CHAPTER 9
NEVER ENOUGH
GRIMM
Hypnotizing.
It was the only way I could describe what it felt like to kiss her. The touch of her soft, plump lips pressed against mine sent my brain aflutter. It bore no resemblance to the hungry, teeth-rattling, tongue-tying kisses I experienced before.
No.
Her kiss was an undiscovered realm, so vast that it would take years to explore its complexity.
Her lips moved over mine so tentatively, almost as if she was testing to see what she liked and didn’t like, all while I felt as though my soul had escaped my body, floating somewhere above us, ready to fall and devour her until it made every last shred of innocence inside her disappear.
I was spilling at the seams.
My hands traveled up those thighs that made me see stars, and sneaked under her – my — T-shirt, lingering on the curve of her back, trying to pull her even closer to me, if that was even possible. Every fine hair on her body stood on end. I could feel it under my fingertips as I slowly stroked my tongue over her lips, waiting, wishing, begging her to grant me entrance.
I was never harder than in the moment when her mouth opened for me for the first time, and I was allowed to discover her taste. A soft whimper escaped her throat, one that I savored and swallowed.
I heroically resisted the impulse to rip that T-shirt to pieces, just so that I could feel her skin against mine.
We took our time getting acquainted, tasting, teasing and stealing touches.
Her palms softly pressed against my chest, and for a second I thought she was going to push me away, but they shyly traveled up until they reached around my neck. Her nails grazed my scalp, and a deep groan escaped me before I could stifle it, my hands gripping the soft flesh of her back, eliciting another moan from her, another one that I ate up like a man starved.
I wanted to record all those little, whispered sounds, then listen to them in a continuous loop when she wasn’t next to me.
My hands wandered down, hovering in the air above her ass.
I was afraid that if I touched her, the moment would have shattered, and I wasn’t ready for it to end, but when she rolled her hips on top of me, probably involuntarily, I lost my mind.
I stood up from the chair with her still wrapped around me and squeezed her flesh in my palms as if I wanted to bruise it. No. Not as if, because I truly wanted to bruise every inch of her, and I knew she would enjoy the pain, because it would also bring her so much pleasure.
Her nails dug into the back of my neck as I pulled the elastic out of her hair and tangled my fingers in her silky curls.
I pushed the utensils on the table aside, and Arella winced when I sat her down on it and kicked her legs apart to make room for myself, then I wrapped her hair around my fist and pulled her head back, moving my lips away from hers, leaving a wet trail from her chin, down to her neck.
I couldn’t stop tasting her, breathing her in, feeling her.
I licked over her pulse, feeling it spike against my tongue, then sucked her skin into my mouth and bit down on it, pulling down the collar of the T-shirt to expose more of her skin to me.
My head felt tangled in a spider web, unable to escape, and I wanted to cover her in love bites, mark her as mine.
“You’re driving me crazy,” I whispered over her neck.
She gasped as I bit into her collarbone and her back arched into me.
“I would appreciate it if you two didn’t fuck next to me,” Klaus coughed, and I snapped my eyes to him, watching as he tried to stand up, a dirty grin on his face.
She shoved me away so fast that I almost stumbled back, then she jumped off the table and put her hands on his shoulders, gently pushing him back on the bed to prevent him from getting up.
“You’re not supposed to be on your feet right now,” she told him, then lifted the bandage to check his stitches.
“I’m fine, blondie,” he shook his head, but when she gave him a scolding look, he quieted.
“What’s your name?” she asked him, reaching for a stethoscope, seemingly forgetting all about my existence.
My fucking brother, the master of bad timing.
I stepped back and leaned against the door, watching her with utter fascination and a raging hard-on that didn’t seem to want to fade.
“He didn’t even tell you my name? I’m officially revoking brotherly rights,” he looked at me over her shoulder, grinning like the devil’s spawn he was.
I mouthed a “fuck you” to him, making sure he could read my lips, then gave him the finger for good measure.
“Klaus,” he finally told her.
“Klaus, I’m Arella,” she smiled at him. “How are you feeling?”
“Brand new, Doc,” he grinned, and I wanted to punch his teeth out. “Fucking peachy, actually, ready to run the marathon and shit,” he continued.
Arella laughed. She fucking laughed, for fuck’s sake, and if he wasn’t my brother, I would have killed him by now, which reminded me that I still had a bone to pick with Boris for grabbing her throat like that.
“Hey, Grimm, why are you still alive?” my brother narrowed his eyes.
“What?”
“Well, you know, since you said you’d die before you introduced her to me,” he laughed, then groaned in pain.
Arella turned her head towards me, raising an eyebrow.
“Don’t make me regret it, asshole.”
He grinned like a maniac, then shut his mouth and allowed her to check his vitals. Her cheeks were slightly flushed in embarrassment because we’d been caught in the act, and I put my T-shirt back on, then took the scalpel out of the bowl she put it in after washing it.
I wanted to leave her alone to do her job in peace and kill someone, but as I walked back towards the door, she cleared her throat.
“Where are you going?”
“I have something to do,” I said grudgingly, my fist clenched around the metal cutlery.
“No, you don’t,” she said matter-of-factly, without even looking at me. “Sit down, Grimm.”
My dick twitched in my pants at her authoritative tone.
~ Do you regret wishing her being bossy with you yet?
“Yeah, Grimm,” my brother mocked. “Sit the fuck down.”
My brain was howling for blood as I plopped down on the chair and crossed my arms in front of my chest, like a good fucking puppy.
~ You’re a lost cause.
“Put the scalpel away.” She took the stethoscope off and put it back on the stand, then turned to me. “What is this ‘something’ that you have to do?” She crossed her arms as well, rolling her eyes as the words left her mouth, and I felt like a teenager caught skipping school.
Why did I listen to her without questioning?
~ Because you’re a fucking simp.
Klaus was watching us with a smug grin, as if he couldn’t believe that the little blonde woman with the piercing green eyes had such a grip on me that she had turned me so… docile.
~ I hate that word.
I couldn’t believe it either, but while my mind contradicted my actions and kept pestering me with questions about why we weren’t killing Boris, my body seemed to have a completely different command center, namely her.
I felt like she could have asked me to dip my legs in acid and I would have done it with a stupid, enamored smile on my face.
That’s how much power she had over me.
I was fucked.
“I was going to kill Boris,” I told her the truth and waited for her to lose her mind, but she didn’t.
In turn, she looked at me calmly with a raised eyebrow, as if I told her I was going to take out the trash, not kill someone. I was too shocked by her seemingly unscathed behavior, by the fact that she didn’t care much about her surroundings.
She hadn’t shied away from my men for a second since she’d arrived, and in that moment, as that unimpressed, defying eyebrow shot up and taunted me, I wondered if I truly knew anything about her?
How could she be so unmoved by crime? Why didn’t she contact the police after I had openly admitted to being a murderer?
Granted, I didn’t tell her that they were among the most corrupt of people, clinging to the mafia’s pocket as tightly as babies clung to their mother’s nipple, but still.
Arella, the woman I stalked for six years, the woman I thought I knew everything about, proved to me that I actually knew nothing. She was a walking, talking contradiction. A fucking enigma, and I was crazy about her.
“You’re not going to kill him,” she said simply, with a little too much certainty.
~ But I want to.
“He fucking touched you,” I hissed.
“He was doing his job,” she almost shouted. “You can’t just kill people for touching me, Grimm. This thing between us will never work if you don’t get your murderous tendencies under control.”
“Burn,” Klaus pretended to cough as he said the word, too amused by the whole situation.
“What thing between us?”
Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow, because she hadn’t said a word about us, or about her choice, and while it was true that she came to me when I called, she didn’t come for me.
She came because her first fucking instinct in any fucking situation, on any fucking given day, was to fucking help people, dammit.
~ You’re exaggerating a bit, don’t you think? Isn’t that what you like about her? Tone it the fuck down.
“I don’t think we should be having this conversation in front of your brother,” she said.
“Then let’s go somewhere else, because I’m confused,” I raised my voice, and she rolled her eyes.
Once again, she didn’t bat an eye at the fact that she was surrounded by criminals, especially one who was particularly on edge and on the verge of going on a rampage, namely me.
~ Who the hell are you, woman?
“I have to keep Klaus under observation,” she sighed, and when I opened my mouth to argue, she took a step closer and pressed a finger to my mouth, completely disarming me.
A touch. That’s all it took.
“I know he seems fine, but he has a deep wound. I need to stay here and watch him in case he gets a fever or shows any signs of infection.”
“But…”
“Besides,” she interrupted, “if he’s half as stubborn as his brother, he might try to get up against my advice and rip his stitches.”
“I like her,” Klaus said as he looked at her.
He seemed as puzzled as I was by how Arella could separate her feelings from her work, by how she put her personal life second and prioritized the safety of her patient.
“Get in fucking line, asshole,” I muttered, and she gave me a smile that deserved every minute I had to wait.
I took out my pack of cigarettes and shoved one between my lips, ready to light it up, but she quickly took it out of my mouth and threw it in the trash, then pointed to the door without saying anything. I rolled my eyes and left the infirmary, hearing her giggle after I slammed the door closed behind me.
I went back to the garage, where the boys had already carried the bodies down to the crematorium. All that was left behind was that awful chlorine smell. The blood had been washed off, not a trace of what happened.
As I lit a cigarette, I looked back at the chair Klaus had been tied to, imagining what could have happened if I’d arrived even ten minutes later than I did.
I didn’t care for many people.
Since I’d been an executioner for most of my life, I was immune to feeling for those I tortured and killed, but when something happened to those few I did care about, fuck, that thing inside my chest twisted and turned with the only type of pain I couldn’t withstand, a hunger for revenge settling my stomach each time. Those few I did care about carried the power to hurt me, Klaus being one of them, then Willow, then maybe – just maybe – my father.
But Arella… she didn’t just hold the power to hurt me.
No.
Arella had the power to ruin me.
I knew it the moment I saw Boris’ hand wrapped around her throat, because the mere thought that someone could hurt her, take her away from me, inflict pain on her, turned me feral.
“How is he?”
I gritted my teeth as I heard Boris’ voice behind me and took a long drag from the cigarette before turning around and punching him in his stupid, bland face. He stumbled back as I clenched and unclenched my fist a few times, but did nothing to hit me back.
“You owe her your life,” I told him as I took another drag.
“I didn’t know she was the doctor, I thought she was one of Klaus’ crazy conquests,” he defended himself.
“That doesn’t excuse the fact that you laid hands on her. We don’t hurt women, Boris, you fucking know that.”
“I know, it was a mistake on my part, and I apologize.”
“My father would have killed you on the spot,” I shook my head, taking another drag.
He nodded, and when I waved my hand to dismiss him, he left.
It was true, though.
My father would have put a bullet between his eyes without blinking if he had been there to witness it. Ever since Amaliya, he made a point of educating every man in our organization. Aggression towards women was a death penalty, and he delivered every time, in front of everyone, getting the message across with maximum brutality.
Nikolai Abaddon didn’t believe in an eye for an eye. He never hurt the people close to his enemies. He carried his battles like a man, not like a coward, because while he might have been a monster, he would never be that kind of monster.
He would never be the monster that went after the weak.
I stepped outside to clear my head, and the cold air of the night calmed the waves a little as I threw the bud on the concrete and put it out under my shoe.
I lit a new one, burning away another six minutes of my life as my mind was still baffled by Arella’s unfazed behavior towards everything that surrounded her. From the dead bodies to the armed guards, to my so-called job.
I took out my phone and thought about texting Hannibal to ask him to dig a little deeper.
According to his earlier research, Arella Santino became a US citizen when she started college, but all records before that moment seemed to have been wiped off the face of the Earth. I didn’t ask him to search further after that, because I was more interested in her future, but right now my thoughts began to spiral out of control.
She kept doing things that made me wonder what happened in her life that left her unaffected by my world.
~ Maybe she’s a spy.
~ She’s not.
~ I didn’t say she is, but MAYBE. Are you deaf?
~ You’re driving me crazy.
~ Or again, MAYBE she’s a psychopath. Many doctors are. That’s why they can cut so easily into human flesh.
I was curious, because her reaction – or lack thereof – could only be achieved by growing up surrounded by crime.
~ I like my theory better than yours.
I rubbed my temples and tried to make him shut up so I could think in peace, but apparently the asshole only went dormant when she was around, so I kept smoking and filling my head with all kinds of fucked-up scenarios, close to pulling my hair out.
I finished the pack, the nicotine having done nothing to ground me, and decided to go back inside and see what and how she was doing.
When I opened the door to the infirmary, she was sitting on the chair, watching over my brother with a genuinely caring expression on her face.
All uncertainty disappeared when I saw her, because while she may have been hiding something, this was real. She couldn’t fake all that kindness. No one was that good.
“I gave him a light sedative to sleep, given his history of addiction,” she yawned, then shook her head as if to wake herself up.
My eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“He told you about that?”
“No, he didn’t, but there are healed needle marks on his arm, consistent with drug use. Do you have any coffee here?”
“Yes, but I think you should get some rest,” she opened her mouth to protest, and I put my hand over her mouth as I stepped behind her chair and leaned down next to her ear, “I’ll watch him,” I whispered as I ran my fingers over her arm.
I expected her to push me away, but her breath hitched as she leaned back, almost like an invitation. I slid my palm between her thighs, reveling in the feel of her soft, warm skin, then slowly pushed them apart as I brushed my nose over her neck, inhaling her scent once more before pressing my lips to her pulse.
Did I really want our first intimate moment to happen next to my brother?
Fuck it.
I was too far gone to care, and he was unconscious.
“Have I thanked you for saving his life yet?” I asked as I traced smooth, barely-there lines on the inside of her thigh, moving closer to her panties with each stroke.
She shook her head, and I grinned against her skin, grazing her neck with my teeth.
“May I thank you properly?” I asked as I pressed a finger over the fabric of her lingerie, almost coming in my pants when I felt how wet she was for me.
“Mm,” she murmured under my palm, nodding at the same time.
“If I take my hand away, will you be a good girl and stay quiet?” I whispered, nibbling on her ear lobe.
She nodded again, her chest rising and falling in rapid movements.
I removed my palm from her mouth, only to move it lower, tracing the hem of her T-shirt before sneaking it underneath and clasping a full breast in my fist. I swore through my teeth when I felt it heavy in my hand, soft and warm.
She breathed in when I pressed my palm over her underwear, and swallowed audibly when I pushed my fingers under the thin material of her cotton panties. My eyes squeezed shut when I felt how easily my fingers slid through her folds.
“You’re fucking soaking for me,
Snezhinka
.”
I kept my voice low, close to her ear, and she bit her lip as if to anchor herself in reality. Her head fell back, resting against my shoulder while I circled her clit a few times, and she swallowed a moan when I pinched her nipple.
“I dreamed about this,” she whispered so softly I barely caught the words, and I sank a finger inside her, close to bursting in my pants from that alone.
She slapped a hand over her mouth when I slowly moved it in and out, her eyes fluttering shut as I peppered kisses and love bites down her neck, and I swallowed a fist-sized lump when I added a second finger and was met with resistance, her tightness making my head spin.
Her legs tensed, her face displayed discomfort, and she grabbed my arm, sinking her short nails into my skin, but not enough to mark it again.
“What’s wrong?” I removed my fingers, returning them to her clit.
“Nothing,” she licked her lips. “I’m just… not used to…” she stuttered, and I grinned.
“To what, baby?” I licked up her neck.
“I never…” my eyes widened, and my heart skipped a beat.
“Never been touched by a man?” I cupped her pussy in my hand and allowed my middle finger to rest at her entrance. “Never been fingered?” I continued as I pushed it inside her. “Never been fucked?” I grinned, watching as the heat spread over her cheeks when she shook her head.
Fuck. Me.
My nostrils flared, and I was close to losing every last ounce of sanity.
Sure, I’d assumed it before, but I thought it was just a wish in the back of my head, that burning want to be the only man in her life. A fantasy only a sick man would come up with. Could it truly be possible that my angel had waited for me all these years?
The fact that she was still a virgin drove me wild, and my head spun out of control as I let go of her breast and removed my hand from under her T-shirt to grab her throat, turning her head towards me to claim her mouth with mine.
The way I devoured her lips was in direct contradiction to the slow thrusts of my finger inside her. Part of me was rough, downright savage, while another part was gentle, refusing to cause her any pain.
“Why?” I rasped over her mouth.
She trembled under my touch, her voice breathy as she answered.
“None of the men I’ve dated met my standards,” she whispered softly.
This time, when I added a second finger, her insides clenched, pulling them deeper, and I swallowed each of her moans before they could break the silence.
“You waited for me, huh?” I pulled her bottom lip between my teeth, biting down on it before letting it go. “Tell me you did,” I tightened my grip on her neck as she struggled to hold in the noises.
“I… I did,” her breathing fanned over my face.
“Fuck,” I kissed her again, my eyes rolling to the back of my head as I reveled in the feel of her wetness. “You looked amazing with my blood on your skin,” I whispered over her mouth as I picked up the pace and used my thumb to circle her clit.
Her eyes widened, black swallowing the green as she gripped the armrest with one hand and my arm with the other.
“I can’t wait to see how good your blood will look on me when I replace my fingers with my cock.”
With those words, her eyes rolled back. Her nails dug into my forearm while her other hand clawed at the chair and she came, clamping down on my fingers so hard that I thought she wanted to break them.
When I pulled them out, I let go of her neck and gripped her chin between my fingers, holding her head up, showing her how I couldn’t resist the urge to suck them into my mouth like a man starved, even though I knew it would seal both our fates.
Arella was like playing with fire, searing and all-consuming.
Her taste on my tongue was heroin, and like any other addict, I couldn’t stop after feeling her euphoria. I would always want more, crave more, and no matter how much she would give me, it would never be enough.
I picked her up from the chair and sat down with her in my lap, her breathing still uneven as she laid her head on my shoulder. Slowly, I pushed my hands under her T-shirt and moved my palms up and down her back, caressing her skin and humming an old Russian lullaby as I pressed my lips to her forehead.
Her eyes slowly fluttered closed, a satisfied smile nestled on her lips as she drifted into sleep, and in that moment, I knew that I wanted to see her like that for the rest of my life.
“You’re a kinky motherfucker, you know?” my brother’s voice made me snap my head towards him, then back at her to make sure she didn’t hear him.
She didn’t, and I flipped Klaus off, then slowly stood up and carried her out of the infirmary.