15. Damir
DAMIR
I can’t sleep.
I have slept through worse than a woman in my house.
I have slept after funerals, after shootings, after negotiations where men smiled at me over dinner while their sons waited outside with guns.
I have slept in hospital chairs, safe houses, cars, and once on the floor of an abandoned warehouse with a bullet wound in my shoulder and Mikhail arguing with a doctor over whether removing it would kill me faster than leaving it in.
But tonight, sleep refuses me because Sofia Volodina is three doors down the hall.
My wife.
The word should not still have weight.
A priest said it. Papers will be filed. Men will rage. Sergei will plan. Sokolov will limp and bleed and curse my name until his throat gives out. None of that is unusual. Marriage in our world is often no more than ink, leverage, and a public lie dressed in white.
But Sofia is not ink.
She is not quiet enough to be leverage.
And she’s a terrible liar when her body speaks first.
I stand beneath the shower with one hand braced against the dark tile, hot water running over the back of my neck, and try not to think about her.
This is pointless.
I think about her anyway. Her back against my study wall.
Her dress torn open under my hand. Her mouth trying to insult me while her hips moved against my fingers.
The shock on her face when she came, as if pleasure had betrayed her personally.
The wet heat of her around my fingers. The soft, broken way she said my name when her body finally stopped fighting what it wanted.
My cock hardens again.
Christ.
I close my eyes and let the water beat against my shoulders. This is not a problem I have had before.
Wanting a woman is simple. Taking a woman who wants me is simpler. I’m not a boy, not a saint, not a man who has ever confused desire with patience. If a woman is mine, and she wants my mouth, my hands, my body, I don’t stand in cold rooms manufacturing reasons to stop.
I don’t stop with my fingers. I don’t send her back to her room. I don’t spend the rest of the night hard and restless because the sound she made when she came keeps returning to me like a curse.
But Sofia is different.
That is the most inconvenient truth in the house.
She wants me. I know that.
I felt it on my hand. Saw it in her eyes. Heard it in every breath she tried to swallow. Whatever fear and fury live in her, desire lives there too, hot and reckless and unwilling to be polite.
But wanting is not the same as being ready.
And Sofia, with all her sharp teeth and louder-than-safe courage, is almost certainly untouched by a man.
I knew the moment I slid my finger inside her. The way she froze. The way her body clenched around one finger like it didn’t know whether to welcome or fight the intrusion. The way she answered my question without answering it.
Has no one touched you like this?
She looked away.
There it was. A small, silent confession.
She’s not the sort of woman who would say it outright. She would rather make a joke, call me impossible, threaten to search my locked rooms, and pretend none of it matters. But it matters.
I wrap my hand around my cock and exhale through my teeth.
This is ridiculous.
I am forty-six years old. I control territories, men, money, weapons, ports, bloodlines, and more secrets than a priest could survive hearing. I have taken wives from enemies, sons from fathers, lives from men who thought loyalty could be purchased twice.
And now I stand alone in my shower, hard and half-mad because I chose not to fuck my own wife against a study wall.
I stroke myself slowly at first, jaw tight, water running down my chest, my other hand flat against the tile. Sofia’s face appears immediately behind my eyes.
Not the painted bride from the church. Not the furious woman demanding answers in my study.
This is Sofia undone, flushed and panting, one breast exposed, nipple wet from my mouth, dress torn around her waist. Her fingers in my hair.
Her body trembling against mine. Her eyes wide with shock when she realized I could make her come.
I tighten my grip. My breath turns rough.
In my mind, I don’t stop.
In my mind, I lift her onto the desk, sweep every file onto the floor, and push Sofia’s dress higher around her hips. She fights me with words because she can’t help herself, because her mouth is a weapon even when the rest of her is opening for me.
I imagine spreading her thighs. I imagine seeing her properly, wet and swollen from my fingers, still pulsing from the orgasm I pulled out of her. I imagine lowering my mouth between her legs and making her come again until that sharp tongue of hers forgets every insult except my name.
My hand moves faster. Water runs into my mouth, over my jaw, down my throat. I barely feel it.
I imagine her hands braced behind her on the desk, eyes furious and frightened and desperate not to show either. I imagine dragging my cock through the slick heat of her, letting her feel the size of me, letting her understand exactly what it means to be my wife.
Teasing, then taking it all.
Punishing both of us.
She would glare at me. She would call me smug. She would tell me to get on with it because patience is not one of her virtues, and I would have to kiss her just to stop myself from laughing.
Then I would push inside her slowly. Carefully.
That thought makes my hand falter.
Carefully.
Even in fantasy, I can’t make myself take her roughly the first time.
I would want to. God knows, I would want to. I would want to bury myself in her until she understood there was no space left between us, until every old family in Moscow, every Antonov, every Sokolov, every man who watched her walk down that aisle to someone else understood that Sofia is mine now.
But the first push would have to be slow.
Her eyes would go wide. Her nails would bite into my shoulders. She would try to hide the pain and fail because Sofia hides too late. I would feel her body stretch around me, tight and hot and shaking, and I would stop no matter how badly it killed me.
Waiting while she curses me for waiting. Kissing her until her body softens. Letting her adjust. Watching her realize she can want more even after the fear. Watching anger become need again.
I groan, low and harsh, pressing my forehead against the wet tile.
My hand works faster now, slick with water and precome, each stroke rougher than the last. My body does not care about restraint.
It wants the woman down the hall. It wants her mouth, her throat, her breasts, the tight heat of her.
It wants to hear that first startled cry when I push all the way in.
It wants to feel her come around my cock the way she came around my fingers.
It wants.
It wants.
It wants.
I think of the ring tied to her finger with black thread.
My father’s ring. Too large for her hand. Ridiculous. Heavy. Mine.
I think of her looking at it as if I had given her something too dangerous to hold.
I think of her saying it looks ridiculous, while her eyes said something else.
I come with my hand braced hard against the wall and her name held between my teeth, hiding my shame and sin. I’ve not lost control yet.
The orgasm hits hard enough to make my shoulders lock. Heat tears through me, brief and violent, and for several seconds there is only the water, my breathing, and the ugly satisfaction of release that fixes nothing.
When it passes, I remain still beneath the shower. My hand is on the tile. My forehead rests against my wrist. The water runs hot over my back.
Nothing has changed.
Sofia is still in my house. Still in my bedchamber wing. Still untouched in the ways that matter and marked in the ways that can’t be hidden.
I rinse my hand slowly and turn the water colder.
By the time I leave the shower, I have locked the wanting away again.
I dress in black trousers, a white shirt, and a dark coat. I wrap my wounded palm myself, tighter than the doctor would like. The cut Dmitri made is shallow enough to be an irritation, deep enough to ache when I flex my hand.
Good. Pain is useful. It reminds a man he still has flesh beneath discipline.
At three in the morning, the house is quiet. I pause once in the corridor outside Sofia’s room. No light under the door tonight. Either she sleeps, or she has learned to hide wakefulness better.
I stand there longer than I should. Then I leave before I do something stupid, like open the door just to see.
Mikhail waits downstairs with the car already running. He looks at me once and says nothing.
Wise man.
The drive to the warehouse takes forty minutes. The city at this hour is stripped down to bone: empty roads, sleeping buildings, sodium streetlights washing the pavement in sick yellow. Snow threatens but does not fall. The river lies black beneath the bridges, reflecting the city in broken pieces.
Mikhail sits beside me, reading through the night reports on his phone. “Sokolov men moved twice after midnight,” he says.
“Where?”
“First to Dmitri’s estate. Then two vehicles to the private clinic.”
“Dmitri?”
“Alive. Angry. Drugged.”
“Unfortunate combination.”
“For his nurses, yes.”
I look out the window. “And Sergei?”
“Still quiet.”
“Too quiet.”
“Yes.”
Silence from Sergei after yesterday means one of three things. He is wounded deeply enough to retreat. He is choosing politics over blood until the old families settle. Or he is preparing something.
I have never known Sergei Antonov to retreat.
The warehouse sits near the old river docks, one of several properties whose official records pass through three companies, two false names, and a dead man in Cyprus.
From the outside, it looks abandoned enough to satisfy any casual eye.
Broken upper windows. Rusted loading doors.
A fence that appears neglected unless someone studies the cameras too closely.
Inside, it’s very much alive.