Eduard
She is so tight around me, in every conceivable way. My cock is still twitching inside her as I carry her through to my bedroom and lie her down on my bed.
“How are you still hard?” she asks.
“Because it’s you,” I say, dropping kisses over her collar bone and down between her breasts as far as I can without having to slide from her.
She pushes her fingers through my hair, her fingers scraping over my scalp and sending little shocks of sensation through my skin.
“You took me so well,” I praise her, needing her to know how amazing she is. “You are perfect for me.”
She shivers as I pull out of her, wincing a little with the loss, which I’m not going to lie, feeds my ego like crazy.
I suck her nipple into my mouth, flicking my tongue over it until she moans.
“Eduard, what are we doing?” she asks.
I release her nipple and look at her, hoping I don’t find regret on her face. Her eyes are searching mine, looking for an answer.
“Let me,” I say simply. “Trust me.”
She hesitates for a moment, one hand still in my hair, then nods.
The simplicity of that gesture hits me somewhere I didn't know was still tender. Trust. She's giving it to me freely, the way she gives everything, and I don't have a single category for what that means.
I kiss my way down her stomach, covering every inch with my mouth.
She's soft here, rounded, real in a way that makes my hands shake.
I've touched violence my whole life. I've never touched anything this gentle and had it survive.
I spread her thighs with my palms and look at her, because not looking would be a waste of something sacred.
She's glistening, pink, already swollen from where I was inside her, and the sight of it makes my mouth water with a hunger that has nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with prayer.
I lower my head and taste her.
She's sweet with my salt and something darker, something that tastes like the center of her.
I groan against her without meaning to, the sound vibrating into her flesh.
She arches off the mattress with a cry that I feel in my spine.
I grip her hips to hold her still, not to trap her, but to give her something to push against, something steady while I unravel her.
I start slow. I've waited for this, I just didn’t know.
I'm not rushing now. I trace her with the flat of my tongue, long strokes from bottom to top, learning the way she responds to every different pressure, the way she tenses when I hit a certain spot, the way her breath stutters when I linger.
She's responsive in a way that destroys my self-control.
Every flick of my tongue draws a sound from her, and I keep them all.
The soft gasps. The broken whimpers. The way she says my name like it's the only word she remembers.
I part her lips with my fingers and find her clit, still a little swollen, and circle it.
I’m gentle but relentless, and her hands fly to my hair, gripping tight enough to sting.
I welcome the pain. It keeps me grounded while I lose myself in her.
I suck her into my mouth, fluttering my tongue against her, and she screams, the sound tearing out of her and echoing off the walls of my bedroom.
A room that has never heard a sound like that, never held anything this alive.
"Eduard, please, I can't, it's too much," she babbles, but her hips are rocking against my face, seeking more, not less, and I don't stop.
I slide one hand up her thigh and press two fingers inside her, curling them, and she breaks apart around me.
I feel her pulse, feel her tighten, feel the wave crash through her as she comes on my tongue with my name breaking across her lips like a hymn.
I don't lift my head. I keep licking her through it, softer now, drawing it out, not letting her come down too fast. She's shaking, her thighs trembling against my shoulders, and I kiss her inner thigh, her hip, anywhere I can reach, because I can't stop touching her.
I want to stay here forever, between her legs, drunk on her, ruined by her.
When I finally look up at her, she's wrecked. Hair tangled, face flushed, eyes glassy and wet. She looks at me like I'm something holy, and I almost laugh because she has it backward. She's the miracle. I'm just the man worshipping at her altar, finally allowed to pray.
I crawl up her body and kiss her, letting her taste herself on my mouth. She moans into it, greedy, and I know I'm not finished. I'll never be finished. Not with her.
I pull her into my arms and she falls asleep. The last thing I’d ever do is wake her, not after the sleepless night she just had. Instead I fumble around on my nightstand for my phone and send a text to Jasper.
Fix it. All of it. I want the Popov’s back in their own territory or I’ll burn it down.
Watching Sammie come apart for me made me realize something. She isn’t just a nice person; she is the sun. And keeping her locked up, even if it’s for her own safety, will be the quickest way to extinguish her light.
She needs to be back in her own world. Her own environment. Even if that means she is without me.
She wakes somewhere before lunch time, and flies out of bed in a panic.
“I need to call Dee or all hell will break loose,” she says, dashing out into the kitchen which is where I presume her phone is.
When she comes back a few moments later, she is punching the number into the phone like it’s personally offended her.
She walks through to the bathroom, still naked, my cum dripping down her thighs. The sight of it makes me hard again.
“Don’t you dare clean yourself up,” I say. “I want you dripping with me.”
She glances over her shoulder, popping her ass at me before laughing.
“Dee, I’m fine,” she suddenly says into the phone. “It’s not as bad as all that. Well, not for me… no… no I need to keep you safe. It’ll only be… no Dee… Do not call my mother.”
I make a call of my own and order take out for us, since neither of us have eaten properly since yesterday.
The food arrives forty minutes later, brought up by Pavel, who hands the bags over at the door with a face working very hard at total neutrality.
He knows. There probably isn't a man on my payroll who doesn't know.
I find that I don't care. That's new. I add it to the list of new things, which has been growing at an unmanageable rate for the last week.
I set the food up on the balcony. I never use the balcony.
It has never had a use. Today it does, which tells you something about the apartment, or about me, or about the woman currently walking out of my bedroom in my sweatshirt and nothing else, hair wet from the shower she took while arguing with Delilah, and I stop laying out cartons and watch her come toward me through my own living room like this is a thing that happens.
Like she's always been here. My chest does the tight thing it's been doing all morning. I've stopped fighting it.
"This is nice," she says, stepping out and pulling the sweatshirt sleeves over her hands.
I hold the chair for her. She gives me a look at the gesture, pleased and suspicious in equal measure, and sits. "Eat."
I ordered from three places, because I didn't know what she'd want and had no intention of asking and getting a polite answer instead of a true one.
Georgian from the place Valeria swears by, khachapuri and dumplings.
Thai. A ridiculous quantity of dessert. Her eyes move over the spread and she goes quiet.
"You didn't know what I liked," she says.
"No."
"So you got everything."
"It felt efficient."
"It’s very sweet," she says. "You're going to have to get used to me saying that word about you, by the way.
I know it goes against your very being." She tears off a piece of the khachapuri, cheese pulling in long threads, and makes a sound that I felt an hour ago in another context.
I pour her water and reorganize my thoughts.
The city hums below us. The early afternoon is warm for it, the sun going long and gold across the towers, and we eat, and she talks, and I do the thing I apparently do now, which is listen to her the way other men watch fires.
I learn things. I learn that the café was her dream from being fourteen, a plan drawn on the back of a napkin and the savings from six years of managing someone else's restaurant.
That the cats were an accident. One stray, Rhodes, who walked in during the renovation and declined to leave, then a second, then a rescue center's phone number, then a policy.
That she named it Purr & Pour at eleven o'clock one night and woke up regretting it but by then Delilah had already ordered the sign.
"And your father?" I ask.
"Left when I was seven." She says it lightly, but I've spent my life reading the weight under light voices. "It's fine. We were better for it. Mom is currently on a cruise, living her best life." She picks up a dumpling, examines it. "Your turn. Family. Go."
"That's a broad question."
"I'm a broad question kind of woman."
So I do, and I hear myself doing it, giving away information I've spent a lifetime rationing.
Valeria is my sister, younger, sharper than all of us, the only person alive who shouts at me.
Jasper, Natan, Mechislav and Demyan are my cousins.
Jasper raised alongside me and Valeria after their father, my uncle, died badly and early.
I tell her our grandfather built what we have, that my father expanded it, that my father has been dead nine years and I've run it since I was twenty-six.
I don't dress any of it up. She asked the question knowing what I am.
She watched what I am get a man killed across the street from her front door.
"Twenty-six," she says quietly. "That's so young to inherit a whole, um." She waves her fork. "Empire? Syndicate? What's the preferred term? Is there a style guide?"
"Business."
"Business," she repeats, solemn. "Of course. And the business has been your entire life since."
"Yes."
"No wonder your cupboards are empty." It should sting but it doesn't, because of how she says it.
Without judgment, the way she'd note a plant that needed water.
She reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine, her thumb moving across my knuckles, across scars she hasn't asked about.
"For what it's worth, the balcony looks good on you. "
The sun gets higher. I top up her glass of water.
Lucifer would be asleep in the front window by now, she tells me, and Rhodes will be holding his vigil on her cardigan, and I watch homesickness move through her face like weather and pass, because she doesn't let things settle on her, she keeps everything moving, light on water.
And I make the decision final, the one I sent to Jasper while she slept.
Because she belongs eight blocks east, in a warm room full of cats with her name on the deed, and every day she spends locked in my beautiful, unused museum is a day of her running on borrowed light.
I'll end the Popov problem. Quickly, completely, whatever it costs, and I'll put her back in her world.
The part I haven't solved is the part where I've stopped being able to imagine mine without her in it.
"You've gone quiet," she says.
"I'm listening."
"I stopped talking five minutes ago."
"I know," I say. "I was listening to that too."
She laughs, startled and bright, the whole-body laugh, the one that arrives before she can prepare for it, and it goes up off my balcony and out over the city, thirty-two floors of glass and steel and not one thing on any floor of it worth more than that sound.
"Okay, Mr Grumpy," she says, standing, moving around the table to me.
I push my seat back to give her the room to sit on my knee.
“So you haven’t had a procession of women…but have you ever had sex on this balcony?”
I look around, it would be private enough. “No, I haven’t.” I say, my cock already hardening at the thought.
A grin breaks out over her face.
“Would you like to change that?”