Chapter 10
10
TOMASZ
T he chessboard stares up at me as I pause on my way to the bathroom. There’s so much I don’t understand about her. The fact that she’s smart enough to beat me at a fair game doesn’t sit well with the fact she’s ended up here. How could she not have sensed that she was walking into a trap when her handler took her to the club in London?
Picking up the white queen she used to ambush my king, I twirl it between my thumb and finger, holding it up to the light emanating from her bathroom window. She knew to pick off my side piece by piece, saving her most valuable pieces to the end. Red disarmed before she went in for the kill, not the most popular strategy. It’s risky, leaving the king open to vulnerabilities.
Putting the queen back down on the board beside the dark king I’ve righted, I stare at the two pieces side by side, wondering aloud, “What game are you playing?”
The answer never finds me, even as I walk through my closet to the bathroom and search through the cabinet for all the things I need to take care of her foot. It strikes me when I’m heading back to her room in the dark and that I’m doing everything I was taught not to. I’m breaking every rule that’s been passed on to me.
It’s you that’s meant to destroy her, not the other way around.
Is that what she’s doing? Picking me apart—rule by rule and defence by defence—until she makes her ultimate move?
Pausing outside her bedroom door, I drag in a breath, shaking my head clear of the questions. This isn’t me. I’ve never doubted my intentions or resolve or, more frustratingly, my strength. It’s not something I’m going to start now.
For a moment, I contemplate turning around and leaving her until tomorrow. Niko and Emin will come for our weekly dinner. It’s my father’s way of ensuring Vanya warms to the fact she’s going to be marrying my friend, his godson, soon. A part of me thinks that he’s waiting for my mother to get better. Or well enough that she can be a part of the planning and the tempering of my sister’s aversions to our life.
Opening the door, I step inside. I’m too lost in my thoughts to caution myself, and as I head towards the bathroom, she ambushes me. Her arms latch around my neck, constricting my air supply as her legs wrap around my body tight, making it hard for me to shake her off as I drop the shit in my hands to the floor and grasp her elbows.
“Let. Go.” My warning is strangled as my vision frays slightly.
Red’s breaths are getting harder and harder the more I twist and shake closer to the bed. I may not have expected her attack right now— stupidly —but I’m stronger, and my mass dwarfs hers so that with every second, her legs loosen around me.
Spinning, I squeeze her elbows to my shoulders before knocking back onto the bedpost. Once, twice, and a much more forceful third time. The sudden rush of air hazes my head as I release her arms, and she drops onto the mattress with a cry.
“Little. Fucking. Snake.” I slap the inside of her thigh so hard that the thwack echoes around us, and her legs fall open. Her naked body is fully exposed to me in a way that makes my blood pound harder in my veins. The sight is like a feast, ready and waiting for me.
“Never…ever…” I spit at her between gritted teeth as I descend on her prostrate form, kneeling between her spread legs so that she is fully at my mercy. My hands knot into fists in her hair while I squeeze her head between them.
Her stare bores into mine, making it exceedingly clear that the fear I smell between us has nothing to do with me or my actions and everything to do with her and her feelings. A part of me pities her. A small part that sees the dying hope in her unseasoned eyes. As fiery as she is, the girl is still green to the savagery of this world.
“ Never think that you can best me, Red. You can’t.”
To make sure she feels as well as hears and understands the meaning of my words, I lower my body completely flush to hers. I really would be a liar if I didn’t notice how good it feels. The warmth she radiates. The way her flesh gives to my muscle. Hard and soft pressed together so that the rage gonging in her chest is palpable while she kicks her legs and tries to throw me off her. It only makes my body even more aware of hers.
“It doesn’t matter how many times you try, I’ll always come out on top.”
Wild, blazing anger glows in her eyes as she continues bucking beneath me, her hot cunt writhing on my hardened cock. Every move. Every second. Every fucking breath. My body aches with a need that mocks my control.
“No matter what happens. No matter what you do. Even if you escaped, I would hunt you down. I would find you, and I would make you wish you’d never left.”
“That would never happen,” Red replies, the strain of our wrangling husking her voice as I allow her to flip us over.
The view is spectacular. Teardrop tits tremble as she fists my wrists, pinning them to the bed. A flush skitters across her skin while she watches me with those bejewelled eyes that glimmer with more emotions than she can bear. The frustration of it all burgeoning inside her is tangible, sending frissons of adrenaline through me as I wait for her to blow.
“Look at me,” Red snaps with a bitten wince when she adjusts her legs on either side of my torso. She may be avoiding my cock, but her breasts are hitched over my face while she looks down her body at me. “Look at my fucking eyes!”
The waver of her voice betrays the tears she’s holding back. It’s hard not to meet her gaze, impossible to ignore her screaming thoughts as she levels me with all the indignation she has for me and growls, “One day…one fucking day…you mark my words…”
With a deep gasp of breath, she puffs up her chest, squeezing my wrists tighter.
“I’m going to be the death of you.”
I could bite back, but that would give her the power she’s looking for. Red is more cunning than I thought. I found her weakness, and now she’s looking for mine. I’ll never give it to her. She’ll never pry it from me because it’s the one thing I’ve been taught to protect all my life. I protect it from my enemies and my foes. I protect it from outsiders, and at times like these, I protect it from myself.
Pushing off the bed, she crawls backwards. When she’s back on her feet, Red limps over to the antique armoire that takes up most of the wall to the side of the bedroom door. If it wasn’t for the scratches and grazes on her skin, she could blend into the ivory wood.
I sit up on the edge of the bed and watch her watching me intently while she pulls another cotton nightdress from a pink silk hanger. Holding it in front of her, she stumbles to the bathroom.
Her foot.
I need to fix it and get the fuck out of here before my control finally gives and we’ll both end up watching each other bleed by another’s hand. The girl is right—na?ve or not. I’m good at foreseeing these things. Always have been. And as God as my witness—as I get up, picking up the shit I dropped earlier before standing in the bathroom doorway, watching her slip her nightdress on—I know that if I don’t put distance between us, her words will be a curse on us both. My Little Red will be the death of me, but I will drag her with me.
Peering at me in the mirror, she levels me with one of her icy, stoic stares. If our warfare wasn’t so familiar, it might unnerve me. As is, the magnetism between us pulls me closer until I’m standing behind her, my hands grasping the edge of the marble vanity at either side of her hips after I put the medical supplies down.
“Turn around,” I tell her, and before she argues backs, I spin her to face me.
Surprisingly, she doesn’t push back, allowing me to sit her on the counter and get a better look at her foot. It’s small and soft, even though it’s grazed in parts from the rough mulchy ground of the woods.
After I’ve dabbed a generous amount of the numbing cream on her toe, I check over the other lighter injuries to give it time to take effect. It’s not advisable to put it on broken skin, but pulling what’s left of her nail off will be a lot easier if she’s numbed to the pain a little.
“I don’t need you to patch me up. I can do it myself,” she grumbles, a shiver wracking through her as I trace my fingertips up her leg, making sure that the minor cuts are nothing but superficial scratches that require nothing more than the antiseptic cream.
Once I’ve taken care of those, I go back to her toe. There’s no point in warning her of what I’m about to do. Instead, I do exactly what Mama used to do with Band-Aids when I was little. Pinching the loose nail, I pull it free in one hard tug that makes her scream. The sound echoes around the room as I throw the bloody nail into the sink and rinse my fingers before cleaning up the bleeding wound it’s left behind.
“This won’t change anything,” she tells me in a hushed, contrary tone as I cap her toe with a bandage and wrap a plaster around it.
It will last until tomorrow when Niko can see to it properly.
“It may take months and years…I don’t care if it takes forever, but when all is said and done, I’ll be standing over your body, watching you fucking bleed.”
“Yeah?” I release her foot, trailing a hand up the inside of her ankle to her calf. The higher my hand roves, the tenser she becomes. “When they trained you to kill me, they should’ve taught you not to bother with empty threats. They only put you at a disadvantage.”
“Empty threats,” she scoffs, bunching the fabric of her nightdress at her knees when I reach halfway up her thigh, stopping it from hitching up.
“You’re full of them…you’ll kill me. You’ll watch me bleed.” Stroking higher up, I step closer. My blood heats as her breathing becomes shorter, punctuating my erratic heart. “Cut me open. Put a bullet in me…”
Although I can’t bear to look at her right now, my eyes flicker to hers when my knuckles graze her slit, and she gasps, “Stop.”
It’s the kind of sound that drives insanity, beckoning me to break all the rules. Step over hard lines and tear down every fucking wall between us. Contrary to the confusion and guilt narrowing her gaze and the fear that clenches her jaw, her pupils grow, darkening with the same wanton desire that’s pulsing through my veins, throbbing in my fingers and wrenching at my insides.
“Anything else, Red?” The words rasp from my lips, scorching the little air that’s left around us.
Cupping the swell of her thigh between the V of my hand, I press the length of my thumb to her pussy. An audible swallow tightens her throat, and despite all her control, her body quivers, opening for me.
“You said that you were going to hurt me…torture me… Didn’t you?” she spits at me, her hands grasping my wrist. The ferocity of her touch ignites every strand of my fading control. “Didn’t you promise to break me and make me beg you to kill me?”
Red holds my hand still, mouth gaping with trembling breaths. In her lustful conflict, she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Truly spectacular with all that pent-up anger she tries to control ticking and ticking.
Stroking my fingers higher, I fan them over the flat between her hips while my other hand grasps the back of her knee. Hitching her leg higher, I nudge my thumb deeper until it finds her wet entrance. The urge to thrust inside her knots around my bones, coiling through my muscles and twisting every thought I’ve ever had about her.
“Don’t,” Red growls, clawing her short nails into my arm while pulling further back on the vanity.
Her back meets the mirror, and with a hushed whimper, she looks down between us with a skittered breath, stare pausing on the bulge tenting my shorts. For a fleeting second, I contemplate pulling away and walking out of here. However, she’s made a good point.
So far, I haven’t delivered on any of the threats I’ve made. Everything I’ve done has been part of a game to unnerve her, and while it works momentarily, it’s also given her the impression that she can control me. Nobody controls me.
Sweeping my thumb through her centre, I hold her stare. The girl snarls, blue eyes rippling like a wildfire ready to catch as I spread her arousal to the tops of her thighs before I cup her pussy. My middle finger strokes through her crease to her slit, back and forth again and again until her breaths are silent cries.
The throb of my cock is unbearable as it strains against my shorts. Still, I don’t stop, and the harder she breathes, trying to resist her body’s instinct to chase what it craves, the faster I tease her.
“Stop!” Red barks, her hands pulling at my T-shirt.
“Beg!” The hand hooked behind her knee yanks her forward so that she collapses back, the clutter on the side falling around us. “You want me to stop, Red? To have mercy?”
“Keep your mercy,” she blusters, thighs pressing to my hips as she tries to wriggle from me.
“But you want me to stop…” Her eyes widen on mine as I push her thigh to her chest, making me aware that she understands the empty threats are done. Pressing the tip of my finger inside her, I stroke her walls as her cunt clenches at the intrusion. The reaction of her body to my touch is fucking maddening. “Mercy…stopping… It’s the same thing.”
“I won’t beg.”
“I’m not stopping.”
It’s time she knows who’s in charge. Who has power over her body and her life. My chest tightens as she squirms. It’s impossible to tell whether she’s getting closer or failing to get away. When I stroke out of her pussy and round my thumb over her swollen nub, she shudders, hands dropping from my T-shirt to the edge of the vanity, gripping it as her body bows and shakes.
As I thrust two fingers deep inside, her pussy pulses tighter, sucking me in to the last knuckle. The flush on her skin deepens, and all that fight she possesses simmers, bubbling and bubbling to overflow as she tenses.
Every inch of visible skin glistens with her sweat while she writhes helplessly, right on the cusp of her release, eyes screwed shut as though she’s still trying to win this battle that only has one true victor—me. Pulling my fingers from her cunt, I drag her flush to me, pinning her thigh to her chest and holding her in place with one hand as the other frees my cock.
Using her juices on my fingers, I stroke over my length, spreading the precum over the tip before I tease it through her folds.
“Look at me, Red…” I groan. The guttural sound of my voice is almost unrecognisable to my own ears. It tears through me as I press my dick to her entrance and tell her, “Look me in the eye when I fuck you.”
Silly girl. When is she going to learn to do as she’s told? When is she going to understand that in the end my power is too much for her fight?
She doesn’t look, and I don’t ask again as I spear her in one thrust that gives me what I want. Her eyes. Her body. Her cry.
It reverberates around us even as I hold still. The feeling of being deep inside her is overwhelming. Suffocating. For a split second, it feels as though she’s the one with the control, and as her cunt pulses around me, my chest tightens. My eyes never leave hers as she goes limp beneath me, and if I don’t move, I might actually go insane.
Releasing her thigh, I lower over her, pinning her with my body as I brace my hands on the mirror above her head.
“Beg,” I tell her. “It’s the only way this ends.”
When she doesn’t respond, I inch out of her to the tip before shoving back inside her. Again and again, tearing her apart as violently as her own guilt and need. Over and over until tears well in her eyes and her pussy squeezes around my cock when I bottom out, pushing the breath from her lungs. It howls out of her with the force of my drive.
“Beg, Red!” I grunt, as my body stiffens. “Fucking beg!”
The heat between us makes it impossible to catch my breath. Her body tenses and quivers with her impending orgasm with her pained pants getting faster, lower. Desperation claws at my insides as her nails scratch over my arms.
“You only get it if you beg.” I bite out each word between clenched teeth, pulling out and pulsing back in when her body settles again.
Her frustration bows her body to mine, regardless of why she was sent to me, despite who we are. There is one thing we have in common—our need. Mine is depraved while hers is contrite. Me, a devil, and her, an angel.
Stroking inside her again, I hold still as the force of my drive aches through me. “I only stop when you beg me to,” I tell her with a hiss, dragging out to the tip and then inching slowly back inside her. Pulsing. Shallowing. “I only let you come if you beg me.”
Either way, she begs, and I win.
I have to give it to her. The girl puts up a good fight. With every stroke, I slam into her. Every thrust, I grind deep, without mercy or reprieve. Even as it pains me, I keep going, easing now and again to stave off my orgasm and edging hers. The heat is inescapable. The current crackling between us makes my muscles coil tight as I push up and pull her flush to my chest. Twisting a hand in her hair, I tip her face back so that I can get the perfect view of her faceas her lips quiver and her eyes well up.
“Don’t do this,” she gasps. Her tone is beseeching enough that I almost pause. Except beseeching isn’t begging, and I want her to. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Beg,” I reply, tugging at her hair harder as I thrust deeper and faster, and just as her body is coiling in on itself, I stop.
“Tomasz…” she pleads.
Fuck. Fuck!
The sound of my name on her lips is my undoing, and I pick up the pace again, rutting into her without pause or relent. The only thing I want to hear again is my name howling from her mouth.
“Please,” she cries, hands clawing at my shoulders as I stroke out and shallow back in, slowly at first, teasing her and me. “Please…please…please…”
Fuck, it’s too late to stop even if I wanted to. As I drive into her again, bottoming out, I come inside her tight cunt. Spurt after spurt, I thrust and thrust as she sobs my name. Tears track her temples as her eyes hold mine, her pussy holding me deep as she comes for me.
“In the end,” I pant, licking my name off her lips. “In the end, Red, I always win.”
Her tears are heavy, and for a small fraction of a second, I think that she’s going to finally submit to me. That she’ll finally accept that I’m the only one that rules over her. How wrong I am.
Even with tears rivering down her face, and her body boneless for me, she levels me with a rawness that robs me of my breath. “You’re not the first man that’s fucked me. You’re not my first?—”
“But I will be your last.”
A dark smile tugs at one side of her lips before she retorts, “That would actually require you to kill me.”
Even now, she finds something to taunt me with. I followed through on one promise, and now she teases me with another. It’s a pity I didn’t threaten to keep her instead.