Chapter 26 Lena
LENA
Raphael’s arms were the only thing holding me together.
I pressed my face against his chest, breathing in that dark, familiar warmth that had become the scent of safety.
Of home. The collar lay warm against my throat, the delicate chain shifting with each breath, and his heartbeat was steady under my cheek.
A rhythm that had somehow become as familiar as my own.
You sound just like your father.
Michael’s words still echoed in my skull, sharp as broken glass.
Did I? Was I becoming the man who’d controlled everything about my life, who’d dismissed anyone who challenged him, who’d kept secrets so dark they were still poisoning everything he’d touched?
The man who’d looked at me and seen not a daughter but a burden to be managed?
“You sound like someone who knows her worth.”
Raphael’s voice rumbled through his chest, and I tightened my grip on his shirt, fisting the expensive fabric like it could anchor me.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Once. Twice. A third time, insistent and angry.
He didn’t move to answer it, but I felt the tension enter his body. The shift from man holding me to predator scenting danger. His muscles coiled beneath my hands, and his breathing changed, going shallow and controlled.
“You should get that.”
“It can wait.”
“It’s been buzzing for five minutes.” I pulled back far enough to look at his face. Something shifted there, gone too fast to name. His jaw had tightened, and his eyes had that distant quality they got when he was calculating, strategizing. “What’s wrong?”
The phone buzzed again. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and his expression went carefully blank. The kind of blank that was its own tell.
“Someone touched what belongs to me.” The words came out low. Dangerous. His jaw was tight, a muscle jumping beneath the skin. “I’m going to deal with it.”
“Now?”
“Now.” He cupped my face in his hands, but there was nothing gentle about the grip. Possessive. Commanding. His thumbs pressed against my cheekbones like he was memorizing the shape of my skull. “You’ll stay at the hotel. And you won’t let anyone close enough to touch you.”
The intensity in his voice made my breath catch. This wasn’t protection. This was ownership. This was a man marking his territory before he left to destroy whatever had threatened it.
“Raphael, what—”
“Don’t ask questions I can’t answer.” His grip tightened. “Just do as I say. This once, Lena. Trust that I know what I’m doing.”
I should have pushed. Should have demanded to know what was happening, who had touched what was his, why he looked like he was about to tear someone apart with his bare hands.
But the look in his eyes stopped me. The rage there wasn’t directed at me.
It was directed at something else. Someone else.
And underneath the rage was something I’d never seen before in him.
Fear.
“Okay.”
He kissed me. Not the gentle press of lips against forehead that had become familiar, but something primal.
Consuming. His mouth moved over mine like he was taking what might be his last taste of me, tongue sliding against mine, teeth catching my lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
When he pulled back, his eyes had gone dark, the brown almost swallowed by black, and I could taste copper where he’d bitten me.
“You’re mine,” he said against my mouth. “Whatever happens tonight, remember that. You belong to me. And I protect what’s mine.”
“Tonight,” I whispered back. A question. A plea.
“Tonight.” His thumb traced the blood on my lip, smearing it. “When this is done, I’m going to show you exactly what it means to be owned by me. Every inch of you. Every part you’ve been holding back.” His voice dropped to a growl. “Be ready.”
Then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him, and I was standing alone in my office touching my lips and wondering when I’d become the kind of woman who watched the door after a man left.
I didn’t go back to my spreadsheets. Instead, I grabbed my coat and my keys and walked out the service entrance, past the kitchens where Ratty called after me in confusion, through the alley to where my car sat waiting in the employee lot.
The hospital was twenty minutes away. I made it in fifteen.
My father’s room hadn’t changed since my last visit.
Same sterile white walls. Same beeping monitors.
Same smell of antiseptic and illness that never quite masked the underlying scent of decay.
He lay in the bed like a stranger wearing my father’s face, thinner than I remembered, his skin papery and gray against the bleached sheets.
I pulled the chair closer to his bedside and sat down heavily.
“Hi, Dad.”
The machines beeped their steady rhythm.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here more.” My voice sounded wrong in the quiet room. Too loud. Too alive. “The hotel… things have been complicated.”
That was an understatement of epic proportions.
I reached out and took his hand. His fingers were cold, limp, unresponsive. Nothing like the firm handshake he’d used to greet business partners, the warm grip he’d squeeze my shoulder with when I was young and had done something to make him proud.
“I met someone.” The words came out before I could stop them.
“Or, I guess you already know him. Raphael Volkov. He’s the one who…
” I trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.
The one who bought our debt. The one who owns me now.
The one who does things to me in the dark that would make you disown me if you knew.
“He’s not what I expected.” I stared at our joined hands, at the IV line snaking into his papery skin. “He’s dangerous. I know that. Everyone knows that. But there’s something underneath all that control, Dad. Something broken that recognizes the broken parts of me.”
The monitor beeped. Steady. Unchanging.
“I think I’m falling for him.” My voice cracked on the admission.
“Which is insane, right? He owns our debt. He has all the power. I signed a contract to…” I couldn’t say it.
Not here. Not to my father, even if he couldn’t hear me.
“But when he looks at me, I feel seen. Really seen. Not as Richard Hughes’s daughter or the hotel’s emergency manager or the girl who failed her way through college. Just me.”
I squeezed his hand, wishing he would squeeze back. Wishing he would wake up and tell me I was being foolish, that I needed to protect myself, that men like Raphael Volkov consumed women like me and left nothing but ashes behind.
Or maybe I wished he would tell me it was okay. That sometimes love found you in the darkest places. That surrendering didn’t have to mean losing yourself.
“The doctors say you might still wake up.” My thumb traced circles on the back of his hand. “I need you to wake up, Dad. I need you to meet him. I need you to tell me if I’m making the biggest mistake of my life or if…”
Or if this was real. If what I felt when Raphael held me was the beginning of something rather than the end.
The machines beeped on, offering no answers.
I stayed for another hour, telling him about the hotel renovations, about Sophie’s latest romantic disaster, about anything that didn’t involve contracts and collars and the dark hunger in Raphael’s eyes.
When I finally left, kissing his forehead the way I used to when I was young, he still hadn’t moved.
The drive back to the hotel felt longer than the drive there.
The afternoon crawled by slowly.
I tried to focus on the operations reports Michael had left on my desk.
Revenue projections. Occupancy rates. The dry mathematics of running a hotel that had been in my family for five generations.
Numbers should have been safe. Numbers didn’t make my stomach flutter or my mind wander to the way Raphael’s hands felt on my waist, the way his body heat soaked through my clothes when he held me close.
My fingers found the collar again. I’d been doing that constantly, touching the delicate chain like a talisman, tracing the small diamond where it rested in the hollow of my throat.
Sophie had called it an “expensive necklace” when she’d first seen it, but something in her eyes had suggested she knew better.
Knew what it meant when a man put jewelry around a woman’s neck and looked at her like she belonged to him.
A knock at my door pulled me from the spreadsheet I hadn’t actually been reading. The numbers blurred together, meaningless, because all I could think about was that rich, masculine scent and the rough scrape of his jaw against my cheek.
“Come in.”
Sophie slipped through the door, carrying two cups of coffee from the lobby café.
The rich, dark scent filled my office, steadying me slightly.
She set one on my desk and settled into the chair across from me with the easy familiarity of someone who’d known me since I was a child sneaking cookies from the kitchen, hiding under the prep tables while the line cooks pretended not to see me.
“You’re glowing.”
I choked on my first sip, coffee burning my tongue. “What?”
“You.” She gestured at me with her cup, manicured nails catching the light. “Glowing. Like someone who’s getting very thoroughly f—”
“Sophie.”
“Loved,” she finished, innocent as anything. “Very thoroughly loved. That’s what I was going to say.”
I could feel the blush spreading up my neck, heating my cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Mm-hmm.” She sipped her coffee, watching me over the rim with those knowing eyes that had seen too much of my life to be fooled. “That’s why you’ve touched that necklace fourteen times since I sat down.”
I dropped my hand from my throat like I’d been burned.
“It’s complicated,” I said, which was the understatement of the century. Complicated didn’t begin to cover what Raphael and I were. Complicated didn’t explain the contract or the collar or the way I’d learned to find freedom in surrender.