Vadim
The meeting had been running for two hours. The port authority contact had been managed, the northern route adjustments confirmed, the remaining Tolam associates accounted for. Everything that needed resolving had been resolved with the efficiency I expected from these men.
I was no longer thinking about any of it.
The meeting was winding down when I sent Iskra the message.
Me: Be naked and ready in twenty-four minutes.
Delivered.
I tapped the table once.
Read.
I waited.
No response. No bubbles to indicate she was composing one. Just the grey tick and the timestamp and the silence of a woman who had received an instruction and was apparently deciding what to do about it.
“Pakhan?”
I glanced up. Everyone was looking at me. My eyes settled on Konstantin first—the fucker knew, it was written across his face—then moved to Bogdan, who had developed a sudden intense interest in the middle distance and didn’t have the decency to meet my eye.
“You seem occupied, brat,” Konstantin murmured. “Anything on your mind?”
“Anything you’d like to share with the group?” Valentin said, reading the room with the precision he brought to everything.
“Any tips, perhaps.” Ruslan added, a smirk barely contained behind his glass.
I stood with great dignity.
“Yob tvoyu mat,” I said, calmly and without heat, and straightened my tie.
No one was offended that I told them to fuck their mothers. They simply laughed.
I snapped my fingers at Bogdan and walked out.
The night air hit me as I stepped outside—cold, carrying the smell of the river and cigarette smoke and Chernograd doing what it always did after dark.
Tikhon had the car at the kerb. Konstantin appeared in the doorway of the club behind me, lighting up, and I flipped him off without turning around. His laughter followed me to the car.
“Where to, Pakhan?” Tikhon asked, with precisely the wrong amount of innocence.
Bogdan punched his shoulder. “Home.”
I checked my phone as the car pulled away.
Still no response.
I looked at the two imbeciles in the front and decided against calling Radovan directly. I messaged him instead.
Me: What is she doing?
Radovan: Cooking.
I frowned at the screen.
Me: Why?
There was a cook in my house for a reason.
Radovan: I don’t know. Sorry. Shall I ask her?
Me: Never mind.
If she was still in the kitchen by the time I got home, there would be hell to pay. The memory of her insolence was still fresh in my mind.
??
??
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Spartak was cleaning his gun in the hallway when I got home. With a flick of my wrist Bogdan and Tikhon moved on.
“Where is she?” I murmured.
Spartak lowered the barrel and pointed toward the kitchen with his thumb.
“Kitchen, Pakhan,” he said, but I was already walking.
Radovan was in the doorway, straightening when he saw me approach.
“I tried to tell her—”
“Leave,” I said, cutting him off. “Don’t let anyone into the kitchen.” I handed him my coat without breaking stride.
I smelled it before I saw her.
Baked bread and sweet fruit—the warmth of the oven rolling out into the hallway, domestic and entirely out of place in my house. I stopped in the doorway.
Iskra was bent over the oven, pulling a tray of pirozhki out with both hands. She set it on the counter and began transferring them to a cooling rack with her oven mitts, working with the focused concentration of someone who had no idea she was being watched.
Her hair was piled high on her head, a few strands escaping at the nape of her neck. The russet sweater had slid off one shoulder. My eyes moved down to the black Lycra that clung to every curve below it.
She had been cooking in my kitchen in her off-shoulder sweater and form-fitting leggings, apparently indifferent to the message sitting on her phone.
She glanced at that phone now, sitting on the counter beside her.
“Damn,” she muttered to herself.
I smiled.
Too late.
I reached past her and slapped the oven door shut. It sprang up with a sharp crack and she startled hard, spinning around.
“Wait,” she said, one hand raised between us.
I waited.
Her eyes moved behind me—calculating, assessing, measuring the distance to the door.
Then she ran.
I lunged sideways and hooked my arm around her waist, hauling her back against my chest before she made it two steps.
“Why must you insist on disobedience?” I murmured into her hair.
“Vadim,” she breathed my name in a single syllable.
“Da?” I asked, slipping my hands beneath her sweater.
I glanced at the ceiling when my hands made an unexpected discovery.
No bra.
“I got carried away,” she said, her voice losing its steadiness as I toyed with her nipples. “The dough had risen. I thought I had time—”
“It’s all right, Iskra.” I kept my voice entirely reasonable. “I’m a fair man.”
Her snort was immediate and unrestrained.
“Since you couldn’t make it to your bedroom,” I continued, tugging her sweater over her head in one motion, “the kitchen will have to do.”
“Oh. Nyet,” she gasped, and dropped into a crouch with both arms crossed over her breasts, as though the kitchen floor offered some kind of sanctuary.
I dragged her upright to face the kitchen window, pulling her hands away from her chest and holding them at her sides.
“If only there had been a way for you to communicate your commitment to your pirozhki,” I murmured, peeling her leggings down her thighs.
“Vadim, please,” she begged.
I crouched down and worked them the rest of the way, past her calves, until she had no choice but to grip the countertop and step out of them one foot at a time.
I straightened up and looked at her—bare from the neck down, facing the window, the late evening light catching the curve of her shoulders and the bruise still visible on her neck.
Mine.
“Kneel down and make it up to me,” I said.
Another groan. But her eyes went to the kitchen window—the grounds beyond it, the night pressing against the glass—and whatever she saw there or imagined there had her dropping to her knees quickly enough. She turned to face me.
I grabbed the messy bun on top of her head and dragged her face across my crotch, feeling her cheek rub against my straining cock through the fabric.
“Now this is how I expect to see you the next time I message you,” I said, and released her hair. “Lick my cock through my trousers. You need to earn it tonight.”
Her eyes widened. The black of her pupils swelled, darkening those blue eyes until there was barely any colour left. She blinked once, then dropped her gaze to the bulge in my trousers.
“Go on,” I said lazily, reaching down to cup her breast. “Earn some cock.”
Her tongue snuck out. Tentative at first—the tip of it tracing the outline of me through the fabric, learning the shape of what she was working toward.
I released her breast and leaned back against the counter.
The kitchen smelled of her pirozhki cooling on the rack behind me, sweet fruit and warm bread, entirely at odds with what was happening on the floor in front of me. The domesticity of it was almost amusing.
I watched her humiliate herself and said nothing.
She inched closer, licked harder, moving her tongue up and down my length while her fingers curled into my trousers for balance.
A warm blush bloomed from her chest and rushed up to her cheeks as she worked her way down.
Her mouth opened wide and she attempted to suck on my balls through the fabric.
It wasn’t the move that bothered me.
No.
It was the defiance in her eyes. That quiet, unbroken strength looking up at me from the kitchen floor, doing exactly what she had been told and somehow making it feel like a victory for her. Taunting me without saying a word.
I unbuckled my belt and pulled it slowly from the waistband, keeping my expression neutral. She didn’t stop. She sucked harder, emboldened, her eyes bright with something that looked very much like triumph.
She thought she had won.
The victory sparkled in those blue eyes—mischievous, satisfied, entirely too pleased with herself for a woman on her knees in my kitchen.
I looped the belt through the buckle.
And then I looped it around her neck.
The brightness in her eyes changed quality immediately.
I smiled.
And tightened the leather around her neck.