Chapter 4
Dominik
She doesn't move.
She stands at the edge of the bed with my jacket still around her shoulders and her dark eyes locked on mine, and she doesn't move.
I can see her pulse in her throat. Rapid.
Thready. The kind of heartbeat that precedes unconsciousness if it goes on long enough, and I realize with a clarity that cuts through every possessive impulse currently short-circuiting my brain that this girl is about thirty seconds from passing out on my bedroom floor.
She's been starving. She's been terrified.
She's been stripped and displayed and sold and driven through the city by a stranger who made her touch herself in his backseat, and now that stranger is standing in a bedroom telling her to lie down, and every synapse in her body is firing the same signal: this is where the bad thing happens.
I watch the calculation happen behind her eyes. The bracing. The quiet gathering of whatever she has left, which isn't much, into a wall she can put between herself and what she thinks is coming next.
And something in me shifts.
A recalibration. A recognition that the girl standing in front of me has been running on fumes and fear for God knows how many hours, and if I push her any further tonight she won't break in a way that's useful to me.
She'll break in a way that makes her disappear behind her own eyes, and I'll be left with a body that breathes and blinks and follows commands but has nobody living inside it.
I've seen that before. The girls Kir sends back after he's finished with them have that look. Vacant. Evacuated. Present in the room but absent from themselves in a way that no amount of time or money can reverse.
I don't want that.
I want her awake. I want her aware. I want every nerve ending in her body firing when I eventually take what I've decided is mine, and I want her to feel all of it, every second, with the same intensity I felt when she walked onto that stage.
"I’m not going to hurt you. Lie down," I say again, and I keep my voice flat, keep it neutral, strip it of everything that might read as threat.
She finally breaks eye contact, her head bowing slightly with resignation, then she removes my jacket, and slowly lowers herself to the bed.
“Show me,” I say, plucking open the top buttons of my shirt.
She knows what I mean because she slides her feet from the heels and lifts her knees. Her feet coming to the edge of the bed, her hands flat on the quilt either side of her hips.
“I won’t have sex with you against your will,” I say it for her comfort and reassurance. “But make no mistake, we will have sex. I can be patient for as long as you need, but there’s a cost.”
Her dark eyes are on me now, her face crumpled with confusion, the dress slipping over her skin revealing more of her to me with every passing second.
“With that said, I will be eating your pretty pussy every night until you’re begging me to put you out of your misery and fuck you.”
Surprise barely has time to register on her face before I’ve dropped onto the bed between her thighs and began devouring her warm cunt like a man starved.
She jumps a little at the contact before her hands come to the top of my head and try to push me away.
My mouth follows her as she wriggles up the bed, but she doesn’t tell me to stop.
The little sounds she is making aren’t objections, and within minutes she is holding the back of my head and grinding against my face.
The sound of me eating her and sucking at her is obscene, but I don’t care.
Her leg comes around over my shoulder and across my back as her thighs begin to quiver. Those little sounds have turned into long, keening moans, and her body locks tight before releasing with an orgasm that rocks through her with a violent force.
I drive her through it, then still my mouth over her clit, not moving. Her hand is stroking through my hair, massaging my scalp like she wants to keep my face between her legs forever.
I finally remove myself and pepper kisses over her thighs as soft aftershocks tremble through her.
Finally, I stand and look down at her, flushed and wrecked on the bed.
“Goodnight, Wren,” I say, then walk from the room and pull the door closed behind me.
I walk back to the living room and think about what the fuck just happened to me.
Three hours ago I had a plan. A clean, efficient, well-constructed plan that involved putting two hollow points in Kir Belov's chest and one in his face and reclaiming six months' worth of stolen revenue.
The kind of plan I've executed dozens of times.
The kind that runs on logic and leverage and the complete absence of emotional interference.
Now I'm standing in my penthouse a million dollars lighter with a woman in my guest bedroom, a rival who is still breathing and a best friend who thinks I've lost my mind.
Ilya isn't wrong.
I take out my phone.
If I'm going to keep her, and I am going to keep her, there's no ambiguity about that, the decision was made the moment the click happened, then I need to know what I'm keeping.
Every detail. Every scar, visible and otherwise.
Every person who has ever touched her and every person who failed to.
I need to understand the full topography of what I've claimed so that I can hold it properly, the way you need to understand the fault lines in a piece of land before you build on it.
I call Yuri.
Yuri Petrov is my intelligence man. Former FSB, recruited by my father twenty years ago and inherited by me along with the rest of the operation when my father died.
He doesn't sleep, as far as I can tell. He exists in a permanent state of caffeinated alertness in a basement office on the Lower East Side, surrounded by monitors and servers and the quiet hum of information being gathered, sorted, and weaponized.
He picks up on the second ring.
"Voronov."
"I need a full workup. Everything. Name is Wren.
She was Lot Seven at the Morozov auction tonight.
Father is the debtor. I need his name, her full name, her history.
Education, employment, medical, financial.
I need to know where she's lived, who she's lived with, and what happened to her there. I need it by morning."
A pause. Yuri is not a man who asks unnecessary questions, which is one of the reasons he's still alive and employed.
"By morning," he repeats.
"Is that a problem?"
"No. I'll call Morozov's office for the intake file and build from there."
"Do it. And Yuri?"
"Yes?"
"Her father. I want everything on him too. Every debt, every bookie, every bar tab, every dollar he's ever owed and every dollar he's ever lost. By the time I wake up tomorrow, I want to know that man's life better than he knows it himself."
"Understood."
I hang up. Pour myself a drink.
Sleep doesn't come. I don't expect it to. I've never slept well, and tonight the usual insomnia is compounded by something else, a low-frequency vibration in my nervous system that I eventually identify as anticipation. The incessant boner doesn’t help.
I sit in the dark and I wait.
At 6:47 a.m., my phone buzzes. Yuri.
I open the file he's sent to my encrypted server and I start reading, and by the second page my hands are so tight around my phone that the case creaks.
Her name is Wren Calloway. Twenty-three.
Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Dennis Calloway and a mother named Sarah who died when Wren was four.
Cause of death: complications from an untreated infection, because Dennis Calloway didn't have insurance and didn't take his wife to the hospital until she was already septic.
He told the ER doctors she'd been sick for "a couple days.
" The medical records say it was closer to two weeks.
Wren was four years old when her mother died because her father was too cheap or too drunk or too indifferent to drive her to a hospital.
I set my phone down. Pick up the Macallan. Put it down without drinking. Pick the phone back up.
It gets worse.
After Sarah died, Dennis fell apart. Or rather, Dennis fell further apart, because from what Yuri's assembled, the man was never particularly together to begin with.
The drinking escalated. The gambling started.
Small-time at first, off-track betting, weekly poker games with other men who couldn't afford to lose.
Then the casinos. Then the private games with people who don't advertise and don't forgive.
Wren started working at fourteen. Under the table, because she was too young for a legal paycheck.
She bused tables at a diner six blocks from their apartment and brought the cash home and her father took it.
Yuri pulled the diner's records. The owner, a woman named Rosa Gutierrez, kept informal logs of hours and pay, and according to those logs, Wren worked four to five shifts a week during the school year and six or seven during the summer.
She was fourteen.
At sixteen, she added a second job. Cleaning office buildings at night through a temp agency that paid in cash and didn't ask questions about age.
The agency's records are spotty, but Yuri cross-referenced them with the building's access logs and found that Wren Calloway was regularly swiping in at 10 p.m. and swiping out at 3 a.m. on school nights.
She graduated from high school with a 3.8 GPA. I read that number three times. 3.8, while working two jobs, while feeding a gambling addict father, while living in an apartment where the heat got shut off every winter and the water got shut off twice.
No college. There was no money for college.
There was no money for anything. Every dollar she earned went into the black hole of her father's debt, and the debts kept growing because Dennis Calloway had the kind of addiction that doesn't plateau.
It escalates. It evolves. It finds new and creative ways to consume everything within reach, including his daughter's future.