Chapter 11 – Sofia
I locked the door and stood with my back against it and waited for my heartbeat to slow down.
It didn’t.
The apartment was exactly as I’d left it—coat thrown over the back of the kitchen chair, folder on the counter, the low lamp in the corner still burning amber against the dark—and standing inside it should have felt like safety, like the particular exhale that came from closing the world out and returning to the only space that was entirely mine.
It didn’t feel like that either. It felt like a container that was slightly too small for everything I’d brought back inside it with me.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed.
The scene in Nico’s office replayed itself again and again.
His face when I walked in. The careful composure giving way to something more calculating underneath when I spread the documents across his desk.
The way he had stood when I turned to leave—not alarmed, not defeated, but recalibrating, and then his hand on my arm in the street.
The grip of a man who was accustomed to things not slipping away from him.
The buzzer went off, sharp and insistent. I turned toward the intercom panel by the door and felt something cold move through me, because my first thought, completely unbidden and completely reasonable given the last three hours of my life, was Nico.
I crossed to the panel and looked at the screen.
Gregory Kamarov.
He was standing at the building’s entrance, his jaw set and his eyes on the camera, an expression I could read clearly even through the grainy resolution: He already knew I was looking at him, and he had no intention of leaving.
My stomach did something complicated that I chose not to examine.
I pressed the entry button without speaking and listened to his footsteps on the stairs—not the elevator, the stairs, because apparently even his impatience had a specific texture to it—and unlocked the door before he could knock.
He moved through my doorway while I closed the door behind him and turned to face him. He looked at me for a long moment. His jaw was tight. His eyes moved over my face as he searched for information he hadn’t decided how to handle.
Then he said, “Did you sleep with him?”
The question landed in the room and stayed there.
I stared at him. I heard the words, processed them, ran them back through my mind to confirm I’d heard them correctly, and then spent a full two seconds in a state of pure disbelief.
“What do you mean?” I asked. The words came out evenly, but only because I was still assembling my response to the audacity of the question.
“Nico.” His voice was flat. “Did you sleep with Nico Calderon?”
An electric anger moved toward my chest. One that came from being reduced to something simple by someone who should have known better.
I’d spent the last three hours building a case that could protect my family, confronting a man who moved weapons under my father’s name—and the man standing in my kitchen wanted to know if I’d slept with him.
“Why,” I said carefully, “does that matter to you?”
He stepped closer. I held my ground, which required more effort than I wanted to admit, because there was something about Gregory Kamarov in a small space that made all other things recede slightly.
He was too much in the physical sense, and he was looking at me right now with an expression that I couldn’t fully name because it had too many things in it at once.
He kissed me.
He kissed me the way a man kissed a woman when he’d spent too long arguing himself out of it—and had finally run out of reasons to stop.
I kissed him back for exactly three seconds before I put my hands on his chest and pushed.
He stepped back. His eyes were dark, and his breathing wasn’t entirely even, and I felt a vicious, satisfying flicker of something at the knowledge that whatever this was, it was doing exactly as much damage to him as it was doing to me.
“You don’t get to do that,” I said. My voice was steadier than I expected.
“You don’t get to show up here every time you feel like it and—” I stopped, because the sentence had several possible endings and none of them felt like the right one.
I chose the truest one. “You told me to move on with my life.”
Something moved across his face. Something that I might have called guilt if I’d believed Gregory Kamarov capable of it.
“Did you sleep with him?” he asked again. This time, the flatness was gone, replaced by something beneath it I hadn’t heard from him before—something raw, poorly contained, and unmistakably desperate.
“What if I did?” I said.
The silence lasted less than two seconds.
He closed the distance between us in one movement and pressed me back against the wall, his forearms braced on either side of my head, his body a wall of heat and presence, and he was looking at me with an expression that made something in my chest go very, very still.
“Nobody,” he said, low and deliberate, each word arriving with its full weight, “has a right to touch you but me.”
I stared at him.
“And who gave you that right?” I asked. My voice came out quieter than intended.
He didn’t answer, but kissed me instead, and this time there was nothing gentle about it at all. It was all the things the previous kisses had been circling without landing, and I felt it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet like a current finding its ground.
My hands moved on their own, fueled by a desperation I couldn’t control.
I shoved one hand under his jacket, my palm flat against the burning skin of his chest, while my other hand tangled in his hair, fistfuls of it, yanking his head back to keep his mouth locked on mine.
The sound he made—a low, animalistic grunt of surrender—shattered whatever was left of my self-control.
Knowing I’d finally broken through his cold exterior did something dangerous to my head.
Gregory didn’t just undress; he stripped with a violent efficiency.
His jacket hit the floor, and his shirt followed in a blur of snapping buttons and tearing white linen.
In the shadows, he looked lethal—all hard, corded muscle and jagged scars.
He was a man built for war, and as he hovered over me, it was clear I was his only target.
He dropped onto the bed, his weight a crushing, welcome gravity that pinned me deep into the mattress.
But he wasn’t in a hurry. He began a slow, agonizing descent, his mouth trailing fire down my neck.
He found the pulse point behind my ear, his tongue wet and searing as he licked a path to my jaw, making my breath hitch and my toes curl into the silk.
“You think you can just replace me?” he hissed, his teeth grazing my earlobe, his breath hot and smelling of mint and narrowed intent.
“I think,” I gasped, my fingers digging into the iron-hard slabs of his shoulders, “that you talk too much when you’re scared.”
He didn’t argue. He growled—a vibration I felt deep in my marrow—and slid lower. His hands hooked under my thighs, his grip bruising as he dragged me to the very edge of the bed. He forced my legs wide, leaving me completely open and shaking under his gaze.
The first contact wasn’t gentle; he used his tongue like a weapon, drinking from me with a starving intensity that made my vision go dark. His fingers didn’t just rest on my hips—they sank into the soft flesh, anchoring me so I couldn’t move an inch while he mapped out every nerve ending.
“Please,” I choked out, my voice sounding wrecked even to my own ears.
Gregory paused for a heartbeat, his hot breath ghosting over the sensitive skin he’d just been devouring. He looked up, a cruel, beautiful smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Please, what? Use your words.”
“Don’t stop,” I whispered, my hands fisting in his dark hair.
“I haven’t even started,” he hissed, and then he was back, his tongue swirling against the center of my ache with a white-hot friction that sent jolts of electricity straight up my spine.
I was sobbing his name now, my fingers alternately trying to yank him closer and shove him away as the pleasure became a physical weight I couldn’t carry. I felt the coil in my stomach winding tighter and tighter, faster and faster, until the entire world narrowed to that one point of contact.
He knew exactly where I was. He slowed down, his tongue barely grazing me, a torturous, teasing flick that made me whine in frustration. “You like it when I take my time, don’t you?” he murmured against my thigh.
“Gregory, now,” I snapped, my heels digging into the mattress.
He didn’t give me a choice. He used his teeth—a sharp, tiny nip that sent me screaming over the edge.
I shattered. My back arched into a violent bow, my body hit by wave after wave of long, rhythmic pulses that tore through me.
I couldn't breathe; the air in the room felt too thin, too hot, too full of him.
Before I could even find my bearings, he was dragging me up the bed.
He sat back on his heels, watching me through the gloom.
His eyes were almost entirely black, his pupils so dilated they swallowed the iris, and his chest heaved with a raw, unchecked hunger that told me I wasn't the only one who was about to break.
“Good girl,” he whispered, his voice a low, dangerous vibration. “Now it’s my turn.”
I didn’t wait. I moved between his knees, my hands trembling as I reached for the heavy, pulsing heat of him. Taking him into my mouth was an act of war. I wanted to hear that cold, Russian composure break into a thousand jagged pieces.
I used my lips and tongue with a slow, agonizing suction, swirling around the broad, velvet head of him until I heard his breath hitch.
I went deeper, my throat tightening, my eyes watering from the sheer size and heat of him.
I wanted to taste the salt of his skin, the scent of his arousal, the very essence of the man I claimed to hate.
Gregory’s hands found my head, his fingers threading through my hair with a sudden, desperate possessiveness.
He began to thrust his hips forward, a rhythmic, primal motion that told me his restraint was a frayed wire.
He wasn’t the strategist now. He was just a man starving for the one thing he had spent weeks trying to convince himself he didn’t need.
“Sofia—enough,” he choked out, his voice cracking. “I can’t—”
He flipped me over with a sudden, bruising strength, pressing my chest into the cool pillows and pinning my wrists above my head with one hand. I felt the searing heat of his body settle against my back, his chest a wall of fire against my skin.
He entered me in one slow, devastating surge.
It was a blunt, overwhelming fullness that seemed to reach all the way to my throat.
I cried out, the sound muffled by the pillow, as he held there for a heartbeat, letting our bodies adjust to the violent integration.
He wasn’t moving yet; he was just marking me, his heart thudding a frantic rhythm against my spine.
“You’re mine,” he hissed into my ear, his teeth grazing the lobe. “Say it.”
“I’m…mine,” I gasped, the lie tasting like honey and copper.
He laughed—a dark, breathless sound—and began to move. It was a fast, punishing pace, each thrust a collision of our tempers. The bed frame groaned against the wall, a steady, frantic percussion to the sound of our skin slapping together and the jagged bursts of our breath.
I reached back, my hand finding his thigh, pulling him deeper, wanting the ache to drown out the memory of the weeks he’d spent ignoring me. I wanted to feel him everywhere. The friction was a building fever, a tightening coil that felt like it was going to tear me apart from the inside out.
“Tell me,” he rasped, his teeth grazing my ear. “Tell me who you belong to.”
“I…I hate you,” I whispered, my voice a broken thread.
The friction was a building fever. I reached back, my hand finding the tension in his thigh, pulling him deeper, harder, wanting the ache to become so loud it drowned out the silence of the last month. We were sweat-slicked and desperate, a tangle of limbs and jagged breaths in the dark.
I could feel the tension in his muscles, the way his entire body was coiled for the final strike. The pressure behind my ribs began to build again, a white-hot spark that caught and spread until my whole body was a live wire.
“Gregory, please—”
He didn’t slow down. He drove harder, his fingers bruising my hips as he pushed us both toward the cliff. I arched my back, my own release hitting me with the force of a landslide, my muscles clenching around him in a series of agonizingly perfect pulses.
A second later, he let out a shattered, guttural groan—the sound of a man finally losing the argument with himself. He surged into me one last time, his body shuddering with the force of his own climax, pinning me into the mattress as the world finally, mercifully, went still.
The room returned to us in pieces: the hum of the refrigerator, the distant siren on the street, the cooling sweat between our bodies. He didn’t pull away. He stayed heavy and warm, his face buried in the crook of my neck.
He was still there. I could feel the heat of him behind me, the slight shift of the mattress when he moved, and the silence between us had a specific quality—not the absence of conversation but its opposite, a fullness that was waiting to resolve in some direction.
“This won’t change my hatred for you,” I said. I said it to the dark, to the wall, to the particular space in front of my face that wasn’t him.
I heard him exhale. A short, dry sound that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“Likewise,” he said.
And then neither of us spoke.
Behind me, Gregory shifted. His hand found the back of mine in the dark—not holding, just contact, fingers resting against my knuckles with the uncertain tentativeness of a gesture that hadn’t been planned. I didn’t move away. I didn’t close my hand around his either.
We lay in that space between, and the night pressed down around us, and something at the very back of my mind was quietly assembling a shape I wasn’t ready to look at directly yet.
I would have to look at it eventually.
But not tonight.
Tonight I let his hand stay against mine, and I breathed slowly in the dark and let myself pretend, for a few more hours, that this was simple.
That it was just warmth and exhaustion and the particular refuge of another body in the room with you when the world outside it felt like it was preparing to move.
Tomorrow, Gregory and I would still be whatever we were, and my father would still be three time zones away, and the three days I’d given myself would be two.
But for now, the room was dark and quiet, and he was here. I hadn’t asked him to stay, and he hadn’t offered. Somehow, he was staying anyway, and I held that small, unreasonable fact close to my chest like it meant something.