Chapter 1 Mina
MINA
The cut along my left jaw throbs in time with the bass that leaks through the cab’s thin door. The stitches tug when I swallow. I taste antiseptic and copper. Vitaly said it would make me remember him.
I will remember—just not the way he wanted.
Anger steadies me better than the painkillers the clinic offered.
I refused them. I want the ache. I want it bright enough, right now, to keep my spine straight as I step out into the night and face the black glass building that is Rope.
The name is etched small in brass. No marquee.
No line. Just a door and two men who see everything.
I am here to make Vitaly pay for what he did to me in a way he understands.
“Members only,” one guard says, the kind of man who doesn’t need to raise his voice. The other scans me.
“I’m here for the owner,” I tell them, even though my heart taps frantically against my ribs. “Roman Ekimov.”
The taller one lifts a brow. I take a black card from my purse and hold it steady. He turns it over, says something in Russian into a lapel mic I can’t see, then nods to the door. The lock releases with a soft sigh.
“Mind your manners,” he says.
Inside, the night becomes a living thing.
Rope is a cathedral to kink. Red lines mark thresholds.
Staff move like friendly ghosts. A couple laughs breathlessly as a knot is tested and admired.
Conversations hum under the beat, low and private.
It should feel sordid. It feels curated.
It feels like rules keep this place on just this side of legal.
And then I see him.
Roman Ekimov sits on a black throne that should be ridiculous and isn’t. The platform is not high, just enough to make a focal point. People dance in front of him like the ocean deciding what to do about a rock. He doesn’t preen. He doesn’t smile. He watches. Not hunting. Measuring.
Light catches silver at his temples and the precise line of his mouth. He is built to last longer than the night—thick muscles and restless energy looking for a target.
Vitaly had choice words about his father. Neglectful. Monstrous. Absent.
But I see a man in a tailored black button-down and matching trousers, posture easy with strength, hands relaxed on the carved arms of his chair as if he grew there. He looks like control given breath. Not the feckless man his son described.
I step to the dance floor’s edge. I do not dance.
Bodies bend and glitter and sway, vying for his attention.
I walk a straight line, the beat parting around me the way a current will bow around a stone.
A few heads turn. Some smiles are invitations.
I hardly notice them. The rope motif coils over ceiling beams, traced in shadow.
The air smells like cedar and something warmer, like heat held in wood.
Five steps from his platform, I stop. My jaw stings. I lift my chin anyway. I look him dead in the eye and hold.
He sees me.
He does not drop his gaze to my mouth or my dress or the bandages on my skin. His eyes are dark and steady, and they stay with mine as if fastening a cable in place. The room thins to a line of attention drawn taut between us. The music keeps breathing. People keep moving. But the altitude changes.
He lifts two fingers—approach.
I step onto the platform. Close, he smells like leather and winter air. He looks even less patient and even more courteous. I don’t know what I expected—threat, certainly—but the thing I feel most is the relief of being seen.
“What business brings you to my chair?” he asks, voice low and textured, an invitation shaped like a test.
“The boys here are nothing,” I say, words careful around the sting. “I want a man, so I found you.”
Something like amusement moves at the corner of his mouth. It isn’t unkind. He glances at my eyes and nowhere else. “You don’t dance.”
“Not for attention I don’t want.”
“And what do you want?”
“You,” I say, and heat flares in my cheeks that has nothing to do with the tape. “Tonight.”
He tips his head a fraction. Approval comes as the softest exhale. He sets his glass aside. “Then you’ll have to let me know how careful to be.” His eyes dart to my jaw for less than a second.
I don’t look away. “Don’t be careful with me.”
His hand rises, palm open, not a command. He pauses an inch from my jaw. When he touches me, it’s to the unhurt skin, thumb sliding under my ear in a stroke so delicate it steals my breath. I didn’t expect tenderness to feel like power. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I will.”
He draws me in. The first press of his mouth is deliberate, not a rush or a claim but a promise of both if I want them.
Heat unfurls low in my belly, steady and deep.
My hand finds his lapel. The fabric is fine and slick against my fingers.
I open to him because I asked for this and I intend to keep asking.
Applause bursts somewhere at the far end of the room.
A laugh arcs like a comet. The bass shifts into a darker pocket.
He lifts his free hand and brushes a small button set into the throne’s arm.
Panels rise around us with a whispering slide—smoked glass that refracts the room into warmth and color while granting us a new kind of quiet. Not a cage. A boundary.
“They cannot see us now.” He watches my face as the world softens. “Still yes?”
“Yes.”
He smiles now, not big, not bright, just real.
He kisses me again, deeper, the kind that requires my name even if he doesn’t say it yet.
Kissing makes my jaw ache worse, but I don’t care.
I rise onto my toes and meet him hard enough that our breath tangles.
He steadies me with a palm at my hip and then guides me backward until the edge of the throne meets my thighs.
The chair is broad enough for two. Or three. Maybe more.
He sits and draws me into his lap without breaking the kiss, arranging me to be comfortable. My dress slides over my thighs. His hands are heat and intention. One at my spine, one at my thigh, fingers firm, patient. He does not hurry. He explores at his leisure.
I answer by learning him in return—jaw, cheek, the shallow divot at his temple where gray threads through. Touching, teasing, kissing, he seems to like it all. “Good,” he murmurs, mouth at the corner of mine. “Just like that.”
I am suddenly greedy. I kiss him until I’m dizzy, and I’m over the foreplay. He lets me take what I want and then takes it back, not to punish, but because the dance is better when it’s shared.
“Careful,” he says when my hand skims the side of my face by habit. He catches my wrist, turns my palm, kisses the center of it. The gesture is so unexpectedly reverent that it undoes me a little. I make a sound I’ve never made in public.
His answering inhale is sharp, hungry, contained. “Tell me to stop,” he says again, rougher now.
“Don’t you dare,” I breathe, and the words break on a laugh that surprises both of us. His smile flashes, quick and devastating, before heat takes it.
We move together with the kind of focus that empties the mind.
I am aware of the glass humming with the music.
Of shadows moving outside our little square of privacy.
Of the way he keeps his touch clear of the wound without treating me like something fragile.
He finds the places that make me say yes without words and returns to them with patience and precision until the yes fills the air around us.
His hands slide under my dress and over my underwear-covered ass. “Beauty, I am quickly losing my restraint.”
“Good.”
He arches a brow in a question. Now?
I nod once, and the next thing I feel is him ripping the fragile lace apart until my panties are a stringy memory. I go for his zipper, and when I reach inside his trousers, it’s all I can do not to panic.
How is that going to fit anywhere?
But I came all this way, and I’m not a quitter. I want revenge.
When his fingers glide over my slick pussy, I gasp at the sensation. It makes him smile. “There?”
“Yes.” The word contains no breath.
But I am here for a mission, not an orgasm. I grab his cock, stroking it until I have his full attention.
“Soft hands.”
“I’m softer inside.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” He aligns our hips and pulls me on top of him. When he starts to enter me, it’s a stretch. I lose my breath and wonder if this was a mistake, but there’s no going back now.
I wouldn’t if I could.
I’m halfway down his shaft when he loops an arm behind me and suddenly stands, flipping us around. He presses another button on the throne’s arm, and the throne reclines, lies flat. He lays me down, using the throne’s arms for leverage as he works the rest of his cock into me.
Slowly.
Excruciatingly slowly.
As he buries himself, he reaches down for my clit with one hand, and braces himself with the other on my throat. Not choking, but claiming. His dark eyes bore a hole into my soul as he fucks me. Heat rises through my core, and I’m twitching against him, so fucking close.
He grunts, “Is this what you wanted, Beauty? To get fucked hard by a man who knows how?”
“Yes,” I growl out.
“Come on my cock!”
From his mouth to my body, it rips through me, equal parts devastation and ecstasy. Shock wave after shock wave take over, and I’m helpless in his hands. He pounds me into the throne, a man possessed.
Until suddenly, he flips me over again, onto my hands and knees.
Then he plows into me from behind. Inches of his length graze my G-spot.
He smacks my ass, and the vibration triggers another orgasm, this one taking my hands out from under me.
I’m face down, ass up, and all I can do is lie there and take it. Too weak to do anything else.
“You take my cock like such a good girl.” His words pour like honey. “That dress of yours will be ruined if I come on it. So I will come in you instead, da?”
“Mm, yes, come in me!”
He unleashes himself until he finally comes deep inside of me with a howl.
His body jerks like he can’t help it, but eventually, things slow to a stop.
There is only heat and breath and the grounded anchor of his hands on my hips.
He strokes my skin reverently until he spreads himself over my back and kisses my neck. “That was foolish of us.”
It makes me grin. “It was. And I don’t care.”
“Right now, neither do I.” He pulls out, making an absolute mess between us. But he doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, he turns me around and kisses me until I can’t see straight. “Usually, I know a girl’s name before I fuck her.”
I laugh. “Mystery is good for the soul.”
He gives me a full smile at that. “I suppose it can be. There is a bathroom behind the curtain.”
I pull him down for one last kiss. “Thanks.” He doesn’t need to know I’m not coming back after I clean up, and I’m not one for goodbyes. The bathroom is private—it links to the strange space of his temporary throne room and nowhere else.
But it has a window that leads to the alley out back, and from there, I get back to the main road and the rest of my life. Vitaly hears all the gossip at Rope, which means he will hear about the scarred girl his father hooked up with.
I wish I could see his face when he hears it.