17. Damir
DAMIR
I find myself outside Sofia’s room just after midnight.
That is how I know I have become foolish.
Men like me don’t find themselves anywhere. We choose rooms, exits, targets, routes. We don’t drift through our own houses like ghosts following the warmth of a living woman because sleep has left us and discipline has become unreliable.
And yet here I am.
The corridor outside her room is dark except for the low sconces along the wall. Beyond the windows, the sea is black and restless beneath the cliff, throwing itself again and again at the rocks as if persistence can turn stone into surrender.
I slept through most of the day after the doctor stitched my arm.
My body took what it needed after the warehouse, the blood loss, the old ache in my hand, and the chaos that followed.
When I woke, the house was quiet. Reports waited on my desk.
Mikhail left a stack of files. Nikolai doubled the men at the gates without being told.
Grigori sent a note that said only, Your wife scared my son’s nanny and may have recruited Maksim into rebellion.
I should have gone to the study. Instead, I came here.
I lift my hand to knock, but the door opens before my knuckles touch wood.
Sofia stands in the opening, breathing as if she has run here from the window.
She’s not wearing the green dress from earlier.
This one is older. Ivory silk faded to cream, soft around her body, the sleeves loose at her wrists and the neckline lower than she probably realizes.
It belongs to this house. I know it the moment I see it, though the recognition reaches me a second too late to stop the quiet strike of memory.
Elena’s.
The silk sits differently on Sofia, warmer, more alive, pulled over breasts fuller than Elena’s ever were, clinging faintly at the waist and hip where Sofia’s body gives the dress a shape it didn’t have before.
For a moment, I say nothing. The past moves through the corridor like cold air. Then Sofia’s fingers tighten on the edge of the door, and memory loses.
She is here.
Alive. Flushed. Watching me with those too-bright eyes as if she has been standing on the other side waiting for the floorboards to betray my approach.
“Were you waiting for me?” I ask.
Her cheeks turn pink immediately. “No.”
“Liar.”
“I was opening the door for air.”
“At midnight.”
“Yes.”
“Facing the hallway.”
She lifts her chin. “The hallway looked stuffy.”
I raise a brow.
She’s breathing too quickly.
I haven’t touched her. Not yet.
That knowledge slides under my skin, hot and deliberate. The fact that her body already remembers mine well enough to react to my presence alone is the sort of thing that can make a man lose patience.
My gaze drops to her mouth. Her lips part.
A mistake. A very dangerous mistake.
“Why are you here?” she asks, stepping backward into the room but keeping her face turned toward me.
I follow her inside. The door closes behind me with a quiet click.
She hears it.
So do I.
The room is lit by one lamp near the bed and the pale silver wash of moonlight through the windows. The sea moves beyond the glass. Her borrowed things are arranged with reluctant order on a chair. My father’s ring still hangs from her finger on black thread, absurdly large, impossible to miss.
“I promised you,” I say.
Her brows draw together.
Then she remembers. I see the moment. The afternoon returns to her face—the study, my hand under her dress, her back against the wall, her body trembling around my fingers while she tried and failed to keep quiet.
Her cheeks burn hotter.
I step closer. “And I always keep my promises.”
The scathing answer she’s preparing doesn’t come. For once, Sofia says nothing.
That tells me more than words would.
I stop in front of her, close enough to feel the warmth of her breath. Close enough to see the tiny pulse beating at the base of her throat, right where my mark has faded but not disappeared.
“Tell me no,” I say.
Her eyes lift to mine. The silence stretches.
Then she whispers, “No.”
But her hands rise to my shirt when she says it, fingers curling into the fabric, pulling instead of pushing.
I lower my head. “Liar,” I say against her mouth.
Then I kiss her.
She opens for me immediately, no hesitation this time.
No moment where her body waits for permission from her mind.
Her mouth meets mine with heat and anger and something close to relief, as if she has spent the day telling herself she doesn’t want this and is furious to discover her body kept better records.
Her fingers climb to my shoulders, careful around the injured arm for half a second before she forgets caution and pulls me closer.
The kiss turns rough quickly. It always does with her.
Sofia doesn’t know how to yield gently. She fights even when she wants. She bites my lower lip, then gasps when I answer by taking her jaw in my hand and holding her still while I kiss her deeper.
The sound she makes goes straight to my cock.
I’m already hard. Painfully.
I slide one arm around her waist and lift her. She makes a startled sound against my mouth, legs instinctively wrapping around me. The silk of the dress rides up over her thighs, and the heat of her through the thin fabric nearly pulls a groan out of me.
“Damir,” she breathes.
I carry her to the bed. She holds on to me, one hand at the back of my neck, the other in my hair, and I remember the shower—the thought of her spread out, waiting, wet and furious—and it takes everything in me not to throw her down and bury myself in her in one motion.
No. Not the first time.
Not with her.
I set her on the bed and come over her before she can decide whether to be embarrassed.
Her hair spills across the pillows, dark against pale sheets, and the old ivory dress fans around her thighs.
For a moment I see the dress as it was years ago, empty in a wardrobe, carrying the dust of a dead woman’s story.
Then Sofia hooks her fingers into my collar and drags me down.
Memory burns away.
I kiss her again, one hand braced beside her head, the other sliding over her waist, her hip, the bare curve of her thigh where the dress has gathered. She arches under my touch, impatient already, and the sight is almost enough to finish me.
“You are overdressed,” she says against my mouth.
I lift my head and sit back long enough to strip off my shirt. Her eyes drop immediately to my chest, to the scars, to the bandage on my arm, to the hard line of my stomach.
She swallows. I see it.
“I thought you were going to make a comment,” I say.
“I’m deciding between several.”
“Choose carefully.”
“I was going to ask if every scar comes with a brooding explanation.”
“No.”
“Good. I’m not emotionally prepared for all that.”
I catch her ankle and drag her closer. She gasps, laughter breaking into heat. Then my hand slides under the dress again and the laughter disappears.
Her thighs part for me. I push them wider with my knee and settle between them, my mouth lowering to her throat. She smells like soap and warm skin and my house. The thought pleases me more than it should.
My hand moves higher beneath the silk, over the softness of her inner thigh.
She’s already wet. So wet that when my fingers reach the thin fabric of her underwear, I feel it immediately. I press my thumb against her clit through the damp material, and her breath breaks.
“Still going to insult me?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I rub her clit slowly. Her fingers grip the sheet.
“No,” she whispers.
I smile against her neck. “That’s what I thought.”
“You are so full of yourself.”
“And you are soaked.”
She turns her face away, but not before I see the flush that burns across her cheeks.
I hook my fingers into her underwear and pull it down her legs. She lifts her hips for me, then looks irritated with herself for doing it so quickly.
Beautiful.
I toss the fabric aside and return my hand between her thighs, touching her bare this time. She’s hot and slick against my fingers, her clit swollen, her body already trembling because it remembers what I did in the study.
I circle her slowly. Too slowly.
She exhales hard through her nose. “Damir.”
“Yes?”
“You know what you’re doing.”
“I do.”
“That was not a compliment.”
“It should have been.”
I slide one finger through her wet folds, then press inside her only a little before withdrawing again. Teasing. Testing.
Tormenting us both.
Her hips lift in frustration. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Being deliberate.”
I look down at her. She glares up at me, flushed, panting, her hair a mess on my pillows, her nipples pressing against the thin silk of Elena’s dress.
My control frays.
I lower my mouth to her breast over the fabric and suck her nipple through the silk. She cries out. Her back arches. She mewls like a cat in heat, and the sound goes straight to my cock.
I take the dress in both hands and pull it down until one breast spills free, full and soft, nipple tight from my mouth and the cool air.
For one moment, I only look.
Sofia’s hands move as if she might cover herself, but I catch her wrists and pin them gently above her head with one hand. “No hiding.”
Her breath comes fast. “You keep saying that.”
“You keep trying.”
Her eyes flash, but before she can answer, I take her nipple into my mouth, and the words become a moan.
I suck her hard, tongue circling the peak, teeth grazing just enough to make her whole body jerk beneath me.
Her cunt clenches around nothing. I feel it against my fingers as I slide them through her again, coating them in her wetness before finding her clit.
She’s writhing now, hot and restless beneath me. The sound of it fills the room, mixed with the sea beyond the windows and my own breathing turning less controlled by the second.
I want my mouth everywhere. Her breasts. Her thighs. Her cunt. The soft place behind her knee. The mark on her neck. The inside of her wrist where the black thread holds my ring to her hand.