Laura
His mouth is exactly how I remembered. Damn him, nothing has changed.
His lips, scent, and taste are replicated so precisely that they drag me out of the denial I built around myself.
Yank me out of a year of rebuilding. A year of careful, deliberate correctness.
A year of Larry’s patient kindness and the peace of a life that asks nothing of you.
Gone. All of it. In one second of his mouth on mine.
I pull back. Hard. Both hands on his chest. He lets me move — barely — and looks at me with those dark blue, intense eyes. Eyes that give nothing away, yet demand everything in return. No. Hell, no. He doesn't get to do this again. Take me and then how long before he decides he can't keep me.
“I have a fiancé.” The words come out clear and steady, and I mean them. I do mean them. “I was getting married today. You don’t get to—”
“You’re not wearing his ring.”
It's not on my left hand. I'd removed it when I sat staring out the window and seriously considered climbing down a trellis and making a break for it. The ring is on a dresser in Cambridge, in a bridal suite I’ll never go back to, and its absence from my finger feels both heavier and lighter.
A contradiction I won't decode. Not now. And definitely not with him. “That doesn’t mean—”
“Tell me you love him.”
I don't respond. He's baiting me, but I'm not falling for it. I don't owe Maxim Ismailov an explanation. He doesn't get to do an autopsy on my relationship.
“Look me in the eye,” he says, “and tell me you love Larry Stevens.”
“I—” The word stalls. Not because it isn’t true — I do care about Larry, I genuinely care about him, he is an honorable man who was good to me — but because love is a precise word and I have spent months not examining how precise it is. “That’s not fair.”
“Tell me you were happy.”
“I was—” Another stall. I push past it. “I was building something. Something important. Something I can trust." His eyes narrow at that description, but I'm not done. "He’s a wonderful man, Maxim. He’s steady and kind and he never once—” I stop.
“He never once what?”
I close my mouth.
His eyes level on me. Slow. Certain. “He never once made you feel the way you felt in that hotel suite.” Not a question.
“He never once inspired you to follow him through a hotel corridor because your body couldn't resist.” He steps closer — just one step, no hands, just him reducing the distance. “You built a relationship with a man who never reached inside you and found the part you hide. Didn’t you.”
“Stop it.”
“You chose him because he was safe.”
“I chose him because he was kind. Too kind for me to betray him now."
“And because kind is manageable.” His voice is level. Almost gentle, which is worse than cruel. “Because kind doesn’t ask you to want things that scare you. Because kind never threatens the walls you built after I sent you home.”
The accuracy of it shuts my throat. “You don’t know me.” My voice cracks on the last word. I hate that it does. “You spent two days with me a year ago, and you think—”
“I know you’ve been at that window every night for a year.” He says it quietly. Watching my face. “Checking the street for something that isn’t Larry’s sensible car.”
The silence between us is enormous before it explodes. “That’s—” Fury floods my chest. Hot and clarifying, and a relief after the accuracy of everything else. “That’s surveillance. That’s you watching me without my knowledge or consent, and that is not the same as knowing me—“
“You’re right.” He doesn’t move. “It’s not. But tell me I’m wrong about the window.”
I can’t.
He takes the small step he’s been holding. Close enough now that his warmth reaches me, close enough that my body is already making its case over my brain’s objections. “I’m not asking you to betray Larry.” His voice drops. “He’s not who you’re betraying.”
“Then who—”
“Yourself.” He says it simply. Like he’s been waiting for the right moment to say it.
“Every morning you got up and hit all the boxes on your checklist and called it happiness. But every night you stood at that window. Watching. Waiting. Not daring to hope. You know who you’ve been betraying for a year. It’s not him.”
My eyes are burning. I will not cry in front of this man.
I absolutely will not. “You don’t have the right to say that to me.
” My voice shakes. “You gave that up. You gave that up when you put me in a car and told me to go back to my good life. So, you don’t get to come back a year later and tell me that my life is a lie—"
“I didn’t say it was a lie.” He reaches up and his thumb traces once — just once — along my jaw. Soft. The way he sometimes touched me at the hotel, times I let myself believe... “I said you deserve more than safe.”
I step back. Away from his hand and its devastation.
“Don’t touch me like that.” My voice comes out raw.
“Like you care and then stand there with nothing to say for yourself. You don’t get to — you can’t just—” My hands are shaking.
I press them to my thighs. “I rebuilt my life. It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t what I wanted in the deepest part of my soul.
And yes, you’re right, I stood at that window and wished—, but I built it.
I chose it. Then you walked in and threw me over your shoulder and brought me here, and you still won’t tell me why—“
“Because I can’t.” The words come out rough, like the grit of hot sand at the beach. It's the first rough thing he’s said since the kiss. “Not yet. Not the way you need me to.”
“Then we have nothing to—” His hands settle at my waist. Not harsh. Not claiming. Just his hands on my waist and his forehead dropping to mine, close enough that his breath touches my face, and my foolish hands betray me. My hands, which were about to push him away, grip his forearms instead.
“Tell me you don’t want this,” he says. Quiet. Certain. Giving me the chance. “Say it and mean it and I’ll call Daniil right now.”
The lie is right there. It’s easy. I don’t say it. Can't. Because he's what I've been looking for like a damn fool.
“There it is,“ he says. Not triumphant. Almost — tired. Like he’s been waiting for this admission longer than I have. "That’s what you’ve been betraying.“
“I hate you.” The words tear out of me. True and furious and not enough. “I have hated you every single day for a year.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “No,” he says—the first real fissure in his control is small and immediately sealed. “You’ve wanted to hate me.“ His thumb moves along my jaw. "There’s a difference, Laura. You know there’s a difference."
The distinction is like a key turning. He’s right. God help me, he’s right. I wanted to hate him because hate would have been clean. Hate equaled closure. Larry's steadiness was another exit. An off-ramp from a highway of pain. “I know,” I say. My voice is barely anything.
“Hating me was understandable.” He tilts my chin up. His eyes hold mine, and in them, underneath the possession, is an unexpected gentleness. “I’m sorry I made it necessary.”
It’s not the full answer. It’s not the why. But it’s honest. My hands, already on his forearms, stop fighting. “I still hate you a little,” I tell him.
“You were going to marry another man. So, same…” His mouth takes mine.
This time I don’t pull back. This is not like the first time.
The first time, I was terrified and wanted something I couldn't ask for. This time I know exactly what I want, and I’m not shy about it.
I can't be after these long months. The anger is still in the background, which makes the craving sharper, darker, more honest than anything tender could be.
He strips what’s left of the wedding dress like a man dismantling a lie.
The lace is already ruined—from the drive, but he treats the remaining silk as an insult to be destroyed.
Buttons scatter across the safe house floor, pinging against the wood like small gunshots.
The bodice tears with a sound that makes me flinch, but his hands are steady, methodical, almost reverent beneath the violence.
He is unmaking the bride. Erasing the version of me that almost walked down an aisle toward the wrong man.
“Look at you,” he says against my throat, his voice a gravel ruin. “A whole year.”
“Don’t.” My nails dig into his shoulders, hard enough to hurt. I need him to hurt. I need some proof that this is real and not another dream I’ve tortured myself with since the morning he sent me away.
“A whole year and you’re still—”
“Less talking, Maxim. We can analyze it later.”
The sound he makes isn’t quite a laugh. It is possession wearing the mask of amusement. “Still a lot opinions.”
“You’d be bored without them.”
“Yes.” He lifts his head and looks at me, and what’s in his face for just that moment makes my heart do a stupid, traitorous backflip.
Need. Raw, unfiltered, boyish need layered under the Bratva armor.
Then it’s gone, shuttered behind the predator’s mask, and his mouth finds where I need him—not gently. Not patiently.
He spreads my thighs with the rough authority of a man staking territory.
His shoulders force them wider, his grip bruising the tender skin just above my knees.
I feel his exhale, hot and deliberate, against my core before he even touches me.
He licks through me in one long, humiliating, devastating stroke that uncurls something low in my spine.
My hips buck off the mattress, but his hands pin me down.
He feasts like a starving beast at a banquet he thought he’d lost forever.
His tongue circles my clit with a precision that is almost cruel, retreats, then plunges deep, fucking me with his mouth while two thick fingers push inside, curling to find the spot that makes white sparks explode behind my eyes.