Chapter 13 #4
“We involve Anton,” I said. “Everything. The photographs. The terms. Kostya’s call. Anton needs to know that someone in his organization is passing information to the people who are trying to destroy us.”
“And Kostya.”
“Nikita traces the timeline. When he first contacted Viktor. What he knew and when he knew it. If Kostya is compromised, Anton needs to find out from us, not from the Voronins.”
She nodded. Then she stood. She crossed the room. She sat on the arm of my chair—not in my lap, not on the floor beside me. On the arm. Close enough that her hip pressed against my shoulder.
“I’ll call Luis tonight,” she said. “He can supervise the site work tomorrow. I’ll work from here. The Henry Street assessment doesn’t need me on-site.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’m choosing to. Not because you told me to. Because the photographs tell me that moving around the city right now is stupid, and I’m not stupid.”
I reached for her. My hand found her waist. I drew her from the arm of the chair into my lap, and she came, and I held her against my chest with both arms and pressed my face into her hair.
She held me back.
Her arms went around my neck. Her hands gripped the back of my shirt. She held me the way I was holding her—tight, close, with the particular grip of someone who understood that the person in their arms was frightened.
I was frightened.
I let her feel it. The tension in my shoulders.
The pressure of my arms around her. The way my face pressed into her hair and did not lift.
I had been holding it since the hotel—the fury, the fear, the image of her face in the first photograph, smiling, unaware—and I had carried it through the car and the highway and the phone call and the hallway, and now I let it exist in my body where she could feel it.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I held her. The lamp hummed. The house was quiet. The photographs lay on the hall table where she had placed them, and the porch light burned outside, and the man at the end of the block was Boris, and Boris was watching the street, and the street was empty.
“I’ll call Nikita, put things in place. Then . . . we can just be.”
Ifinished the call with Nikita at nine-fifteen. He would begin tracing Kostya’s communications immediately. Anton would be briefed in the morning. Arkady was doubling the watch on Dover Street. Boris was staying overnight.
The house was locked. The guards were positioned. The work that could be done tonight had been done.
I went upstairs.
Ksenia was in my bedroom. She had changed—the grey sweater gone, replaced by one of her “interesting” pajama selections.
Flannel. Patterned with small cartoon cats.
She had pulled back the covers on the bed and placed Misha on the nightstand and she was sitting on the edge of the mattress with her bare feet on the floor and her hands in her lap.
She looked up when I came in.
“Is everything set?”
“Everything that can be set tonight.”
“Come here.”
I crossed the room. I stood in front of her. She reached up and took my hand. Her fingers were warm. She held my hand and looked at it—turned it over, examined the knuckles, the lines across the palm, the broad shape of it.
“Sit,” she said.
I sat beside her. The bed dipped under our combined weight. The lamp was on. The amber light fell across her face, her hair, the absurd pajamas.
“Daniil.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want the Voronins deciding what happens to our marriage.”
She said it without emphasis. Plainly. The way she said things when the armor was off and the words came from the place beneath the performance.
“Oleg wanted you to make a decision about me. He wanted you to decide where I go, what I do, how I live. He wanted to turn you into the kind of man who ships his wife away because he’s afraid.”
“I know.”
“But I’m not staying because you told me to. I’m staying because this is my home and you are my husband and I will be damned if Viktor Voronin gets to decide what my life looks like.”
I looked at her. The cartoon cats on her pajamas. The bare feet. The set of her jaw. The woman who had looked at five photographs of herself under surveillance and said what do you want to do instead of tell me what to do.
I kissed her. I put my hand on the back of her neck and I brought my mouth to hers and I kissed her with the full weight of everything I had been carrying since the Meridian Hotel. The fear. The fury.
She kissed me back. Her hands found my collar. She pulled me closer—not urgently, not with the desperation of the night in the library. With intention. With the deliberate, focused attention of a woman who had decided what she wanted and intended to take it.
I pulled back. I looked at her.
She reached for the hem of her pajama top. I stopped her. I took her hands. I held them.
“Let me,” I said.
She let me.
I lifted the top. Slowly. The flannel sliding up over her stomach, her ribs, her breasts.
She raised her arms and I drew it over her head and dropped it on the chair.
She wore nothing beneath it. Her skin was warm in the lamplight—pale, soft, the faint mark of the pajama seam pressed into her shoulder.
I put my mouth on her shoulder. The seam mark. I kissed it. Then the curve of her collarbone. Then the hollow of her throat, where the gold pendant usually rested. It was on the dresser now. She had taken it off. The hollow was bare.
I kissed her breast. Left first. The swell of it, the softness beneath my mouth.
I found her nipple and circled it with my tongue—slowly, with the patience I had not given her the first night, when everything had been hunger and urgency and the raw, explosive release of days of restraint.
This was different. This was not hunger. This was devotion.
She inhaled. Her hand came to my head. Her fingers threaded through my hair. She did not pull. She held.
I moved to her right breast. Same patience. Same attention. My mouth warm on her skin, my tongue tracing the shape of her, my teeth grazing the nipple until she made a sound—low, quiet, the sound of a woman settling into pleasure rather than chasing it.
I moved down. Her stomach. The soft skin below her ribs. The place where her hip bones created a shallow valley. I kissed each place. I took my time. The lamp hummed. The house was silent around us—no phone, no car, no Arkady, no crisis. Just the room and the bed and the woman beneath my mouth.
I knelt on the floor. She sat on the edge of the bed. I put my hands on her knees and pushed them apart—gently, not a command, a request. She opened.
I pulled the pajama bottoms down. Over her hips, her thighs, her calves. She lifted her feet so I could draw them off. She was naked. Sitting on the edge of our bed in the amber light, her legs parted, her hands resting on the mattress beside her hips.
I gripped her legs. My hands wrapped around her thighs—both of them, my fingers spanning the flesh, holding her open.
I could feel the muscle beneath the softness.
The strength in her. She was not fragile.
She was not breakable. She was warm and alive and here, in our home, in our bed, and the man who had photographed her was in a hotel room across the city and he could not touch this.
I put my mouth on her.
Tender. Not the ferocity of the first time, when I had pulled her down onto my face and fucked her with my tongue until she made a sound I would carry for the rest of my life.
This was different. I kissed her the way I had kissed her mouth—slowly, with attention, with the particular care of a man who understood that what he was doing was not just pleasure but a statement.
I found her clit. I pressed my tongue against it—flat, warm, holding.
She gasped. Her hands gripped the mattress.
I held the pressure. I did not move. I let the warmth and the steadiness of my mouth do the work, and I felt her respond—her thighs tightening against my hands, her hips tilting forward, her body opening to me the way it had opened before, not because I commanded it but because she chose it.
I moved my tongue. Slow circles. She was wet—I could taste her, feel her, the slick heat of her arousal against my mouth. I kept the rhythm. Steady. Relentless. She breathed faster. Her fingers found my hair again. Her grip tightened.
“Daniil—”
I did not stop. I held her thighs and I kept my mouth on her and I felt her climb—slowly, gradually, the pleasure building in waves that I could track through the muscles of her legs, the tension in her stomach, the pitch of her breathing. She was close. I could feel it.
I pressed harder. She came.
Quiet. Not the devastating, body-wrecking climax of the first night.
Something deeper. A long, sustained wave that moved through her body like a current—her thighs trembling, her stomach tightening, her breath held and then released in a sound that was my name, spoken softly, as if the word itself were enough.