Chapter 4 Aftermath
AFTERMATH
DANI
The bed was massive, obscene really, but somehow the empty half felt like an arctic wasteland. I reached over blindly, fingers skating across smooth cotton, hunting for heat that wasn’t there.
All I found was the faint indentation where his body had been.
How did someone that big move that quietly?
Pale winter light leaked in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, turning the room into a grayscale postcard. Outside, the city glittered under a thin skin of frost. Tiny white flakes clung to the glass like the world was trying to decorate even this place.
Inside, it still smelled like him.
Like last night.
My thighs ached in ways I’d never experienced. Every shift of my hips dragged bedsheets across skin that had been rubbed raw by stubble and hands and the way he’d held me down while he—
Don’t think about it.
My brain laughed at me. Thought about it anyway.
His mouth between my legs. His fingers inside me. The blunt, burning stretch of his cock forcing its way in when my body had no idea what to do with something that big. The way he’d filled me until I didn’t know where he ended and I began.
The way I’d begged.
Not for freedom. For more.
Every time I replayed it, my traitorous body reacted. Muscles clenching, heat blooming low and sharp, breath stuttering like it had forgotten how to be normal.
I threw an arm over my eyes and saw a Christmas tree instead.
White and silver, perfect and cold, standing in the corner of his pristine room. It had watched us stumble out there half-dressed when he’d pushed me up against the wall later, like some twisted holiday ornament scene no normal family would unwrap.
The sheets tangled around my waist. I realized I was naked. Completely. Sometime after he’d carried me from the floor to the bed, I’d lost track of what was covering what.
Which version of him was real?
The man who’d stood in a Christmas tree lot and ordered a man executed like he was taking out the trash? The one who’d pinned me against a wall soaking wet and ended a 911 call with three taps?
Or the one who’d held my face, looked me in the eye, and told me to say no—and then actually waited?
The one who’d carried me to bed after breaking me open, who’d stayed inside me long enough that I’d almost believed for one insane second I wasn’t just a problem he was solving.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe both men were real.
The idea should have horrified me.
Instead, it did that thing where my stomach swooped and my insides went soft, and I hated myself more for it than for anything else I’d ever done.
Seriously—what the fuck was wrong with me.
I was halfway through cataloging my psychological damage when the bedroom door clicked. My pulse jerked like it had been yanked on a string.
He stood in the doorway like he owned it.
Like he owned everything.
Still in his black shirt from last night, now rumpled and half undone, revealing a V of tanned chest and ink I didn’t have the courage to trace. Dark hair mussed like he’d run his hands through it a few times. Jaw shadowed. Eyes pale and heavy with something I couldn’t name.
He didn’t smile. Didn’t say good morning. Just watched me.
Pinned me to the mattress with his gaze the way his body had pinned me to the wall.
Say something. Anything. Make a joke about the amenities. Ask about the breakfast package that came with your captivity.
“You’re awake.” His voice was rougher than usual, scraped over gravel and old sins.
“Brilliant observation, Sherlock.” My voice came out huskier than I intended.
The sheet had slipped to my waist. His gaze flicked down. Stayed for a beat too long on bare skin and marks he’d left on my breasts. Part of me wanted to yank the blanket up. The other part wanted to arch into it.
I did neither.
“The bed’s comfortable,” I managed instead, because apparently my mouth reached for banality when my brain short-circuited.
“Good.” He stepped into the room, footsteps silent on polished wood. “You need your rest.”
Right. Because nothing lulled a girl to sleep like witnessing a hit, getting kidnapped from a Christmas tree lot, trying to call 911, and then losing her virginity to the man responsible for all of the above.
Totally restful.
He approached slowly, deliberately. Giving me time to object, move away, throw something. I didn’t. Every rational bone in my body screamed at me to retreat, and I lay there like I’d been nailed to the mattress.
When he reached the edge of the bed, he stopped.
Instead of climbing in, he just looked at me. Studied my face like he was memorizing it for later. The hard planes softened by that damned winter light filtering around him, turning him into something too beautiful and too lethal all at once.
He reached out.
Brush of fingers at my temple. Thumb catching a stray strand of hair and tucking it behind my ear, his knuckles grazing my jaw. The contact sent a shiver through me, ridiculous and involuntary.
Don’t lean into him. Don’t lean into the man who just wrecked your entire idea of yourself.
I leaned into him anyway.
His hand stilled on my cheek. Thumb tracing the line of bone with devastating precision.
“Stop pretending you don’t want this,” he said quietly.
The words were soft. Not cruel. That made them worse.
Because they were true.
I wanted to argue. To deny. To throw him back into the role of captor and monster where I could hate him cleanly with no confusing side effects.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The lie scratched my throat on the way out.
His mouth curved. Not a smile. Something sharper.
“Liar.”
The single word cut through every last bit of resistance I’d managed to gather overnight. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was the fact that my whole body still hummed with the phantom feel of him inside me. Maybe I was just done pretending for one goddamn minute.
My hand moved on its own.
Covering his where it framed my face. Pressing his palm more firmly against my skin like I wanted to fuse us together.
“What if I am lying?” I asked.
His eyes darkened—not black, but deeper, like storm clouds over snow.
“Then I’d have to do something about that.”
The threat in his voice made my pulse stutter for reasons that had nothing to do with fear.
This is insane. This is the most insane thing you’ve ever done, and you once tried to rescue a cat from a third-floor fire escape with a laundry basket and zero upper body strength.
He leaned closer.
Close enough that I could see the silver flecks in his irises. Close enough that his scent—dark cologne, coffee, the faint metallic tang of city winter—folded around me. Close enough that my lips tingled in anticipation before they even touched his.
He leaned in, just enough that his breath brushed my mouth, giving me one last, silent chance to turn my head away.
I didn’t.
Our mouths crashed together, and everything I’d been trying to repress roared back to life.
He moved.
This was hungrier. Deeper. His lips slanted over mine, his tongue sweeping in like he had every right to be there, and my body answered with equal ferocity.
My hands tunneled into his hair, tugging him closer, deeper. His fingers gripped my waist, dragging me up the bed toward him, dragging a sound from my throat I didn’t recognize as my own.
He kissed me like he was claiming something. Staking territory.
And I kissed him back like I wanted to be branded.
When he finally pulled away, both of us breathing hard, his forehead rested against mine for a heartbeat. Just one.
“Good girl,” he murmured, and I hated how the praise arrowed straight between my legs.
I was about to say something utterly brilliant and cutting—I’m sure—when he pulled back further. The warmth that had been in his face a second ago shuttered. The killer slipped his skin back on over the man.
“This doesn’t change anything,” he said.
The words dropped between us like a weight.
Cold, flat, utterly at odds with the way his hands were still curved around me, his thumb skimming the space under my breast like he hadn’t noticed he hadn’t let go.
It shouldn’t have hurt. What did I expect? A declaration of love? A happily ever after? A shared Christmas stocking?
I’d known exactly what I was doing last night when I’d clung to him and begged for more. When I’d spread my legs for a man whose hands knew how to end lives without flinching.
Of course it didn’t change anything.
Except everything had changed.
I’d crossed a line you didn’t uncross. Given a piece of myself to a man who could crush it or throw it away without a second thought.
And the worst part was I wasn’t sure I cared.
“You’re right,” I lied, forcing my features blank. “It doesn’t change anything.”
He didn’t call me on that one.
Just stepped back, breaking all contact. The distance he put between us felt like blowing out a candle and watching the room go dark.
“Get dressed,” he said. “Food is in the kitchen. Natasha will bring more clothes later.”
“That’s it?” My voice cracked. I coughed to cover it. “No more post-kidnapping customer service?”
His eyes flicked to the window. Outside, fat snowflakes had started drifting down, softening the hard lines of the city.
“Don’t mistake this bed for mercy, kotyonok.” His tone had gone back to steel. “Or what happened in it for anything more than what it was.”
My chest went tight. “And what was it?”
His answer was immediate. Brutal.
“Necessary.”
He left before I could decide whether to hit him, scream at him, or drag him back to bed.
The door closed with a soft click. The sound of his footsteps disappeared down the hall.
I stared at the ceiling for a long moment, trying to remember how to breathe without his weight pinning me to the mattress.
He was wrong.
It had already changed me.