Chapter 17 #2
Dimitri is watching me the way he always watches me — with the patient calculation of a man who has decided I'm the key to something and is waiting to find the lock. He can't see through the table. But he's watching my face and my face is the only thing I have control over right now, so I hold it.
One of the other heirs raises. Aleksei considers — actually considers, chips in hand, the picture of a man with nothing on his mind except the hand in front of him — and slides his fingers beneath the fabric.
The touch is light at first. Exploratory.
He learns the shape of me through the thin cotton the way he learns everything — methodically, without rushing, building a picture.
He finds where I'm warm. He finds where I'm wet.
And the low sound he makes — barely there, exhaled through his nose, not for the room — is the most devastating thing that has happened to me in six weeks at St. Gabriel.
He raises. Five million becomes ten.
"Fold, Dimitri," he says pleasantly.
And his fingers push inside me.
The sound I almost make is a very specific kind of violence against my own dignity.
I swallow it whole. My knuckles are white on the table edge.
The glass beneath my hands is cool and I focus on that — the cool of the glass, the faint hum of the table lighting, the somewhere-distant thrum of music from the deck above — and Aleksei adds chips to the pot with his free hand and says something to the heir on his left without changing his cadence at all.
He is playing poker.
He is also taking me apart, methodically, with two fingers, at a glass table in front of his rivals.
These things are happening simultaneously and with equal attention, which is possibly the most specifically terrifying thing he has ever done to me.
"They can't see," he says, very low, against my hair. His lips don't quite touch my ear. "But they would never forget if they could."
Stop, I think. Stop, stop, please don't stop.
Dimitri folds. He looks at me when he does it — specifically, deliberately, making sure I see him see me.
There is nothing I can do about that look.
I look back at him — steady, composed, holding the expression until he's the one who looks away first, because I've learned by now that whatever game this is, losing ground in it costs more than the discomfort of holding position.
I hold position.
It nearly kills me.
Aleksei adds to the pot.
He works with a patience that is almost clinical — the same patience he applies to everything, to race setups and negotiations and the act of making me say things I don't mean to say.
He knows exactly what he's doing. He has always known exactly what he's doing.
His fingers find the angle that makes the muscles in my thighs clench and stays there, and his thumb finds my clit, and the combination of inside and outside pressure with the specific additional humiliation of having to sit entirely still and say nothing and look Dimitri Drakos in the face while this is happening —
His free hand slides from my hip to my waist, steadying me, and I understand that even this is calculated — he's holding me still because he knows I'd move otherwise, and moving would give it away.
My breath comes out against my closed mouth in a controlled thread.
One more—
His thumb circles. His fingers curl forward.
I shudder. A single full-body tremor, impossible to prevent, and he turns my face toward his in the same instant — one hand cupping my jaw — and kisses me.
Deep, claiming, deliberate. His mouth swallows the sound I make before it reaches the room.
His teeth catch my lower lip. His fingers don't stop — not yet, not until I've gone taut against his hand and then loose, the orgasm rolling through me in waves I have no option but to receive because I cannot move, cannot make noise, cannot do anything but hold the table edge and let him take me apart in a room with witnesses.
When the last tremor passes he withdraws his hand.
Cool air returns between us.
He lifts his hand from under my dress and wipes his fingers on my inner thigh — slow, unhurried, deliberate. Not cleaning up. Marking. The gesture of a man who wants me to feel the evidence on my own skin for the rest of the night.
He pushes chips toward the center of the table.
"I believe that's the hand," he says.
His voice is completely level. His expression is completely composed. He looks like a man who has just won a hand of cards, which is also true, and nothing else, which is not.
He lifts me from his lap and stands, the motion smooth and unremarkable, one hand briefly at my waist before dropping entirely. He picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
He leans to my ear.
"You'll remember this when you touch yourself," he says. Quiet. Final. Factual, almost, the way he says everything.
Then he walks out of the High Stakes Room.
I stand at the table while the other men collect their losses and file out after him, and I look at the glass surface, still glowing faintly gold.
Dimitri is the last to go.
He pauses at the door — not looking at me directly, just pausing, the specific deliberateness of someone who wants me to notice the pause.
He's taking inventory. I am a variable in something he's building, and tonight I have given him information: that Aleksei uses me.
That he's willing to use me as a display piece in a room with an audience.
Dimitri will file that under leverage and let it sit.
I keep my face neutral until the door closes.
Then I put my hand over my mouth.
Then I take it away.
I smooth my dress. I check my expression in the reflection of the glass — composed, neutral, unreadable. I have worn this expression so many times since October that it fits like a second skin, which is its own kind of information about what this place is doing to me.
I walk out.
And I stand in the narrow corridor below deck for a moment, my hand against the wall, listening to the party above me — the music, the voices, the performance of ease — and I think about what just happened with the specific clarity of someone who doesn't have the option of being unclear.
He used me. He used me deliberately, strategically, as a weapon against Dimitri's composure and a display of his own certainty. He calculated the effect on every person in that room, including me.
And he made it feel like the best thing that has happened to me in months.
That's the problem.
That's the whole problem.
I straighten my dress.
I go upstairs and accept a champagne glass from a passing server and stand at the railing looking at Biscayne Bay and I understand, watching the paparazzi flashes strobe across the dark water, that I have never wanted anything more than the man who just walked away from me.
I'd be furious about it.
I am furious about it.
But the fury and the wanting have stopped feeling like opposites, and I'm not sure they ever were.