Laura #2
“You do good work,” I whisper.
His mouth twitches. “Be quiet, mysh.”
But he doesn’t stop. He conditions. He combs through the tangles with his fingers. He towels me dry afterward, wrapping me in its softness, and when he carries me to bed—still damp, still dizzy—I expect him to take me. To claim.
Instead, he tucks me beneath the sheets, climbs in behind me, and pulls my back against his chest. His arm bands around my waist. Possessive. Inescapable.
“Sleep,” he commands.
I do
My life has a new normal, if normal includes waking up in a Bratva enforcers’s bed to the sound of him ordering my breakfast in rapid Russian.
Normal, if it means him pausing mid-phone call when I enter a room.
He dominates the space without trying. He commands, and I find myself obeying—not out of fear, but out of a terrifying willingness to let him steer, guide.
Let him teach. I'm learning more than I could have ever imagined about how to please a man—not just any man, him.
But also how to please myself, as he never comes without me.
He teaches me to play chess. His rules. No mercy.
“You’re terrible at this,” he says, but there’s pride in it when I take his knight.
“You’re not letting me win.”
“Never.” He captures my queen. “If I let you win, you won’t learn.”
I stick my tongue out at him. He leans over, catches it between his teeth, kisses me until the board is forgotten, and he takes me on the couch. Laying my back on the pillow and placing my ankles on his shoulders as he pumps into me, until we're both shouting obscenities.
Later he resets the pieces and makes me finish the game.
He wins. Of course.
I fall asleep at night with his heartbeat under my ear, his hand splayed possessively over my hip. I could get used to this. I could get used to the way he hoards me and feeds me and guards me from windows and delivery drivers and the world. The thought should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
***
Morning. He’s already up, already dressed—suit jacket on, the professional armor back in place.
I pad out of the bedroom in one of his shirts, expecting coffee, expecting his eyes to darken with that look he gets when my bare legs are visible.
Instead, he’s standing at the window with the phone at his ear.
His face changes while I’m still in the doorway. It closes off like a steel gate slamming shut. His shoulders square. His jaw sets. Eyes that had been open for two days—tentatively, incrementally, like a flower forcing through concrete—quietly, irrevocably shuts.
He ends the call.
Looks at me. “I have to go,” he says.
My chest does a slow, stupid collapse. “Okay. When do you—when will you be back?”
He doesn’t answer that.
My hands grip the doorframe. “Maxim.”
“Daniil will drive you.” He picks up his keys from the hook by the bar. “Your ID cleared last night. You’re free to go.”
The pretense stings.
Free. The word is like a grease splatter burning through layers of skin.
“That’s it.” My voice holds steadier than the rest of me. “Three days and that’s it.”
“That was always it,” he snarls. But then a breath, and all the fire is out. Extinguished by the cold ice block he has become. He meets my eyes, and his are level and dark and give me absolutely nothing. “I told you. Before any of it. And you agreed”
“I know what you told me.” I square my shoulders, pulling the borrowed shirt tighter around me. “I’m asking what this was. The breakfast. The—” My throat closes. I push past it. “You washed my hair.”
His expression cracks, then reseals. Fast. Gone. A wall of reinforced steel where a man had stood.
“I told you what I could offer.” His voice is even. Absolutely, devastatingly even. “No revision. I meant that.”
“I’m not asking for revision. I’m asking—” I stop.
What I’m asking and what he’s telling me don’t live in the same world.
They never did. I knew that. I knew it going in, knew it when he fed me berries and when he let me touch his scar and when he held me all night with my face cradled on his chest. “Never mind.”
I'm not going to be the one who begs. Cracks. Cries. Although all of those things are bubbling dangerously close to the surface. I said I could do this, and I will.
I get dressed in the bedroom alone. Zara’s gown from the party, mocks me. My hands are steady. I decide they’ll stay steady. When I come out, he’s still at the window, his back to me, a silhouette cut from the bright skyline.
I cross to the door and stop with my hand on the frame. “For what it’s worth,” I say, without turning around, “you’re not as good at this as you think you are.”
“At what.”
“Not caring.” I stare at the brushed-steel door. “And for all of your rules about truth, I think nobody lies more than you.”
I leave before he can answer.
Daniil is in the lobby with a car already waiting, because Daniil is always exactly where he needs to be, and the drive back across the city is gray and quiet and long. The seat is leather, and cold.
He will hear about this trip so I don’t cry.
I sit in the back seat of a car that isn’t mine and never could be, and I watch my city go past the window and understand something I didn’t understand before. It’s not the hollow that gets me. The hollow I knew. The hollow I’ve been living with for twenty-two years—I know how to manage it.
What I don’t know how to manage is having had the window open. Having felt, even for a short time span what it would mean to be on the inside. Having been seen, and fed, and washed, and held. And now having to go back. He was right about all of it. That’s the part that makes it so hard.
He told me exactly who he was and exactly what this was, and I walked into it with my eyes open but with a heart that only saw what it wanted…