Chapter 10 – Ilya
After the incident in her room the other day, I hadn’t been able to get her out of my mind. I’d come so close to losing control and claiming those enticing lips of hers.
Part of me was glad I walked away. But another part of me wished that I hadn’t—and now all I could think about was what would’ve happened if I’d kissed her.
I recalled the look in her eyes that morning, the way her chest rose and fell with slow breaths and the subtle quiver of her lips. That wasn’t fear. It was something else, something I dared not label yet.
The scent of her perfume and shampoo, coupled with the expression on her face, made my cock twitch in my pants.
What was supposed to be a scolding session ended as something else, something almost intimate. The sight of her body, even when shrouded beneath the fabric of her clothes, always unraveled me.
That morning, she’d been wearing a simple flared gown, and I couldn’t help admiring how beautiful she looked in it. Her hair cascaded down her shoulders, her skin seemed to be glowing under the lights, and her hazel eyes held a hint of defiance.
Even now, seated at my desk, I couldn’t help but let a faint smirk tug at the corners of my lips as I remembered her reaction when I walked into her room. She thought I was there to finish her off, and to save herself from me, she grabbed a pencil.
A pencil.
“You might end up killing me, Ilya, but I swear to God, I’ll leave a lasting scar on your face before I draw my last breath.”
The threat had landed well. But not as she’d intended. I thought it was funny and had almost let my blank expression slip for a moment. I didn’t.
Iris had messed up. She revealed herself to Ivan at the wrong time, and I wasn’t pleased with that. Couldn’t she have just stayed hidden until I’d walked him out of the mansion?
I hadn’t wanted him setting his eyes on her, at least not now. Too bad she didn’t listen and obey my instructions.
“You told me to stay in my room and not come out until morning. How was I supposed to know you’d extended the curfew?”
Thinking back now, perhaps she was right. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I reviewed the footage from that night, and she’d truly never left her room. She’d done as I’d said.
Maybe if I’d been more specific about when she was supposed to remain in her room, Ivan wouldn’t have set his eyes on her.
She’d heard when he asked me to eliminate the witness, and that statement scared her so much that she’d locked herself away from me.
By now, she should’ve known that I had no interest in taking her life. She was more valuable to me alive than dead. Whatever that meant.
My brother’s stance on the matter was clear: I was supposed to abide by the rules and do things by the book. Deep down, I knew my obligations to the Bratva should come first over everything else.
This wasn’t my first rodeo. He knew that. The entire council knew that. My life had been dedicated to our cause, and I’d never once broken the rules or defaulted in any way.
I killed for the Bratva.
I fought for the Bratva.
I lived for the Bratva.
And I would die for the Bratva.
But somehow, I couldn’t end one life for the Bratva.
To everyone else, she was just another witness to be disposed of, someone expendable and insignificant. However, to me, she was something more.
I obviously didn’t have what it took to kill her, and I wasn’t willing to let someone else do that for me. The thought of her dying wasn’t even something I allowed into my head. I couldn’t imagine it.
Why, though?
Why was I getting so attached to her so quickly? What about her kept pulling me in? Why was she living rent-free in my head all the time?
It got so bad that I found myself always keeping tabs on her. I watched through the screens, studying her routine more diligently.
I began paying closer attention to whether she ate properly. What time her lights went off. Whether she’d taken the long way around the house to avoid passing my office.
I noticed patterns I had no business noticing, the kind of detail I usually reserved for surveillance, for men I was building a case against before I ended them.
I knew, for instance, that she’d stopped eating breakfast in her room and started taking it by the window instead, where the morning light hit the desk.
I knew she read faster when she was anxious, flipping pages too quickly to actually absorb them, like the motion itself was the point.
I knew all these things because I could hear and see everything in this house. That was the problem.
None of it mattered. I told myself that every day, sometimes more than once, standing in my office with a glass of vodka I wasn’t drinking, running through every reason this fixation made no sense.
It still didn’t stop.
This newfound fixation annoyed me. It was reckless, the kind of thing that got men in my position killed, or worse, got someone else killed because of them.
I’d built my entire life on not caring about the wrong things at the wrong time. Attachment was a liability. Ivan had said as much without needing to say it outright, and he wasn’t wrong.
I knew better. I’d known better my whole life.
Since I couldn’t bring myself to put a bullet in her, I considered something else. Perhaps I could send her somewhere far away, somewhere no Bratva official would think to look.
But even that didn’t sit well with me. Instead, something cold settled under my skin at the thought. Irritation. Resistance. Something I didn’t have a name for and didn’t want one.
I’ll figure something out. But in the meantime, she stays here. With me.
***
Later that night, I was lying awake in bed when a scream tore through the house. My head snapped toward the door, and I was up before I even processed the sound.
The sound had come from her room, loud and disturbing.
I grabbed my gun, sprinted out the door, and down the hall. Something crashed upstairs, furniture or a lamp, hard to tell from the noise alone.
My mind ran through the worst scenarios first. Intruder. Attack. Someone Ivan sent without telling me. I raced up the stairs in a blur, hoping to arrive in the nick of time before something catastrophic happened.
I reached her door in seconds and kicked it open. “Iris!” My voice echoed off the walls as I held my gun in front of me.
She stood barefoot on the bed, one hand gripping the headboard, pointing at the far corner of the room. Her charcoal gray button-down shirt was thin and oversized, the silk slipping off one shoulder.
My gaze swept over her body, making sure she was all right. Fortunately, she was.
No blood. No intruder. No threat I could see.
“What happened?” I asked, stepping inside, still alert.
“Spider!” Her voice cracked on the word. “There’s a spider in my room.”
My brows slowly rose in disbelief, a gust of relief blowing across my face. I lowered the gun, adrenaline still surging through me too fast to just switch off.
I scanned the room again out of habit, checking corners, windows, and the door behind me, before I let myself actually look at what she was pointing at.
A spider. Crawling along the wall near the curtains, small, harmless, moving at its own unhurried pace.
Neither of us said anything for a second.
The adrenaline hadn’t left my system yet. My pulse was still too fast for a threat that turned out to be an insect the size of a coin. That made the whole scene feel worse, standing there with a gun in my hand over something this small.
I lowered my head, fingers rubbing my eyes.
The spider moved again, dropping slightly along the wall, and Iris made a sound that wasn’t quite a scream this time, more of a strangled gasp, and crossed the room toward me without thinking.
She hopped off the bed and grabbed my arm. Then my chest, both hands fisting in my shirt, her whole body pressed against mine before either of us decided it should happen.
I felt her warmth and the softness of her gentle swells through the thin fabric immediately. Her breathing came fast and uneven against my chest, her fingers curled tight into the material like she needed something solid to hold onto.
She buried her face briefly against my shoulder, just for a second, hiding from a spider, a harmless insect.
It hit me harder than it should have.
I stood there, gun still loose in one hand, and didn’t move. Didn’t pull her closer. Didn’t step back either. Just stood still and let her hold on, my other hand hovering near her back without quite deciding to land there.
“What’re you waiting for? Kill it—chase it away,” she said, still holding on to me. “Shoo! Get out of here!” she barked at the little insect.
It crawled toward the window and found its way outside. Only then did she let out a deep sigh of relief.
Then she realized what she was doing.
I felt it the second it happened, the shift in her, the way her whole body went stiff against mine.
She pulled back fast, putting space between us, and I watched her gaze drop to what she was wearing under the dim light.
Iris cleared her throat, fingers tugging down the hem of her shirt while adjusting the top three undone buttons.
The glimpse of her cleavage I’d caught earlier was now burned into the back of my mind. The hem grazed her alluring thighs, not hiding much of anything.
Embarrassment crossed her face first. Then something closer to anger, quick and defensive, as if she were furious at herself for the moment more than at me.
I looked away from her before I could get carried away by the provocative scene in front of me.
“I can’t believe you screamed so loudly and had me running up here because of a spider,” I said, filling the awkward silence.
“That spider was going to jump on my head,” she replied, her voice as sweet as honey.
“It was on the wall. It wasn’t going anywhere near you.”
“You don’t know that,” she insisted, her brows furrowing.
I exhaled softly. “Well, it’s gone.”
“Check the window.” She pointed in that direction. “Close it. I don’t want it crawling back inside.”
Silence.
I hesitated for a moment, shocked by the scene unfolding right now. Quietly, I headed over to the window and did as she wanted before turning to face her.
“Done. Happy now?”
She paused, avoiding my eyes. “Thank you.”
I stepped closer. “Hold on. You’ve threatened to kill me. Twice now. With a knife and a pencil.” I halted before her with slightly raised brows. “But somehow you’re afraid of a spider?”
“Don’t look at me like that.” She scratched the back of her head. “The spider had eight legs. You have two.”
I nearly laughed at that joke. And even though I didn’t, I let my expression crack a bit. Her eyes crinkled at the corners as a small grin played on her lips.
She looked so gorgeous. Sexy. And it took every ounce of self-discipline in me to restrain myself from making a move on her.
Her legs were alluring. Her eyes were beautiful. The soft skin above her breasts was enticing, and her lips seemed to be calling out to me.
Every cell in my body was awakened at the sight of her. My heart was racing, my cock swelling between my legs. We stared into each other’s eyes longer than we were supposed to. And with each passing moment, I found myself closing the distance between us.
She didn’t pull away.
She didn’t push me back either.
The temptation was so strong it was starting to cloud my reasoning. I knew this was my cue to bolt. If I stayed in here any longer, holding her gaze and smelling her signature scent, I’d lose whatever little control I had left.
I studied her for a brief moment, wondering if she wanted me as badly as I wanted her. Would that explain why she hadn’t pushed me away? Would that explain the hint of what looked like desire in her eyes?
In a heartbeat, I snapped out of it and took a step back. She drew a deep breath, tense, her eyes dropping to the floor.
I left the room without thinking twice and closed the door behind me.
Standing in the hallway, I tried very hard not to think about how badly I still wanted her.
Her scent followed me out of her room, a reminder that I couldn’t shake her off so easily.
The warmth of her against my chest hadn’t faded yet. Neither had the way she’d looked at me just before I left.
I told myself it meant nothing.
But did I really believe it?