth on my throat. My nails scoring down his back through his shirt. The desk shuddering under us with each thrust. I took everything he gave me and demanded more, and he gave me that too, matching my desperation with a patience that infuriated me because it meant he was still holding back.
“Your room,” I gasped when I needed more, when the desk wasn’t enough, when the angle was wrong and I wanted him deeper. “Now.”
He didn’t argue. Just lifted me like I weighed nothing, carried me through the hallway, kicked open the bedroom door.
When he dropped me on the bed, I didn’t wait for him to set the pace.
I shoved him onto his back and climbed on top, taking control, using his body the way Clara had told me to use everything else he had.
I rode him hard. Angry. Desperate. His hands gripped my hips but didn’t steer. He let me take, let me use, watched me with those dark eyes that saw too much.
“That’s it.” His voice was a low rasp, more animal than man. “Fuck yourself on my cock. Show me how much you want what you say you hate.”
“Fight all you want,” he growled, his voice barely human. “You’re still going to come for me.”
A sound rumbled from his chest, low and animal, vibrating through his ribs into my thighs. Not quite human.
I didn’t care. Didn’t want to examine it. Just wanted to burn.
My hands braced on his chest. His heartbeat steady and slow beneath my palms, slower than it should have been given what we were doing. His control showed in the way he held himself still when every line of his body said he wanted to move.
His name tore out of me when I came. Not soft. Sharp. Almost an accusation. I screamed his name and hated myself for it, hated my treacherous body for craving the man who had destroyed me.
And then he swelled inside me.