Chapter 16
Lidiya
Iwake to the smell of him.
It takes me a full five seconds to understand where I am, and when I do, the understanding arrives not as a single realisation but as a series of small, horrible detonations. His pillow. His duvet. The mattress that has cradled my body like I’m something precious rather than something purchased.
I’m in Damien Voronov’s bed.
I sit up so fast the blood rushes from my head, and the room tilts. Predawn light filters through the window, and I blink.
The bedroom is still. The door hangs at an angle from where he kicked it in. Beyond it, the hallway is silent. No voices. No movement. No bleach smell, though maybe that’s just distance or my nose adjusting.
I look down at myself. Still in the dress. Still in the cardigan. The belt has twisted around my waist during the night, digging into my ribs, and I loosen it with stiff fingers. The tape on the hem has come partially undone, and a strip of it hangs like a white flag of surrender.
Appropriate. My dress surrendered before I did.
I swing my legs off the bed and wince. Every muscle in my body has seized overnight, the kind of deep, bone-level stiffness that comes from hours of tension held in the foetal position.
My feet hit the carpet, and the softness of it is an insult.
Everything in this house is an insult—the thread count of the sheets, the weight of the duvet, the fact that I slept better in a murderer’s bed than I ever have on my own mattress.
Not a murderer. He killed men who came to take me.
The distinction shouldn’t matter.
It does.
I stand and catch my reflection in the full-length mirror opposite the bed.
The sight is brutal. Mascara has tracked down my cheeks in dark rivulets, dried into streaks that make me look like a raccoon who’s been through a divorce.
My hair, which looked passably decent last night, has flattened on one side and tangled into a bird’s nest on the other.
The dress is creased beyond salvation, the tape dangling, the belt askew.
I look like I crawled out of a skip and into a five-star hotel.
I scrub at the mascara with my sleeve and manage to smear it into a wider, more democratic distribution across my face.
The en-suite calls to me. His en-suite, with its enormous walk-in shower and, in the morning light, a double vanity unit with a rainfall showerhead the size of a dinner plate.
Bottles line the shelf inside—expensive things with names I can’t pronounce and labels in minimalist fonts designed to make you feel inadequate for using supermarket shampoo.
I hesitate. Using his shower feels like crossing a line. But the mascara situation is dire, and I can smell my own stress sweat through the cardigan, and if I’m going to face him this morning, I’d rather do it without looking like I lost a fight with a chimney.
I lock the bathroom door. Then I strip off, leaving everything in a pile on the heated bathroom floor and step into the shower.
The water hits me like absolution. Hot and immediate and relentless, nothing like the thirty-second window of lukewarm I get at home before the pipes give up.
I stand under it with my palms flat against the tile and let it pound the tension out of my neck, my shoulders, the knots between my shoulder blades that have been there so long I’d forgotten they weren’t supposed to be.
I use his shampoo. It smells like him, and the scent wraps around me with a familiarity that makes my stomach do something complicated. This is what his pillow smelled like. This is what surrounded me all night while I slept in his bed like it was the safest place on earth.
I wash my hair twice because I can, because the hot water doesn’t stop, because for once in my life there’s enough of something and I’m going to take it.
By the time I rinse it out the second time, my hair feels like it belongs to someone else.
Someone who eats three meals a day and doesn’t cry in bathtubs.
I turn the water off and stand there, dripping, staring at the tile.
The silence of the bathroom is different from the silence of my bedsit.
That silence is empty—the absence of things I can’t afford.
This silence is full. Heavy with marble and money and the lingering presence of a man who terrifies me in ways I can’t neatly categorise anymore.
I step out and grab the nearest towel from a heated rail.
It’s the size of a bedsheet and softer than anything I’ve ever owned.
I wrap it around myself and catch sight of the pile of clothes on the floor.
The dress. The cardigan. The cheap bra. The underwear I’ve washed so many times, the elastic is about to give up.
I can’t put those back on. I physically cannot. Not after this shower, not after this towel, not in this house, this mansion, in Belgravia, where women are perfectly put together with their millions of pounds and kale smoothies.
But that leaves me with no options. I can’t walk out of here in just this towel. Or can I? Maybe it would look better than the dress.
Sighing, I grab another towel and squeeze my hair, drying it as much as I can before I open the bathroom door and freeze when I see Damien standing in front of the huge wardrobe, pulling out a black tee.
“Here,” he says without any pleasantries. “It will do until I can get you something sent over.”
“Sent over?” I ask, staring at the item of his clothing that he wants me to put on.
“Sent over,” he repeats, like I’ve asked him to explain gravity. “Clothes. From a shop. To this address. It’s a service that exists for people who don’t want to leave the house to buy things.”
“I know what sent over means. I’m asking why.”
He turns to face me fully, and I clutch the towel tighter because his gaze does a sweep—heated, brief, thorough enough that warmth crawls up my neck.
His eyes are clear, alert. If he slept at all, it doesn’t show.
He’s already dressed in dark trousers, white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled to the forearm, exposing ink that crawls up both arms in patterns I refuse to study.
His hair is damp. He’s showered elsewhere, which means he’s been awake long enough to use another bathroom, get dressed, and lay out clothes for me before I even got my shit together.
“Because I can.”
“I didn’t ask for your charity.”
“No one said you did.”
He tosses the tee onto the bed and then stands there. Not leaving.
“A bit of privacy?” I snap.
The wicked curve of his lips does things to my insides that are clouding my judgement. Part of me wants him to stand there while I drop the towel. That part terrifies me more than knowing he is a killer.
Instead of leaving, he moves closer and scoops up the tee. He stops in front of me. “Hold up your arms.”
“What?”
“If you want help getting dressed, Lidiya, just say so.”
“I don’t—”
“Hold up your arms, solnyshko.”
The command in the tone is impossible to refuse. I do as he says, lifting both arms above my head. Something treacherous and warm unfurls low in my stomach at the proximity of him.
He slides the tee over my head with a gentleness that has no business existing in hands that killed three men last night.
The fabric falls past my thighs, soft and worn and carrying his scent like a second skin.
His knuckles graze my skin as he tugs the collar into place, and the contact sends a jolt through me that I feel in my teeth.
I drop my arms. The towel is still wrapped around my body beneath the shirt, and I yank it free, letting it fall to the floor between us. The tee covers me to mid-thigh. I’m standing in Damien Voronov’s bedroom wearing nothing but his t-shirt and a rapidly deteriorating sense of self-preservation.
“There,” he says, his voice lower than it was a moment ago.
His eyes hold mine, and there’s something in them I haven’t seen before—not the calculating assessment from the café, not the controlled menace from the auction.
Something raw. Hungrier. Something he’s choosing not to act on, and the restraint of it is somehow more dangerous than if he’d just kissed me.
I step back, my legs hitting the bed, and I realise how easily he could lay me down and ravage me.
“Breakfast,” I say, because it’s the only word I can find that doesn’t involve begging him to fuck me so hard, I’ll forget about everything that has happened in the last twelve hours.
He holds my gaze for one more second, and then the hunger banks behind something controlled and familiar.
He steps back, and the air between us rushes in to fill the space like it’s been holding its breath too.
“Breakfast,” he confirms. “Downstairs. Five minutes.”
He turns and walks out without looking back, and I stand there in his t-shirt with my pulse hammering, my thighs pressed together, and my brain screaming at me to get a grip.
I don’t get a grip. I sit on the edge of the bed and press my palms against my face until the heat in my cheeks subsides to something manageable.
Then I breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
The way you do when you’re trying not to have a complete and total breakdown in a Bratva billionaire’s bedroom while wearing his clothes and nothing else.
My stomach growls its protest at not being filled again after the feast last night.
I want to ignore it because getting used to something that will vanish the second I step out of this house is possibly worse than the idea of staying here and hiding out in his bed forever.
But that is not an option. I need to fuel up to keep my wits about me.
It’s strategic, even if it’s dangerous to my mental state.
I stand up and walk barefoot across the carpet, pausing at the doorway. The hallway looks different in the morning light. Less like a crime scene corridor, more like the interior of a very expensive hotel where someone forgot to fix the door.