Matilda
The kiss shouldn't have felt like that.
Except it wasn't a kiss.
Was it?
I keep replaying it in my head, trying to make sense of what just happened. His thumb on my chin. The way he pulled my lip free from between my teeth like he had every right to touch me. Then his mouth closing over the small wound I'd made.
You don't know what you've done. You're mine now.
The words settle under my skin like a brand, hot and permanent and impossible to ignore.
I press my fingers to my mouth, half-expecting to feel something different. A mark, maybe. Evidence of the moment. But there's nothing except the faint throb where I bit too hard and the ghost of his breath still warming my lips.
My heart is racing. Has been racing since he touched me. I don't know if it's fear or something else, and that uncertainty terrifies me more than anything else that's happened tonight.
He didn't kiss me. Not really. He just… tasted me.
Claimed me.
The thought makes my stomach flip in a way that has nothing to do with nausea.
I steal a glance at him. He's looking straight ahead now, jaw tight, one hand resting on his thigh while the other props against the window. Like nothing happened. Like he didn't just put his mouth on mine and say words that sounded like both a promise and a threat.
You're mine now.
What does that even mean?
I'm still wearing his jacket. It smells like him and I pull it tighter around my shoulders even though I'm not cold anymore. The shaking has stopped. When did that happen?
I should be mourning my brother, crying for my family, regretting every choice I made tonight. Instead, I'm sitting in the back of this car trying to figure out why the Pakhan's mouth on mine felt less like a violation and more like… inevitability.
Like he was right.
Like I am his now, and some part of me doesn't hate the idea as much as I probably should.
The car turns, and I watch the gates of his estate come into view. Iron rising out of the darkness like something permanent and unyielding.
You don't know what you've done.
My first kiss flashes unbidden into my head, dragged up from the place I’d buried it years ago.
I was fifteen, awkward and hopeful and foolish enough to believe that attention meant interest. It happened behind the school gym, quick and clumsy and all teeth.
He’d tasted like a cheap energy drink and cheaper cigarettes.
I remember thinking I should be disgusted, but I was too taken up in the fact that someone wanted to kiss me.
By the end of the day everyone knew it had been a dare. A joke at my expense.
He never looked at me again without an arrogant smirk and a snort of laughter.
That kiss hadn’t warmed me. It had hollowed me out.
This…this isn’t comparable at all. Gennady Petrov isn’t a boy from school. He’s a man who ordered my brother’s death without raising his voice. A man whose world is built on violence and consequence. A man I barely know.
And yet it all feels like some strange kind of normal.
The car stops while I’m lost in my own thoughts. The weight of his jacket is still around my shoulders. It smells faintly of him, something dark and clean and unmistakably male, and I don’t know why it brings me so much comfort.
He doesn’t touch me again.
That almost makes it worse.
It wasn’t a dare this time. It was a regret.
Inside the house, everything is quiet. All soft lighting and wide corridors and a sense of order so complete it makes me feel like the floor is about to fall away from beneath me. This is his world. It fits him.
He leads me to a bedroom, efficient and composed, like nothing unusual happened in the back of the car at all.
"It’s still early," he says, stopping at the door. His voice is calm again, unreadable. "Make yourself at home."
Home.
I flinch. Is this my home now? Or is this just a place for me to find my feet before I can make it on my own?
"Okay," I manage, shrugging out of his jacket and handing it back to him. He watches my every move, his eyes raking over me in a way that would ordinarily make me want to cover up. But not here, with his hungry gaze taking in every part of me like I’m the answer to a question he had never considered before now.
I find that I don’t want to hide myself from him.
The nightgown isn’t transparent, exactly.
The gathers see to that, all those tiny pleats catching and diffusing what little light there is.
But it's thin. Thin enough that I'm painfully aware there's almost nothing between my skin and Gennady’s gaze. There’s almost nothing between us at all.
He takes the jacket from my fingers and nods once, already stepping back without even a lingering glance.
The door closes softly behind him.
I stand there for a moment, alone in the quiet. The bed looks impossibly inviting. I crawl into it, not entirely registering the way it smells like him, and let exhaustion crash over me now that I’m no longer running on adrenaline.
As I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, my fingers brush my mouth again.
I don’t know what that kiss meant. I don’t know if it meant anything at all. But I know this much, nothing in my life has ever made me feel like that before. And the thought of Gennady Petrov being the one to do it terrifies me far more than the fact that I followed him here ever did.