Chapter 29
Damien
Everything vanishes as Lidiya stares into my eyes, hers pooling with tears of frustration and disbelief. “We will figure this out,” I murmur, running my thumb over her bottom lip.
She leans into my hand. Not much. Just enough that I feel the weight of her surrender against my palm, and it does something to me that no amount of vodka or violence has ever managed. It quiets the noise.
“I don’t know who I am anymore,” she says, and the rawness of it strips the air between us down to nothing. No pretence. No armour. Just a woman sitting in the back of a car in a church car park, unravelling.
I slide my hand from her chin to the side of her neck, feeling her pulse kick against my fingers. Fast. Scared. Alive.
“You’re Lidiya,” I say, and I mean it with everything I have, which is more than I expected. “Whatever name they gave you, whatever name was taken from you, you are the woman sitting in front of me right now, stronger than I’ve ever seen. That’s who you are.”
A tear escapes down her cheek. She doesn’t wipe it. She lets it fall like she’s too exhausted to pretend it isn’t there, and something in my chest fractures along a fault line I didn’t know existed.
I catch it with my thumb. The tear is warm against my skin, and I hold it there for a second too long because touching her face feels like handling something sacred, and I am not a man built for sacred things.
“What if it’s true?” she asks, and her voice is so small it barely fills the space between us. “What if my whole life—everything I thought I knew—was just a cover story for a crime?”
“Then we burn the cover story and build something real.”
“You keep saying we.”
“I keep meaning it.”
Her eyes search mine, looking for the lie, the angle, the hidden clause. I let her look. I’ve got nothing to hide that she hasn’t already seen—the violence, the entitlement, the obsession dressed up as strategy. She’s seen the worst of me, and she’s still here, still breathing, still fighting.
“I’m not a good man, Lidiya,” I say, because she deserves at least that much honesty. “I’m not going to become one. But I am the man standing between you and whatever is coming, and I will not move.”
“You terrify me,” she whispers. “Not because of what you are. Because of how much I want to believe you.”
The confession lands somewhere between my ribs and stays there, lodged like a bullet I don’t want removed.
I close the distance between us. Not fast. Not aggressive.
I move the way you move toward something you don’t want to spook, something wild and wounded that might bolt if you breathe wrong.
My forehead touches hers, and the contact is electric—skin on skin, breath mingling, the world outside the tinted windows ceasing to exist.
“Then believe me,” I say against her mouth. “Just for today. Just for the next hour. You can go back to hating me tomorrow.”
“I don’t hate you,” she says, and the admission costs her something visible. Her face crumples for a fraction of a second before she rebuilds it, brick by brick, the way she’s been rebuilding herself her entire life. “That’s the problem. I should. God, I should.”
“What do you want, Lidiya? Right now?”
She pulls back and looks up at me, tears clinging to her lashes. “You.”
There isn’t a single thing in this world or beyond that could stop me. I crash my lips against hers, and she opens for me like she’s been holding her breath since the moment we met.
The kiss is nothing like the one in the car earlier. That was a test. A detonation charge set to see what would blow. This is the aftermath—the raw, scorched earth where nothing grows except need so acute it has teeth.
Her hands fist in my shirt, dragging me closer, and I go willingly because there is nowhere else in this city, this country, this miserable fucking planet that I want to be.
She tastes like salt from the tears and sweetness underneath, and I kiss her with a greed I’ve never felt for anything—not money, not power, not the particular thrill of watching a man realise he’s made a fatal mistake.
I haul her onto my lap. She comes without resistance, her knees bracketing my thighs, the white dress riding up until I can feel the heat of her against my rapidly stiffening cock.
My hands find her waist, her ribs, the dip of her spine where the fabric bunches, and every point of contact sends a current through me that rewires something I thought was permanently set.
She makes that sound again, small, involuntary, and this time I swallow it. Take it into my mouth and keep it, because it belongs to me now. Everything she gives me belongs to me, and I will guard it with the same ferocity I guard everything else, only more. So much more that it should frighten me.
She kisses me like she’s angry about it. Like every press of her mouth is a punishment she’s also inflicting on herself. I take it. I take all of it. Her teeth catch my bottom lip, and I groan into her mouth, my hands tightening on her hips until I know I’m leaving marks through the fabric.
“Damien,” she breathes against my lips, and my name in her mouth is a weapon I never want to disarm.
I drag my mouth from hers and down the line of her jaw.
She tilts her head back, and I press my lips to the hollow of her throat where her pulse hammers like it’s trying to break free.
I feel it against my mouth—the rapid, frantic beat of a woman who’s choosing to fall instead of fighting the gravity.
Her hips shift against me, and I stifle the groan as my cock jerks, wanting to be inside her.
Sliding my hands under the dress, I hook my fingers into her panties and pull them aside.
She moans softly as I tease her, pressing her pussy against me, begging me to touch her.
She’s soaked. The slick heat of her coats my fingers the second I slide them through her folds, and the sound she makes is a desperate, fractured noise that vibrates through her body.
“Look at me,” I say, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. It’s wrecked. Stripped back to something raw that I don’t recognise, and I don’t care.
She lifts her head, and her eyes are glassy, flushed, ruined.
I circle her clit with my thumb, slow, deliberate, and her mouth falls open on a gasp that fogs the air between us. Her fingers dig into my shoulders hard enough to bruise. I want them. I want every mark she’s willing to leave.
I slide a finger inside her, and her whole body clenches. Tight. Hot. So wet, the obscene sound of it fills the back seat like a confession.
“Fuck,” she whispers, and the word is a prayer, not profanity.
I add a second finger and curl them forward, finding the spot that makes her thighs clamp against me. Her back arches, pressing her breasts against me.
“Take me, Damien,” she pants. “Right here, in front of God. Make me know who I am.”
The growl that rips from my throat is feral as I unzip my pants.
She lifts herself just enough to give me room, and I free myself with one hand while the other stays buried inside her, refusing to stop, refusing to let the pleasure break even for a second.
She looks down between us, and her breath catches at the sight of me, hard, thick, and the way her lips part makes me want to destroy something beautiful just to feel this again.
I withdraw my fingers, and the loss makes her whimper. I grip her hip with my slick hand, positioning her, and the head of my cock slides through her wetness, nudging against her entrance. The heat alone nearly undoes me.
Her breath hitches.
“Say it again,” I tell her.
“Take me.”
I pull her down onto me in one slow, devastating stroke.
The sound she makes is guttural, torn from somewhere deep, and my vision whites out for a second as her pussy sheathes me to my balls. She’s tight. So fucking tight, so fucking wet for me.
“Say my name,” I murmur, my hand going around her throat. “Say my name so everyone knows who is fucking you, so they all know who you belong to.”
“Damien,” she gasps, and the sound of it reverberates through the car, through my bones, through every defence I’ve spent thirty years constructing.
“Louder, solnyshko. God didn’t hear you.”
“Damien!” she cries, soaking my cock as her pussy clamps down on me in a possessive move that thrills me.
I tighten my grip on her throat. Not enough to hurt. Enough to feel the vibration of my name leaving her body, passing through my palm like a current I want to bottle and keep.
She rolls her hips, and the friction is blinding.
I grit my teeth so hard my jaw aches, fighting the urge to slam her down and take what I want, because this isn’t about me.
This is about her. This is about a woman who’s had everything stolen—her name, her history, her safety, her dignity—and is choosing, right now, in the back of a car in a church car park, to take something back.
I let her set the pace. It costs me. Every slow, grinding roll of her hips is exquisite torture, her body rising and falling on me in a rhythm that’s unhurried, deliberate, like she’s memorising the shape of me inside her.
Her hands move from my shoulders to my face, her palms cupping my jaw, and she holds me there while she rides me, forcing me to look at her, forcing me to see her.
I see more than she knows.
I see the tears still drying on her cheeks. The flush spreads down her neck and across her collarbones. The way her lips are swollen from kissing me and parted around breaths that come shorter and sharper as she gets closer.
“Don’t stop,” she whispers, and it’s not a command. It’s a plea wrapped in steel, and I give her what she needs.
I thrust upward, meeting her rhythm, and the car rocks on its suspension. My hand stays on her throat, her pulse a wild, staccato drumbeat against my fingers. The other grips her hip hard enough to leave bruises that I want to see tomorrow, purple and possessive against her pale skin.
She tightens around me, her cunt gripping my cock like a vice, milking me with each pulse.
My vision narrows to her face, to her lips parted, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed with the filthy pleasure of fucking me in a church car park.
Sweat beads at her hairline as she grinds down harder, taking me deeper, her body demanding everything I have while the leather seat beneath us creaks with our sin.
I move my hand from her throat to pull her hair free of the hairband. It tumbles around her, and I tangle my fingers in it, tugging roughly as she cries out.
Her orgasm hits like a wave crashing into a seawall.
Her entire body seizes, back arching, fingers clawing at my jaw, and the cry that tears out of her is my name again—fractured, desperate, holy in a way that has no business existing between two people like us.
Her pussy contracts around me in rhythmic pulses that drag me to the edge and hold me there, dangling over an abyss I’ve never wanted to fall into before.
I let go.
The release tears through me with a violence that has everything to do with surrender. I spill into her with a groan that comes from somewhere primal, somewhere I’ve kept locked and guarded my entire life, and the sound of it fills the car like a confession I can never take back.
She collapses against me. Her forehead drops to my collarbone, her breath ragged and hot against my neck, her body still trembling with aftershocks that ripple through her and into me.
I don’t move. I hold her there, one hand in her hair, the other splayed across her lower back, and I let the silence settle over us like ash after a fire.
The car windows are fogged. The church spire is a grey smudge beyond the glass, and somewhere out there, Kirill is walking a perimeter he doesn’t need to walk, giving us time he knows I’ll never acknowledge needing.
Her breathing slows. Mine doesn’t.
Because something just shifted, and I felt it happen, and I can’t undo it.
This wasn’t strategy. This wasn’t a calculated move to bind her closer.
This was me, stripped of every justification I’ve been hiding behind since the moment I saw her on that stage, and what’s left is something I don’t have a word for.
Something that feels a lot like the thing I’ve spent my entire life avoiding.
Vulnerability.
Her fingers trace the scratch she left on my cheek earlier, the dried line of it still stinging, and the tenderness of the gesture after the ferocity of what we just did cracks something open that I don’t know how to close.
She pulls back and tries to get off my lap.
I stop her. I grip her wrists painfully tight, but she doesn’t flinch.
“Don’t,” I say, and I don’t know what I’m telling her not to do. Don’t be gentle. Don’t look at me like I’m something worth saving. Don’t make me feel this when I need to think clearly because there’s a dead man walking who wants to take you from me.
“Don’t what?” she murmurs against my neck.
“Don’t try to leave.”
“Or what?”
“You don’t want me to answer that.” My voice drops an octave, rough-edged as a knife against stone. Her pupils dilate, a quick black flood against blue, and her pulse jumps visibly beneath the delicate skin of her throat where my fingerprints still linger.
“Maybe I do,” she breathes, and the words are a dare. A lit match held over petrol.
But she doesn’t try to move again. Instead, she settles deeper into my lap, and I’m still inside her, softening but unwilling to withdraw from the heat of her body.
The intimacy of it is obscene. This. Us.
The after. The quiet where two people sit tangled together and can’t pretend they don’t feel what they feel.
I release her wrists. Slowly. Watching the red marks bloom where my fingers were, and the sight of them does something sick and satisfied to the part of me that wants to mark everything I touch.
She doesn’t rub them. She leaves them to look at later.
“We can’t stay here,” she says eventually. Practical. Grounded. As if she didn’t just come apart on my cock, screaming my name at the Almighty.
“We can stay as long as I want.”
“The windows are fogged. We’re in a church car park. Your man is walking circles outside like a secret service agent who drew the short straw.”
“Kirill’s fine. He’s had worse assignments.”
“Worse than being forced to walk around while his boss fucks someone in the backseat of the car?”
“Significantly worse.” I brush her hair behind her ear. “But never this.”
“Liar,” she whispers.
“I’m many things, Lidiya, but I’m not a liar.”
She searches my eyes for a moment, but I don’t know if she finds what she’s looking for because she climbs off me, and this time I let her.