Chapter Twenty-One
It happened again. We fucked.
I hadn’t meant to lose control the way I did. But it was as though there was something about him that pulled me in like a moth to a flame. I had tried to resist him, but I failed woefully in my attempt.
Why was I so attracted to the man who was responsible for changing the trajectory of my life? Why did I find him so irresistible despite how much I claimed to hate him?
Why did his touch always ignite a fire within me—one I usually had no control over? He told me what was going to happen if I didn’t push him away. Yet, I refused to do that. I refused to reject him, knowing full well that he’d definitely leave me alone if I did.
I was already turned on at the time, and all I wanted was to feel him deep inside me again. My craving for him clouded my judgment. And although a part of me felt guilty for making the same mistake twice, the other part was glad that I did.
Rodion’s magical touch breathed life into every dead cell in my body, a reminder that sex with him was more therapeutic than I would ever admit. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed his kisses and caresses until I was in his arms again.
I couldn’t understand what had come over me—what had prompted me to go down on him and take his dick in my mouth. Despite my shame and guilt, I couldn’t deny the fact that I enjoyed every moment of it.
Deep down, I felt the need to repay him for the service of making me come with just oral sex. I wanted to prove that I was also good with my mouth and my hands.
But why? Why did I feel the urge to prove myself to the man who kidnapped me and had me locked up in his mansion? Why did I allow myself to get lost in the heat of the moment?
I had sucked his dick with everything in me, hoping that my skills would please him. The sound of his guttural groans, the expressions on his face, and the way his muscles contrasted told me I’d done a fantastic job.
An inexplicable sense of satisfaction washed over me when I made him come with just my hands and my mouth. Watching him shudder as he ejaculated made my pussy tingle and nipples hard.
Sliding his hard, veiny cock into my wet entrance was more satisfying than the meal I’d had earlier that evening. I felt it deep inside me. So fuckin’ deep. He fondled my boobs like an experienced man who knew the exact amount of pressure to apply when squeezing a woman’s breasts for pleasure.
He let me ride that night, let me take the lead as he surrendered beneath me. I was in control of the whole thing, including the timing of his arrival.
I recalled how much he’d struggled to hold back his release after I asked him not to come yet. His face was a mask of pleasure, and his legs were already shaking, ready to fill me up. But I wasn’t there yet, and he had to wait.
As small as it was, it was a sign of selflessness—proof that he didn’t care only about satisfying himself. He had my satisfaction at heart as well.
I’d watched him hold it back in, his face twisted in a way that exposed his struggles. Still, his eyes bored into mine, and I savored every expression he wore.
Rodion didn’t come until after my dam shattered. And while my body was trembling with ecstasy, he finally let go, shooting his load deep into my pussy. My waist was glued to his groin, his eyes locked to mine in a moment that would later define the course of our relationship.
While his essence filled me up completely, my squirt spilled over his cock as we climaxed together. The feeling was like nothing I’d ever felt—warm and intense in a way that stole both our breaths.
I wasn’t supposed to let him cum in me again, but I couldn’t help it. Besides, there’s a good chance that I was pregnant already.
Speaking of pregnancy, I was nearing my due date for my period, meaning sooner or later I’d know my fate.
The more I tried to focus on something important, like how to convince Rodion to let go, or what I’d do if I were truly pregnant with his child, the more I thought about fucking him. Over and over again.
One thing was certain to me now: I was becoming addicted to him. To his dick, his touch, and his kisses. Whenever he touched me, I always felt alive and satisfied, as if I’d been starving without even realizing it.
With him, I felt like a woman whose body was cherished and adored.
The man might be the devil himself, but at least he knew how to please me.
He was always attentive to what I craved during sex.
He didn’t only explore my body when he got the chance; he also listened to the things I never said out loud.
Slowly, Rodion Tarasov was starting to consume my every thought, making me consider things that I usually wouldn’t.
What if staying here wasn’t such a bad idea after all? He clearly didn’t have any plans to kill me or to let me go. What if, instead of hating him—something I was already failing at anyway—I tried to convince him to bend his rules?
Whatever was going on between us, the feeling seemed to be mutual. So maybe instead of fighting him, I could take a more subtle approach and hope for the best.
Maybe, if I played my cards right, I might make it out of this one piece.
***
Later that day, in a bid to clear my head, I went to the one place in the mansion where I knew I could find some kind of knowledge. The library. It was the only place that didn’t seem like a trap.
Everything else—the dining room with its formal table and its candlelight, the corridors with their closed doors and their implicit boundaries, even the bedroom—all of it carried the particular weight of a space designed to contain rather than to welcome. Including the enormous living room.
But the library somehow felt different. It was as though the space had its own logic, and that was the closest thing to breathing room I’d found in the four days I’d been here.
That was right, four days. Four days that felt like four months.
I spent most of my time here, especially when I wanted to get away from my own thoughts and my new reality.
Not because I’d run out of ways to be angry, but because anger without direction was just noise. And noise without purpose had never been something I could sustain for long before the journalist in me overrode everything else and demanded I do something useful with my hands.
He’d returned my laptop the day after the sex in my room. Not my phone—he kept it confiscated.
Deep down, I couldn’t help thinking I’d blown and ridden him so well that he felt the need to compensate me.
The laptop was brought to my room by a staff member who introduced herself as Yelena. Tall. Lean. Dark hair and hazel eyes. Pretty too. She spoke English; her voice was thick with the Russian accent.
“Miss Bennett.” She walked inside, holding what looked an awful lot like my laptop. “The boss asked me to bring this to you.”
My eyes widened in shock as I jumped out of bed and rushed over to her. “Are you serious?”
She nodded, handing it over.
I accepted it.
It included a note stating that the network and certain files were restricted.
I had a feeling the handwriting was his—neat, slanted like a carefully crafted signature.
As disappointing as that was, I could still work with it.
Rodion didn’t know this, but a few months ago, long before I even crossed paths with the Bratva, Jimmy hand-built me a secondary access protocol for exactly the kind of situation where I needed to get into something I shouldn’t.
After she delivered what she was told to deliver, she turned around, ready to leave.
“What’s your name?” I asked her. Not just because I was curious, but also because she seemed like someone whose help could come in handy later.
“Yelena,” she replied, wearing a courteous smile.
“I’m Aria.”
Yelena nodded, then avoided eye contact before exiting the room.
Earlier, I’d overheard her talking with two other maids about one of them possibly being pregnant. Yelena had said she had a couple of pregnancy strips in the cupboard in her room.
It was the closest thing to an accurate pregnancy test I could get under the radar. That’s why I thought her help would come in handy later. I knew I was definitely going to need her assistance.
I’d missed my period by two days now, and although it had been overshot by a few days several times in the past, I was almost certain this time was different. He came inside me twice, and I wasn’t on birth control both times. There was no way I wasn’t pregnant.
However, I’d have to get that strip later tonight and test my urine early tomorrow morning.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to get it from her. But I was going to figure something out.
At a table in the library, surrounded by towering shelves and the smell of old paper, I sat in silence, eyes fixed on my laptop screen.
I went through my research files, rebuilding the threads he’d deleted, filling the gaps from memory and from the photographs still archived in a cloud account routed through a server he apparently hadn’t thought to check.
I worked through the restored files for a long time before I found the thing I hadn’t been looking for.
It started with a name in a subsidiary record: a financial advisory group listed as a silent structural contributor to one of the older offshore entities in Rodion’s network. It predated the current holding architecture by nearly two decades.
The group itself had been dissolved, its records scattered across three different jurisdictions, the way things only get scattered when someone works deliberately to make them difficult to find.
I found them anyway, because finding things that didn’t want to be found was, at its core, the only skill I had ever fully trusted myself to possess.
Meridian Strategic Advisory Group. Not the freight company—a different Meridian entirely, older, cleaner on the surface, the kind of firm that described itself as a “boutique international compliance consultancy” in language designed to make eyes slide past it without catching.