Iskra
I lifted Runa from his bed with the cotton scarf wrapped around her arm, the excess material resting on her chest, and moved to transfer her into the cot.
Vadim took her from me before I could—lifting her with the careful confidence of a man who had been practising—and laid her on her back.
I watched as she snuggled into her blanket and settled back into sleep without protest.
I turned to leave.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he murmured.
I turned back, confused. This was the same routine we had followed for three weeks. Runa fed, Runa settled, I returned to the west wing.
“To bed?” I whispered.
He walked toward me. Slow. Deliberate.
I swallowed and stepped back without meaning to. He kept coming. I kept retreating, until my back met the door and there was nowhere left to go.
“Do you know how you can make amends, Iskra?” he murmured, lifting a strand of my hair and toying with it.
I shook my head.
“Give me back the time.”
Time?
“Pardon?”
His hand moved to my belly. His fingers spread slowly, deliberately, until his palm covered it entirely—the same gesture he had made a hundred times before, in a different life, in a different arrangement that had also not been my choice.
“The time this belly was full of Runa. The time she was due. The time she took her first breath of air in this world.”
“I—I have pictures,” I said, still confused, still trying to find the logic in what he was asking. How could anyone give that time back. It was gone. It had always been going to be gone.
“I want the real thing.” His fingers curled around my hip. “Another child. Another Runa. And this time I will be there from the beginning.”
I glanced past him.
The cot. The edge of Runa’s blanket visible above the rail. The small sounds of her sleeping.
Another child in his world.
I nibbled my lip.
“Or,” he said, his voice dropping to something conversational and therefore more dangerous, “once Runa is weaned, you can move back to your parents’ house.”
I inhaled sharply and shook my head.
“You owe me a child.”
“An heir, you mean?” I said unable to keep the bitterness from my voice.
He shrugged.
“There is always Konstantin.”
This was something new.
My eyes found Runa again—the edge of her blanket, the small rise and fall of her breathing, the only fixed point in a room that had just shifted beneath me.
I was stuck. I had always known it, somewhere beneath the hope of Istanbul and the suitcase that was always packed. He would hunt us down no matter what corner of the world I tried to hide in. He had proved that already. And I could never leave her—not voluntarily.
“Would you bring other women here while your daughter watched?” I asked.
His fingers bit into my hip.
Then loosened.
“It depends on whether her mother is being a bitch or not,” he growled.
“I’m not being a bitch by asking,” I whispered, urgent, low enough not to wake Runa. “I want to protect her from that. From all of it.”
He stared at me for a long moment—the cold assessment, the calculation, the quality of silence from a man deciding whether what he’s hearing is strategy or something he hadn’t anticipated.
“No,” he said finally. “I wouldn’t.”
The man had the emotional intelligence of a peanut—and that was being generous.
Perhaps I could adjust. Adjust enough to make the noose around my neck a little more palatable. Loosen it by degrees until breathing felt less like a concession.
My eyes found Runa.
I knew my answer. It wasn’t fair or just. But this was my life—the path my parents had placed me on, the contract that had somehow become a child asleep in a mahogany cot in the Pakhan’s bedroom.
Yet.
He hadn’t hesitated to place Runa in his room.
Most Russians did this when their children were born—it was simply what was done—but I could see beyond the cultural habit to something underneath it.
The tender way he held her. The patience he showed for her specifically, reserved entirely for her, entirely absent everywhere else.
He loved his daughter.
Whatever else he was—and he was many things, none of them simple—that was real.
“Then what choice do you leave me with?” I murmured.
The tension his body held relaxed beneath his T-shirt.
Fourteen months since Runa was conceived. Perhaps he had been counting too.
He planted one hand on the door beside my head.
The other found the waistband of my pyjamas and tugged them down.
Cool air hit my legs before he pressed his lips against my neck and inhaled—slow and deliberate, the way he did everything—and when his warm breath fanned across my neck and shoulder the shiver moved through my body before I could stop it.
His hands cupped my bare cheeks and he hoisted me up until I had no choice but to wrap my arms and legs around him. He grunted in satisfaction—the specific sound of a man who had been waiting and was done waiting—before turning and carrying me to the bed.
He glanced at Runa.
Then pulled the covers back and climbed on with me still clinging to him. He worked the tie at my waist and opened my top.
“I wanted to see these,” he said, tracing his fingers down my belly and sides. “The proof that this body carried my daughter.”
His hands parted my thighs. He glanced up with a smirk.
“I didn’t exactly have time to groom,” I mumbled, heat rising from my neck to my cheeks. “Runa keeps me rather busy.”
“I like it,” he said, and rose to pull his T-shirt off.
The white material fell somewhere and while he tugged his bottoms down I couldn’t help but admire the artwork of his tattoos and the hard muscle beneath them. I had forgotten how big he was beneath the suit. My eyes dropped lower.
His cock stood tall and proud, the tip already wet.
“You look as though you’ve missed it,” he mused, his voice low with amusement.
I averted my eyes. Too late. His low chuckle confirmed it.
“And these,” he said, and buried his face in my breasts.
His hands moved—pressing them together, finding every curve of them—and I felt his stubble and his lips and his warm breath all at once.
Not hurried. Not transactional. There was a reverence in the way he touched me that I couldn’t explain and wasn’t going to try to.
He had spent weeks lurking around us, staying for almost every feed, watching while sitting in his chair and his face giving nothing away.
His hot mouth clamped down on a nipple. He began to suck hard. Reminding me that before I became a mother, my body had needs.
Oh.
This was dangerous territory.