Chapter 15 Rurik
Rurik
When the noise in my blood finally settles, exhaustion takes its place. I pull Jessica up to standing and we go through to the bedroom together. I strip off my clothes and climb into bed beside her, enjoying the way she curls against me. .
Sex has never mattered to me beyond the moment. It’s always been about appetite and release, control maintained through detachment. But with her, it feels like a declaration. A line drawn so deep it can’t be erased.
Lying next to her, drifting off to sleep, I finally allow myself to think about what she represents.
Jessica is not a weakness. She’s a catalyst.
I fall asleep with her in my arms, knowing what has to happen next.
We wake in the late afternoon, the light already sinking to darkness.
“I still have some work to do,” I say against her neck. My cock is already nestled between her thighs, warm and hard.
She tightens her thighs, gripping it.
“You need a break, Jessica,” I say, fighting the urge to fill her again. “Are you in any pain?” I ask.
“A little, only an ache. A good ache.” She opens her eyes and turns to look at me. “I needed it. I needed to feel that way. I liked it, and I’m glad we did that.”
Her words are meant to reassure me, but I can’t help but think I took it too far.
“Jessica—” I start, but trail off, not knowing how to say what I’m thinking. How do I tell her that I’m obsessed with her? That I want to make her mine in every conceivable way? How her begging me to do what I did has altered something in my chemistry?
No woman has ever made me feel so powerful, so alive. To hold her pleasure so entirely, for her to trust me with it…
“I’ll get some food sent up, then we need to arrange for your stuff to be brought here,” I say instead.
If she suspects that wasn’t my original train of thought, she doesn’t say anything. She just smiles a sleepy smile and nods.
I leave her to rest a while longer and get back to work, stopping only to allow room service in with the food, and to arrange for one of my men to empty her apartment.
Then my focus is where it needs to be. Not on Jessica and her perfect, hungry pussy, but on Michaelsson and the shit storm he has created by marrying her mother.
Lena Rookeridge didn’t resurface by accident. She always moved toward leverage. Toward men with ambition and appetites she could manipulate. A candidate with a reputation problem is exactly her type. A man desperate enough to believe marriage cleans sin.
Michaelsson thinks he married insulation.
What he actually did was step further onto my board.
I pull up the files again. Financial trails. Shell accounts. Favors exchanged quietly over the last decade. Lena didn’t disappear after stealing from my uncle. She redefined herself. Learned patience. Learned presentation. Learned how to weaponize legitimacy.
Clever, but not clever enough.
The difference between Lena and me is that she believes survival is victory. I believe endings matter.
I don’t intend to destroy her publicly. That would splash too far, risk collateral damage. Jessica doesn’t deserve to have her life defined by spectacle or scandal.
No, Lena will be neutralized the way power should be handled.
Quietly. Permanently.
Her access will dry up. Her accounts will freeze under investigations she can’t outrun. Michaelsson will learn his wife’s past just as his campaign begins to fracture, and he’ll be forced to choose between her and his future.
He’ll choose wrong.
They always do.
When the marriage collapses, Lena will be exposed without being ruined. Stripped of leverage. Reduced to a woman with a long memory and nowhere to apply it.
Alive. Contained. Finished.
That’s the cycle ending.
I glance back at the bedroom and force myself to stay where I am, to finish thinking like a man who makes decisions that last.
She will be tested when the truth fully settles. When she understands exactly who her mother is, and what she herself could become if she chose ambition over integrity.
That’s the choice that matters.
Not whether she stays with me.
But why.
I don’t want obedience born of fear or protection alone. I want her eyes clear when she stands beside me. I want her choosing me with full knowledge of the cost.
Power is easy to take, but consent is earned.
When she wakes, I’ll tell her everything. About Lena. About Michaelsson. About what I’m doing and why. I’ll give her the truth without varnish, and then I’ll step back far enough that she can decide.
If she walks, I’ll still protect her. If she stays, the world will adjust around us.
This is the part no one ever understands about a kingmaker. The goal isn’t power. The goal is deciding which futures are allowed to exist, and which ones vanish into obscurity.
I turn from the window and finally go to her, sitting on the edge of the bed. I brush my knuckles lightly along her shoulder, grounding myself in the simple reality of her warmth.
Jessica stirs, eyes blinking open, still heavy with sleep.
I meet her gaze steadily.
“Food’s here,” I say quietly. “You need to eat.”
She smiles lazily as she stretches, the sheet slipping and reminding me what I said no to earlier.
God, I want her so much my balls are already throbbing for release.
“If you want me to rest,” she says, sitting up against the headboard, “you need to stop looking at me like that.”
I can’t help it though. Every part of her sets my blood on fire. Her hand strokes over my thigh, squeezing.
“You could go gentle,” she says.
I undress slowly, letting her eyes trail over me, take in the shape of me, the tattoos that spread over my body, the size of me. When I lean over her, nudge her legs apart with my knee and settle between her, she is already flushed with desire.
“Like what you see?” I ask, nipping at her jaw and neck, then smoothing my tongue over her skin.
“Yes,” she says, her voice breathy.
I slide into her without resistance. She is still full of my cum, her own arousal adding to the slickness of her channel.
She stretches quickly now. Her body already acclimatizing to my size. She lifts her knees back, hooking her arms around them, taking me deeper.
“Rurik,” she says on a whisper that makes something tighten around the base of my spine.
I kiss her, continuing my torturously slow pace, building the tension between us to a critical mass.
She is quieter when she comes this time. Not the deafening screams of pleasure from when she fucked my fist earlier, but a low stuttered whimper of release as she milks my cock.
I follow her over the edge, body going taut as I pump into her again. Empty myself into her again. No words of claiming or breeding or owning. I don’t need to.
She knows.