Devon #3
He licked into me, and I arched, the angle sending the aftershocks into new ripples. He swallowed those, swallowed me, and when the kiss softened, I chased it like a starving thing. He ended it before I could beg, pulling back just far enough to breathe the same air.
I rested there, boneless and shaky, heat still licking at the edges of my body.
The room glowed steady again, no more betrayal from the lights, but I could’ve sworn the air still vibrated faintly with what I’d done.
Maybe what we’d done to me. I didn’t know.
I didn’t know anything besides the weight of his palm on my thigh and the slick warmth between my legs and the clean scent at his throat when I tucked my face there and tried to remember how to be a creature who functioned.
“I’ve never felt anything like that,” I admitted into his collar, voice raw. The words made me feel small. Not stupid-small. Human-small. “If I… if I embarrassed you—”
He cut me off with a soft, shocked sound that could only be called a laugh if laughter had edges.
“You could never embarrass me.” He cupped my jaw to make me meet his eyes.
They were pale and intent, all that cold iron melted into something dangerously gentle.
“You were the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
I didn’t have a place in my head for that sentence. It landed somewhere lower, in the dark where there weren’t any words at all, and unfurled. I swallowed hard and nodded because nodding was the only thing I trusted myself to do without breaking.
He pressed his forehead to mine for a heartbeat, then slid his hand out of my panties with a care that made me shiver again. He kissed my cheek, then the place below my ear he’d been worrying earlier.
“Remember this,” he murmured against my skin.
“I don’t think I could forget,” I said, and the truth of that terrified and steadied me in equal measure.
We stayed like that a while, his arms around me while the club remembered how to hum instead of strain, and my body decided to accept gravity again.
The edges of me stitched back together around his shape.
It occurred to me, dimly, that I was letting myself fit around him. It should have alarmed me. It didn’t.
“Come,” he said at last, voice a gentle command.
He fixed my zipper with the same care he’d unmade it, slid the button home, threaded the belt through its loops and buckled me back into something like decency.
He tugged my clothes into place as if dressing me were a privilege.
When he was done, he smoothed his palms over my hips.
He had the right to be smug. He wasn’t. The restraint made my chest ache.
I sat up reluctantly. He steadied me with a hand at the small of my back even though I would have crawled for him if he’d asked. I didn’t tell him that. He didn’t need to hear all the ruin in me at once.
He kissed my temple one more time, stood, and only then did I realize my legs were still draped over him. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, set me on my feet with ridiculous care, and when my knees wobbled, he pretended not to notice—he only moved closer until I could borrow his balance.
“Water,” he said, and it sounded like a holy word.
He vanished for half a second into the quiet behind the bar—I heard a cap crack, the faintest clink of glass—and returned with a bottle.
It felt indecent to wrap my mouth around the opening after what his fingers had done to me.
I drank anyway, grateful, and the water tasted clean enough to hurt.
He watched me drink with an attention that verged on reverence. When I lowered the bottle, he took it and tipped it to my lips again, as if the act belonged to him. I let it.
“We’ll go upstairs,” he said after a moment, voice smoothing back into command. “I want you to sit somewhere soft until your breath is steady.”
“Bossy,” I muttered, and rolled my eyes because it felt safe to do that now.
“Yes,” he agreed without apology, and held out his hand. I took it, because the only thing worse than obeying him would have been not to.
His office felt like a cathedral to control—books that smelled like rain on old stone, leather that remembered hands older than me, and a glass wall that let him watch his kingdom without ever being watched.
He steered me to the couch with the same purposeful care he’d used a few minutes ago to unmake me, and the strangest part was how safe I felt among all that sharp history.
He set me down and didn’t crowd. The liquor cabinet winked from across the room with crystal and deep amber, but he brought me more water instead.
The ice rattled against the glass before settling.
He offered it wordlessly, and I drank without thinking, the cool working its way down between nerves that still trembled in little aftershocks.
“Arms,” he said softly.
I lifted them, obedient before I realized I’d done it. He slid my jacket over my wrists and smoothed the shoulders into place, one palm gliding down each lapel as if he were blessing me back into the world. It made me stupidly emotional.
He reached into an inside pocket and drew out a phone. He spoke, “Nikolay,” and something in his tone bent not to command but to kinship. He ended the call, tucked the device away as if the matter had never existed, and turned his knee a little toward me. A small shift. A held door.
“Your bag,” he said. “I asked my son to bring it up.”
I didn’t know what to do with that tenderness. I stared into the glass where my reflection was a pale smudge and waited. The office door opened with a restraint that belonged to a man used to making himself smaller for other people’s sake.
Nikolay filled the doorway anyway. He was big the way trees were big—inevitable, comforting. He glanced at me first, then his father, a silent check-in I felt in my bones. When he stepped in, the room felt warmer. He held my new handbag with a reverent hand, like it was a reliquary.
“Devon,” he said, voice a soft rumble that settled my shoulders. “I believe this is yours.”
“Thank you,” I managed, taking it. I knew the little bag was more valuable than all the contents of my apartment. The meager items inside were ridiculous compared to its cost. He treated my thanks as though everything was of equal value.
He looked at me like I mattered. He looked at his father like he’d followed that man into a thousand storms and would do it again. And then he was gone, the door clicking behind him without any ceremony, the scent of something warm and woodsy trailing in his wake.
“He’s kind,” I said, clutching the small bag.
“Yes,” Kazimir said simply. “That is his power. But his anger is only matched by his size. It's good that he is fond of you.”
He stood and offered me his hand. The impulse to take it was so strong it felt like gravity. Fingers to fingers, palm to palm, I rose because I wanted to be the sort of person who followed him without looking back.
His driver waited for us, and I knew where we were heading. I also knew this night was the beginning of a brand-new life for me.