Chapter 32
Irelynn
“Say something,” Ilya’s demand is quiet. Although it’s tender, it’s filled with a power that I now understand knows no bounds.
“I don’t know what to say.” I can hardly make my voice work. “I’m afraid of you.”
“I will not hurt you.” He leans forward, holding me captive by my wrists to press a kiss to the center of my forehead.
A shuddering breath tumbles over my lips as I squeeze my eyes closed. This is all so much more messed up than I thought. It’s so complicated.
“Please,” I beg. “Please, Ilya, let me—just let me go to sleep.”
He gives his head a slow shake. “Not now, my heart.”
“Please.” All I want to do is crumble. I want to break apart as I sob my heart out into his pillow, shattering beneath his blankets. I’m not even sure if I want to cry for myself or for him. For the little boy who never had a chance to become anything other than this hard man.
“Not with the nightmares I’ve just spoken to you so fresh in your mind.”
My body trembles. I would make to lift the blanket to cover me again, but his hands hold my wrists pinned in place. Then he murmurs darkly, “We’ll sit here with the fire for a while longer before we go to bed.”
“Will you at least release my wrists?”
He concedes with a rueful grin that I can’t help but think is handsome, even though I know the terrible, ugly violence that lurks under the beauty of his skin.
What is wrong with me?
Because I just can’t handle looking at him anymore, I shift so my back is facing his front. I lift my feet onto the footstool and snuggle into the warmth of his chest, wishing he were anything but the man that he is.
My confused heart aches. I can’t help but wonder if he would have been different if he’d been born to a normal family, or if he’d always been destined to become this—this dark thing that stalks the world, tearing hearts from chests in his quest to possess mine.
My eyes well with new tears I refuse to let fall. It’s as though Ilya senses I’m struggling with my emotions, on the brink of cracking open wide and spilling everything I contain inside, because he holds me tighter. It’s like he’s trying to hold the pieces of me together.
But what about his pieces?
“I’m afraid of you.” When he sighs, I hurry to continue, “But I feel so terribly sad for you, too.”
Beneath me, Ilya stiffens. There is a long pause, and then a confused, “Why?”
The very fact he can ask that question with such sincerity speaks to just how fucked up this all is.
“Because you never had a chance to be anything else.”
“I was born like this, Little Blue.”
“I think you were made, like all monsters before you.”
“Not all monsters are made. I certainly wasn’t.”
“Your father?—”
He cuts me off. “My father gave the monster inside me the tools and intelligence to be who I’ve always been, who I was always intended to be. He saw me for the thing I was, and ensured I developed the skillset to not only feed the monster, but to do it in a way that I wouldn’t suffer for it.”
“He taught you to hurt people.”
“He taught me to hurt very bad people.”
“And what about you? What do you deserve?”
“I’ve always expected my end will be gruesome. I am prepared.”
The horror of his words strikes me down to the core. Imagining anyone bestowing him his end, no matter what that end is, fills me with something massive and unsettling. I recognize it for what it is, even though I wish I didn’t feel it for this man. Grief.
The idea of someone hurting him as he’s hurt others, many others, if his word is to be believed—robs the very air from my lungs.
It hurts.
I need to free myself from him. I need to escape him before I’m so far captured, so completely his, that I can’t escape.
How could I live knowing that the man I love is the target of so many deadly men?
“Ilya—”
When I fail to continue, he prompts me, “Hmm?”
“What would happen to me, if you were to meet your gruesome end?”
God, even saying that hurts me.
“You would be safe.”
“You would leave me with Luka?”
A low and almost menacing growl rumbles in his chest. I feel the sound echo inside my own body. The hands he rests on my belly curl into tight fists in the blanket.
My heart quickens along with my breath.
“No, I wouldn’t leave you with him. But I do have specific instructions my brother would follow to ensure you were set up to live the rest of your life safely, and without ever needing to work again.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because you are mine.” His lips wander the skin of my temple. Shivers slither under my skin. “It is my job, and my honor, to take care of you.”
I tilt my head, so his lips have direct access to my forehead, then I tilt my head back a bit more. I can taste the intoxicating blend of his kiss only a breath away.
Then I push him. “Does it matter that I might not want to be yours?”
“No.”
“What if I take to flirting with other men?”
His fisted hand splays wide on my belly, then it begins a slow and claiming travel up my torso to the parting of the blanket at my breastbone. His fingertips whisper against the skin there, a slow and oddly arousing back and forth, before he says calmly, “I would kill him, likely in front of you.”
He continues his calm administration, a swarm of butterflies bursting inside my belly.
“You must know I’ll never stop trying to run from you. Every chance I get.”
His pitch drops low as his hand moves, his fingertips slipping under the part in the blanket that covers my breasts. I gasp, and he speaks against my lips. “And you must know that I will always chase you. And I will catch you. Every. Time.”
I don’t know what possesses me. Maybe I’ve lost a little of my mind in the insanity of it all, because I tilt my head just enough to brush my lips over his. The contact is enough to set off fireworks inside my body. The sparks rain down on the swarm of butterflies, their wings catching fire as they burn deep within me. That little brush of my mouth against his set something loose inside him.
With a growl that is nothing short of animalistic, Ilya claims my mouth in a brutal, bruising, deeply claiming kiss. His hand moves with intent to my breast, palming the swollen flesh.
I whimper into his mouth.
When finger and thumb roll one peaked nipple, I find my sanity. I try to pull away, but Ilya’s other hand works at the part of the blanket I clutch around my body, tearing it from my hold to flip it wide open.
I gasp, wrenching my mouth from his as I attempt to reach for the blanket, or to escape his lap. I fail in both as he pins me in place against his body, my own entirely bare. A warm orange glow ignites my flesh as the fire dances in the hearth.
His fingertip traces my navel. “Do you like the idea of driving me mad with jealousy? Does it turn you on, the idea that if you ran, I would hunt you? That I would chase you?”
I suck in a sharp breath. As much as I can’t seem to reconcile the woman, I know myself to be, with the way I ache at his words, I can’t deny that I do, in fact, ache.
So, I say nothing at all.
“Does it make your pretty little cunt wet, Little Blue, the thought of me capturing you all over again?”
Oh God. A pulse of wet heat follows his words. I have to fight hard not to clench my thighs together. I’m so exposed to him like this, any movement now would be telling.
“Tell me, would you fight me?” His hand on my breast gives me a firm, almost painful squeeze. “Would you scream when I caught you? Would you come all over my hand as I punished you?”
When I still refuse to speak, he taunts me. “Tell me, Little Blue, does the thought turn you on?”
“No,” I lie, aching to roll my hips now. So, I do—into the hard bulge at my back. “But you are.”
“You have no idea how turned on I am at the thought of hunting you. Of showing my disobedient little runner just how much, she belongs to me.”
If I thought I could shame him for his desire, he’s quickly proven me terribly wrong.
“Ilya.”
“I think you’re lying, Irelynn.” His voice is a low timbre that resonates deep inside me. I’m losing control, my head shaking from side to side in the nook of his broad shoulder. “I think you’re hot and wet.” If I have to listen to him rumbling these words in my ear any longer, I might combust right here in his arms. “I think your body begs for my touch. It’s your mind I still have to convince.”
“Never.”
“I’ve never backed away from a challenge.” The shadow of his day-old scruff calls goosebumps to the surface of my skin when he trails it over my shoulder, my neck. “This is a challenge I will conquer.”
Then, to my horror and relief, the hand at my navel dips low. He pushes his fingers into the tight curls between my legs, more red than the hair on my head, and groans as his fingertip meets my wet heat.
“I fucking knew it.”
“Ilya,” I moan. I can’t help myself.
“Spread your legs for me, Blue.”
I shake my head again and am quickly awarded a sharp pull on my nipple that eases the moment I let my legs fall open. Firelight flickers close by, illuminating the arousal I wish I could hide as he pulls his hand back to gaze over my shoulder at the glistening shimmer on his finger. Then he lifts it to his mouth, sucks it clean, before he lowers it and sinks it inside me.
I cry out at the delicious intrusion, my body arching against his even as my legs try to close around his pumping hand. My mind spins as he rolls and twists and pulls and flicks my nipple. The hard arousal pressing into my back a distant and ominous warning that I may push him too far one of these days.
He might be a man of astonishing control, but I’m learning that he only has so much when it comes to me.
“You’re so tight.” He strokes his finger in and out of me. The sound of my body sucking him in deep feeds my arousal. “You’re so warm and fuck—” He rocks his hard cock against me once. I moan. “I want inside you.”
“No—”
“I know,” he soothes with an open-mouthed kiss to my shoulder. “You’re not ready for me. But you will be.”
I want to deny, but no words have ever felt so much like a lie, I can’t quite force them from my tongue.
Instead, I try not to think at all as he plays my body like an instrument.
I don’t think about the fact that my captor is running his rough lips over my skin.
I don’t think about the odd little boy turned monstrous man.
I don’t think about the lethal finger that pumps into my core, again and again, pushing me closer and closer to the ledge.
I don’t think about the heart in my chest that pounds in sync with the one at my back, inside the brutal, relentless man.
I don’t think about the fact I’m falling madly, deeply, irrevocably, tragically in love with the man who stole me from my life. With a monster. A killer. A Bratva King.
My body falls apart around his finger, and he pumps me through wave after wave as I cry out. He stokes me until my body falls flat over his, entirely spent. Then, with no words and no attention paid to his own desire, demanding nothing more from me than he’s already taken, he lifts me into his arms. Cradled in his strong embrace, he walks me to the bed. He tucks me beneath a heavy blanket before he settles into the bed behind me. It’s the first time I haven’t worn his shirt to bed.
It”s also the first time that I twist until I’m facing his broad, inked, naked chest.
It’s the first time his arms come around me as he lays flat on his back, and he pulls me over his chest.
It’s the first time I fall into sleep with my head on his chest, listening to the steady, strong thunder of the heart he claims beats for me.
In the haze between wakefulness and sleep, Ilya murmurs into my hair, “You’ll fall in love with me, Little Blue. I vow it.”