Chapter 21
ELLIE
It’s Thursday afternoon, post-lessons. Anya is napping, and I have two unstructured hours that I haven’t figured out what to do with.
I go to the staff kitchen, a huge room on the ground floor near the service entrance that I’ve only been in twice. I want coffee. I want to read my book and do ordinary stuff in an ordinary space without analyzing it.
The staff kitchen is warm, and garlic and herbs linger in the air from lunch service. I’m already reaching for a mug when I register that I’m not alone.
Dmitri is sitting at the small table in the corner.
He has a coffee in front of him as he stares at his phone. He looks up when I come in, and his expression communicates profound personal inconvenience caused by my existence.
“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”
He looks back at his phone.
This is, by Dmitri’s standards, an effusive greeting.
I pour my coffee, debate leaving, and decide not to.
He looks up again.
“I keep running into you in unexpected places,” I observe .
Nothing.
“Well. Not unexpected, exactly.” I wrap my hands around the mug. “You live here. You’re allowed to drink coffee. I’m just — I thought you’d be driving. Or guarding. Or doing whatever it is you do when you’re not doing those things.”
He puts his phone down on the table and looks at me with the expression of a man who is performing patience as an act of profound will.
“What do you do,” I ask, “besides drive? For Rolan.”
The name lands in the room. His jaw shifts.
“I can’t discuss that with you, Miss Calloway.”
A full sentence. With a subject, verb, and object. An unprecedented response.
I feel genuinely encouraged.
“Right, but in general terms, are you security? Are you, I don’t know, a general?—”
“That’s classified information, Miss.”
I wrap my hands tighter around the mug. “Can I ask you something completely unrelated, then?”
He waits.
That, apparently, is a yes.
“Do you actually have a favorite food? Because I asked you, genuinely, and you looked at me as if I’d threatened your family. But everyone has a favorite food. Even people who communicate exclusively through monosyllables and disapproval?—”
Dmitri’s composure slips for a second.
It’s small. A tectonic event in a landscape that has been geologically stable for decades. The corner of his mouth moves a hair in an upward direction, which, in the context of Dmitri’s facial vocabulary, is the equivalent of laughing until you cry.
I feel a surge of genuine triumph. I knew it. I knew there was more in there.
“So, there is a human being behind the?— ”
The door opens.
Rolan fills it the way Rolan fills any doorway. He’s in his shirtsleeves, jacket gone, and his face is cold.
His eyes land on Dmitri first. Dmitri goes still.
What did he do?
I look between them.
Rolan doesn’t look at me yet. He’s holding Dmitri’s gaze with the fixed attention that I’ve watched him use on problems he’s deciding how to handle.
“Elizabeth.” My name in his mouth. Always Elizabeth or Miss Calloway. “My office. Now.”
“I was having coffee?—”
“Don’t argue with me.”
I put down my mug and get up.
He walks beside me down the corridor. I look straight ahead and think about asking again. I decide against it, only to ask anyway. “What happened? You looked?—”
“We’ll talk in my office.”
He closes the door and turns.
“What did I tell you?”
“I’m not sure what you?—”
“What did I tell you?”
He moves toward me. My back finds the wall before I’ve consciously decided to retreat.
“I genuinely don’t know what I did.”
He stops close. Too close.
“You can’t make conversation with my staff.”
I stare at him. Seriously? “I was drinking coffee. Dmitri was drinking coffee. I couldn’t have said more than forty words.”
“I don’t care.”
“You never told me I couldn’t talk to the?—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“That is genuinely not a rule that was?—”
He kisses me .
There’s no preamble. One moment, he’s telling me it doesn’t matter, and the next, his mouth is on mine. The argument I was building dissolves completely.
He’s kissed me before in my mind, in the dark, with the bathroom light making that gold line under the door. In those versions, it starts slow. Cinematic and measured. A first kiss that has a beginning you can identify.
This has no beginning.
It arrives fully formed: his mouth, his tongue, the taste of vodka, and his hands, one on my jaw, the other on my hip.
My hands find his neck before I’ve decided to move them. My fingers curl into the fabric of his collar and hold on, which is apparently all the permission the rest of me was waiting for.
His hands tighten at my hips, and he lifts me.
My legs wrap around him instinctively, and he’s carrying me effortlessly toward the sitting area along the far wall. The sofas. The soft lamplight.
He has a taste I’m going to be thinking about for the rest of my life.
He sets me down on the leather sofa without breaking the kiss. Then he pulls back far enough to look at me, and his eyes are different. The ice is still there, but running hotter, melting.
His hands slide under my sweater.
He pulls it over my head, and it’s gone. The bra follows with efficiency. Then his mouth is on my breast, and I drop my head back against the cushion and stop thinking in complete sentences.
“Your skin,” he says against me, his lips tracing the curve of one breast and then the other, unhurried. “Extraordinary.”
I open my mouth. What comes out is not words.
“I’ve thought about this.” His mouth moves lower while he works my pants and underwear down my hips. “Since I saw you in that kitchen.”
He pulls back and looks at me .
I’m completely bare, and he’s completely dressed. I pout. “This doesn’t seem fair.”
His eyes gleam. He reaches up and unbuttons his shirt.
Nothing prepares me for the actual geometry of him — or the ink.
It starts at his left shoulder and covers most of his chest, not scattered pieces but a continuous landscape. Dark lines and images that I can’t separate into individual components from here. An Orthodox cross lost in the layering. Text in Cyrillic I can’t read.
I want to look at every single one.
I’m not given the opportunity, because he drops to his knees in front of me, and the thought dissolves.
His mouth finds the inside of my thigh first, inching higher until he reaches my aching core.
“Oh—”
His hands press my hips flat when I try to move.
My hands find his hair, gripping the soft strands tightly.
He makes a groan against me, a low, approving sound that reverberates through my entire body.
“Better,” he says, against my skin, his breath warm and his voice dropped into that register, “than I imagined.” A pause before he moves his tongue, making my spine arch off the cushion.
It circles my clitoris, and when his fingers enter me, my eyes roll back. Unable to contain a moan, the orgasm arrives.
He stays there until the trembling stops, then rises, taking off the rest of his clothes.
Lifting me again, he repositions us until I’m in his lap, my back to his chest, his mouth at my ear.
“Sit down,” he orders, resting his cock at my entrance. Low. Patient.
I sink down slowly .
God, he’s so fucking big the initial stretch makes me inhale sharply. He steadies me with one hand at my hip.
“Good.” His voice has changed again — less controlled, rougher. “You’re doing well.”
“That’s — very encouraging,” I manage, which is the most dignified thing I’ve said in this room.
I feel him everywhere. When I’ve taken most of him, I stop and breathe and wait for my body to negotiate a new normal, and he waits with me, his chest warm against my back.
Then I move, taking him all in.
His exhale is sharp, and I feel it against the back of my neck.
I move again, finding a rhythm, and open my eyes.
Something in the corner of the room catches my attention. A red light shines from high on the wall, steady and patient. A small camera.
I stop.
“Is that a camera?” My voice comes out remarkably composed, given the circumstances. “Is someone watching?”
He moves inside me with a slow, deliberate thrust upward that makes my question feel suddenly less urgent.
“No one watches these without my permission.”
“But what if?—”
“No one does anything without my permission.” Harder this time, the words and the movement arriving together. “Everyone here knows better than to look at you without my permission.”
He kisses down the side of my neck.
“But if you’re a good girl,” he says against my pulse point, “maybe I’ll let you watch the tape. When I’m done with you.”
I swallow. “And if I’m a bad girl?”
I feel the shift in him — a subtle thing, a tightening.
“Then I’ll have intimate blackmail footage of you, won’t I?” His hand slides around to my stomach, then lower. “ But you won’t be a bad girl.” His fingers find where they’re most devastating. “You’re going to do as I say.”
I manage a nod. It’s all I have.
“Good girl,” he says and fucks me harder, increasing his pace with every thrust.
His hand works through it, and his hips drive up to meet mine. There’s a point where the sensation becomes almost too much.
“Rolan,” I whisper his name.
“You’re doing so well, Elizabeth. Come for me. Come all over my cock”.
That’s all it takes. The second orgasm hits me like a crushed wave.
He follows me over the edge a few moments later, his grip tightening, the warmth of him filling me.
We stay still for a moment. Neither of us speaks.
Then he moves, lifting me, gently this time, and laying me on the sofa. He settles beside me. His hand brushes hair from my face in a gesture so brief I almost don’t catch it.
“Never,” he says, “make conversation with my men again.”
I look at the ceiling. “You need better threats,” I say, “if these are the consequences.”
Silence.
I turn my head. He’s looking at me with an expression I can’t read.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, I know. I heard you.”
He holds my gaze for one more moment before deciding, “You need a bath.”
I start to sit up. His arm comes around me, pulling me back against him as he stands, my body cradled against his chest.
He carries me to a wooden door in the far wall, flush with the paneling, nearly invisible in the low light.
His bedroom is enormous.
I knew it would be .
The bed is dark wood and wide enough that you could lose someone in it. No clutter on any surface. One book on the nightstand. The room smells of him.
He carries me through another door into the bathroom.
It’s all dark marble and low, atmospheric lighting and the kind of fixtures that appear in magazines with captions about understated luxury. The bathtub is freestanding, deep, and he’s already moving toward it, turning the taps with his free hand while holding me against him with the other.
He sets me on the edge of the vanity and steps back.
“Ready for round two, I see,” I say.
His lips press together. The seismic event. He reaches past me to the shelf behind my head.
I shift to slide off the counter. “I can?—”
“Stay.”
“I’m just going to?—”
“I said, stay.”
I settle back and consider him. His expression is dangerously close to amusement, controlled and private.
I bite my lip. “Or what?”
The look that crosses his face makes my entire nervous system file an urgent internal report.
He takes one slow step toward me.
And I discover, sitting on his bathroom vanity, that I am very interested in the answer to that question.