9. Aleksandr
ALEKSANDR
Reprimand.
Boundaries.
Control.
The words had looped repeatedly through my head the entire drive back.
I told myself on the drive that tonight would be different. That I would remind her that lines exist between us for a reason. Crossing them has consequences, even for the woman who has somehow managed to slip past every defense I’ve spent forty years building.
I’ve handled men twice her size with less thought than this. Broken defiance in boardrooms, back rooms, and on the floors of blood-soaked warehouses. Bent it, redirected it, turned it into something useful for me to wield when necessary. Power is simple when you understand its mechanics.
Yet the second I found myself slipping into her room, I should have known better. Her sitting up in bed with the sheets tangled around her waist, silk nightgown slipping off one shoulder, hair a dark spill across pale skin, had every rehearsed word evaporating on my tongue.
She hadn’t flinched when she saw me. She had simply watched me with those too-perceptive eyes, chin tilting in that way of hers that told me she knew exactly what she was doing to me.
There had been no fear reflecting back at me in those dark honey-brown eyes.
Just a quiet, burning challenge I’d learned to crave.
All the carefully constructed discipline I rehearsed on the drive home vanished the moment she reached for me and pulled me closer.
Desire overrides judgment so quickly it almost feels almost like instinct.
By the time my brain catches up with reality I’m already kissing her, hard and deep with one hand fisting in her hair to angle her head exactly where I want it, the other sliding around her waist, fingers splaying across the curve of her spine as I haul her against me to erase every inch of space she thought she had.
She moans into my mouth, the sound soft and needy.
It punches through me with the force of a bullet, snapping the last thread of restraint I thought I still possessed.
Her hips arch up to meet mine, rolling in a desperate, instinctual motion that sends heat spearing down my spine and straight to my cock.
Her nails dig hard into my shoulders as if she’s torn between clinging to me and pushing me away.
I hold her down. A firm, unmistakable reminder of who is in control.
I expected her to fight back. To shove, scream at me, scratch at my face and curse my name.
Hell, there’s still a part of me braced for her to swing at me again the moment clarity returns and she realizes where this is heading.
The resistance that tells me she’d rather die than bend to what I know we both want.
I would almost welcome it because that’s what makes her so different. That’s what makes her mine to ruin if I ever choose to.
A dark, vicious satisfaction unfurls in my chest when she squeezes my waist with her thighs, using my body as a conduit to chase her own pleasure when she grinds her hips into mine again.
That alone is all the permission I need to keep going.
My lips part from hers with a wet sound.
I push back from her just enough to grab her wrists and pin them above her head.
Her silk nightgown rides up her thighs, baring her panties completely.
Her thighs part for me when she notices my attention locked onto her sex, revealing a thin strip of wetness soaking the fabric.
She laughs breathlessly. “You want this?”
My cock strains behind my fly. “Are you fishing for compliments, lyubimaya? You want me to tell you all the ways in which I plan to fill you? How badly I want to sink myself into that tight heat I know you’ve been hiding from me?”
Her breath stutters out of her.
I lower myself over her, pressing my weight down over her wrists with enough pressure to keep her in place without hurting her. The position opens her more beneath me, forces her to feel every inch of my length trapped inside my pants as I drag it over her rapidly soaking panties.
My mouth hovers dangerously close to hers as I murmur, “Is that what you want? Because I can show you exactly what you do to me.”
For a moment, she hesitates.
The entire world narrows to that breathless second where her body goes still beneath mine, her expression tightening with something like…
awareness. She’s smart, far smarter than she pretends to be.
She understands the weight of this moment and what crossing this line actually means.
She knows if she lets me take her now, everything between us will change irrevocably.
There will be no more pretending to hate me from a safe distance. No more sharp-tongued sparring masking the tension between us. Once I’m inside her, once she takes me willingly, her lies about wanting nothing to do with me will crumble just as fast as her restraint already has.
She knows that just as well as I do.
But even through her hesitation, I can feel the truth in her body. The way her thighs shake slightly while restraining from tightening back around my hips, the way her eyes darken with the same desire overriding my system, tells me all I need to know.
She may fear me but I know, without a shred of doubt she wants me more.
Her mouth parts hesitantly, the words clawing their way up from somewhere deep and forbidden inside her. “Aleks…”
My name, let alone a shortened version of it, breathed out in that softened, reluctant surrender makes my stomach flip. Her tongue flicks out to wet her lips and my gaze snaps to the movement, hunger tightening in my chest like a fist.
“…I want you.” She whispers.
I don’t give her time to take it back.
My hands are already moving, releasing her wrists only long enough to fist the thin silk at the neckline of her nightgown. With one sharp yank, the fabric tears straight down the front with a satisfying rip that makes her gasp.
The sound goes straight to my cock.
I don’t pause to admire the view. I’m too far gone for that at this point.
My mouth closes over her breast in the next heartbeat, tongue flicking across the already tight, rosy nipple before I suck it hard enough to border on punishing.
She squirms beneath me with a broken cry like she’s trying to feed more of herself into my mouth.
I bite down just enough to sting, leaving a faint red ring around the peak.
She keens, her fingers knotting painfully in my hair.
The other hand is already between her legs.
The silk of her panties is soaked when I hook two fingers beneath the edge and drag them roughly to the side. The realization that she’s this wet, this ready for me to fuck her after slapping me earlier pulls a low, animalistic groan from my throat.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
My fingers slide through her slick folds spreading them wide to tease her swollen clit with the lightest graze before I plunge two of them inside her without warning to the knuckle.
Her tight heat clamps down instantly, greedy as her walls flutter around the intrusion like it’s been waiting for me all night.
She cries out again, hips jerking up to meet my hand. Her nails rake over my scalp, pulling hard enough to burn. I don’t care. I curl my fingers inside her, stroking that spot inside her while my thumb finds her clit and grinds it in tight, merciless circles.
Her thighs tremble around my wrist, stomach quivering under mine where I’ve braced my body across her hers to hold her down.
I don’t let her escape the sensation. I work her ruthlessly until her cries turn fractured and her whole body locks tight.
She comes with a broken noise that echoes off the high ceiling.
Her walls pulse around my fingers in hard, rhythmic spasms. I keep stroking her through it, drawing it out while forcing every last little tremor from her until she’s whimpering and oversensitive against my palm.
“Please,” she begs, voice wrecked. “Aleks… please…”
Only then do I pull my hand free.
I lift my head from her breast. A red, wet ring marks the soft skin around her nipple where I’ve been sucking and claiming her.
She watches me with glassy, dazed eyes as I bring my soaked fingers to my mouth and lick them clean, never breaking eye contact.
Her pupils are blown so wide the color around them almost disappears completely.
I strip in seconds. Then I’m back on her, naked and hard, settling between her spread thighs like I belong there.
Because I do.
I notch myself at her entrance, the head of my cock resting there. I feel how slick and swollen she is from already coming. Her hole spasms, desperate to pull me in before I’ve even moved.
I thrust in with one brutal stroke.
Her nails score down my back, running over the fresh welts she left already.
The sting only makes me harder, sending a hard pulse down the length of my cock.
I don’t give her time to adjust to me and fuck her hard.
My thrusts are deep, relentless as each one bottoms out.
Our hips snap together with punishing force, both a reward and discipline for earlier.
Her legs wrap around my waist, her heels digging into the small of my back to urge me deeper even as she gasps and sobs beneath me.
“You belong to me, Katya,” I growl against the shell of her ear, my teeth grazing the sensitive lobe. “Say it.”
“I’m… I’m yours,” she gasps, voice fracturing on every brutal thrust.
“Louder.”
“Oh, fuck—yours!”
I shift my angle, grinding the base of my cock against her clit with every stroke, forcing her toward the edge again even as she’s still trembling from the first orgasm.
“You can test and fight me all you want. But you will always end up right here, Katya. Under me. Full from my cock. Marked by me. Dripping with me. Because that’s exactly where you fucking belong. ”
“Oh my god,” she chokes out, eyes rolling back in her head, her body starting to seize again.
I slam into her twice more, hard enough to bruise us both, and bury myself to the hilt as I come with a guttural groan that vibrates through both our bodies.
Her walls clench tightly around me, pulsing as she comes again.
Heat floods out of me in thick, endless spurts, filling her until I can feel it leaking out around my cock, slicking her thighs and the sheets beneath us.
I collapse on top of her, my strength momentarily gone. Only instinct and some shred of sanity keeps me from crushing her as I shift my weight onto one arm, bracing myself above her while my body still cages hers completely.
She breathes hard beneath me, chest rising against mine. She lifts a trembling hand, fingers tracing the line of my jaw with a softness I’m not prepared for. The touch trails upward, slipping into my hair, curling weakly around the strands like she isn’t ready to let me go yet.
We stay locked together like that for a long while.
I don’t pull out yet—I can’t. Not when she’s still fluttering around me in soft, helpless little aftershocks that make my breath shudder.
The instinct to stay inside her, to keep her close and anchor myself in the one place I shouldn’t but suddenly can’t leave is overwhelming.
I lower my head and rest my forehead against her shoulder, inhaling the faint scent of her skin, letting it soothe and unravel me in equal measure. She feels fragile under me in a way she never does when she’s standing across a room hurling insults or glowering at me.
Here, she feels… almost breakable.
Impossibly precious, even.
Neither of us speaks.
Realistically, there is nothing to say.
The cold war between us filled with barbed words, power struggles, and careful avoidance of what has simmered beneath the surface from the start has fallen into a temporary truce. A treaty sealed with a kind of surrender neither of us intended to give.
With the heat of her body pressed against me and my release still inside her, everything else feels… distant.
Irrelevant.
I tilt my head then, my lips brushing the warm, vulnerable place just beneath her jaw. I press a slow, open-mouthed kiss over her pulse point, feeling it jump against my tongue and tighten my teeth around it in a quiet claim—a promise, a threat, maybe. I’m not sure which anymore, maybe both.
She sighs contently under me.
A sudden truth descends over me, cracking through the sex-soaked haze.
For the first time since she walked into my life, I don’t know what I will do if Malyshko forces me to give her up.