Chapter 32
Lidiya
Damien is staring at me in a way that makes my toes tingle in my expensive new boots.
It’s an intoxicating swirl of possessiveness, darkness and something I can’t name but feel in the marrow of my bones.
It’s the look of a man who has just been handed a weapon he didn’t know he needed and isn’t sure whether to wield it or worship it.
I don’t look away. I hold his gaze because I meant what I said, and meaning it terrifies me more than the blade in my boot or the blood drying on my temple or the fact that somewhere in this city, a man I’ve never met believes I’m his granddaughter and is willing to crash cars and stab people to get me back.
I trust Damien Voronov.
The man whose family bled me dry. The man who bought me at auction. The man who dressed me this morning and made me breakfast and fucked me in a church car park while the world tried to tear us apart.
The irony isn’t lost on me. It’s just no longer relevant.
“We should go,” I say, breaking the spell before it crystallises into something neither of us is ready to carry this soon.
He blinks once, and the mask slides back into place—controlled, lethal, every inch the Bratva man who doesn’t flinch. But I saw what was underneath. I saw it, and I’m keeping it.
“Wait,” he says, grasping my hand and pulling me closer. He doesn’t say anything else. He leads me to the stairs, and we take them slowly. “We aren’t doing this today,” he says when we get to the top. “It’s too much. You’re hurt and…”
“And what?”
“And I need you to rest.”
“That’s not what you were going to say.”
“If I told you what I’m thinking, you would run a mile,” he mutters darkly and pulls me towards his bedroom.
I follow, suddenly feeling the fight drain out of me. He’s right. My head is pounding, I’m tired, hungry, and I could do with a shower and some rest before I face down whatever Orlov is going to have ready and waiting for us.
Damien guides me into the bathroom and turns on the shower.
Steam rises immediately, filling the space with warmth that seeps into my aching bones before the water even touches me.
He stands there for a moment, hand under the stream, testing the temperature like it matters.
Like I’m something that can’t be subjected to water that’s too hot or too cold.
He turns to face me, and he slides the coat off my shoulders. His fingers find the hem of the white dress. “Arms up.”
It’s the same command as before. The same gentle authority that bypasses every defence I have and speaks directly to the part of me that’s exhausted from fighting everything, all the time, forever.
I lift my arms.
He peels the dress over my head with the same care he used with the t-shirt, only this time there’s no towel underneath.
Just me. Bare except for the underwear the boutique sent over this morning, which feels like a lifetime ago.
His gaze doesn’t roam. It stays on my face, steady and unreadable, while he folds the ruined dress and sets it on the vanity like it deserves respect even in its current state.
He bends down and pulls the stiletto free from the top of my boot, trailing the sharp point up my inner thigh.
My breath hitches as the cold metal traces a line that has no business feeling like a caress.
His eyes are dark, fixed on the path of the blade, and the control in his hand is absolute.
The point barely dimples my skin, leaving a ghost trail of sensation that lights up every nerve ending from ankle to hip.
“Damien,” I breathe, but I don’t know if it’s a warning or an invitation.
He doesn’t answer. He sets it on the vanity beside the dress, then unzips the boot with a deliberateness that makes the simple act feel obscene.
One boot. Then the other. His fingers graze my calves as he pulls them free, and I grip his shoulder for balance because the room is doing that tilting thing again, and I’m not sure if it’s the concussion or him.
He hooks his hands into the sides of my panties and slides them down my thighs. I step out of them, and he throws them to the side before burying his face in my pussy. He inhales deeply and then stands.
His thumb traces the wound at my temple.
The touch is featherlight. Clinical, almost. Except his jaw is tight, and the muscle there ticks once, twice, like he’s swallowing something back that wants to come out as destruction.
Turning me, he reaches up and unclasps my bra, letting it drop to my feet as he makes me face him again.
“Beautiful,” he murmurs.
Hesitantly, I reach up and unbutton his shirt, one by one, revealing ink-covered skin that I’ve been refusing to study since the moment I first saw it.
Now I look. Each button reveals another layer of the story written on his body—Cyrillic script winding across his collarbone, geometric patterns cascading down his pectorals, something dark and intricate crawling over his ribs that I can’t decipher but want to trace with my tongue.
He stands there, utterly still, while I push the shirt off his shoulders and let it pool on the heated floor.
The restraint costs him something—I can see it in the way his hands hang at his sides with fingers curled, not reaching for me even though every line of his body is angled toward mine like a compass needle fighting its true north.
I press my palm flat against his chest. His heart hammers beneath my hand, steady and savage, and the contrast between his external composure and the violence of that rhythm makes something crack inside me.
His skin is hot under my palm, and his heartbeat is real, and everything else in my life has turned out to be fabricated.
My name. My parents. My history. All of it, tissue paper and smoke.
But this is real. This is the only thing I can verify with my own senses.
The heat of him, the thunder of his pulse, the way his breath changes when I touch him.
I flatten my other hand against his stomach and feel the muscles contract beneath my fingers.
Hard. Defined. The body of a man who uses violence the way other people use conversation.
I trace the edge of a tattoo, following it down to where it disappears beneath his waistband, and his breath catches. Just once. Just enough.
“Lidiya.” My name in his mouth is a tether. A rope thrown across a chasm I’ve been falling into since Orlov opened her mouth and called me Anna.
“I’m here,” I say, and I mean it in every possible way. Present. Conscious. Choosing this.
I undo his belt. The leather slides free with a whisper that sounds louder than it should in the steam-filled bathroom.
His pants follow, leaving him naked, and he takes my hand.
The shower is a wall of heat behind us, steam curling around our bodies like something alive, and he guides me under the water without a word.
It hits my scalp, and I hiss. The cut at my temple protests with sharp, bright pain that steals my breath. I press my hand to it reflexively, and Damien’s hand covers mine, guiding it away.
“Let me,” he says.
His fingers work through my hair with a gentleness that doesn’t match anything else about him.
He tilts my head back, keeping the water away from the wound while he washes the blood from my face, my neck, the dried streaks that ran all the way to my collarbone.
The water at our feet runs pink, then clear, and I watch it spiral down the drain like evidence being erased.
His hands move lower. Over my shoulders, my arms, my breasts.
Not sexual. Methodical. Like he’s cataloguing every inch of me to make sure I’m still whole.
His thumb brushes the underside of my breast, and my nipple tightens despite everything—the pain, the exhaustion, the fact that we found his man half dead and then were in a car crash.
“Turn around,” he murmurs.
I do. The tile is cool against my palms as I brace myself, and his hands slide down my spine, counting vertebrae like they’re precious.
He washes my back, my waist, the curve of my arse.
His touch lingers there for a fraction longer than necessary, and I feel the heat of his body behind me, close but not touching.
“Damien,” I say, and I don’t know what I’m asking for. More. Less. Everything.
His hands still on my hips, thumbs pressing into the small of my back, and the silence stretches taut between us like a wire about to snap.
“Don’t,” he says, and his voice is rougher than the shower spray. “Don’t say my name like that unless you want me to fuck you against this tile.”
My breath catches. The blade of want cuts through the exhaustion, the pain, the chaos of the last few hours, and leaves something raw and exposed in its wake.
I want him. I want to feel something other than fear and confusion, and the vertigo of my entire identity unravelling.
I want to feel claimed, possessed, anchored to something solid while everything else slides away like water down the drain.
“Damien,” I breathe.
His restraint shatters.
One second, there’s space between us. The next, he has me pinned against the tile, his body pressed flush against mine, the hard length of his cock digging into my lower back.
His hand wraps around my throat from behind, not choking, just holding, his thumb beneath my jaw, forcing my head back against his shoulder.
“You don’t know what you’re asking for,” he growls into my ear, and the vibration of it travels straight through me, pooling low in my belly.
“I know exactly what I’m asking for.”
His other hand slides down my stomach and between my thighs. No preamble. No teasing. His fingers find me wet for him, and the groan that tears from his throat is primal.
“Still soaked from earlier,” he murmurs, and there’s satisfaction in his voice that makes me clench around nothing. “Still full of me.”
The evidence of what we did in the car is still there, slick and undeniable, and the filthy reality of it makes me whimper.
His finger finds that perfect spot and moves in slow, knowing circles until my legs give way beneath me.
His arm bands across my waist, holding me up, holding me exactly where he wants me while his fingers work me with the same controlled violence he applies to everything else.
I’m drowning in sensation. The hot water sluices over us, steam filling my lungs, his fingers working me with a precision that borders on cruel.
The tile is cold against my breasts, and the contrast between cold and hot, between the brutal press of his body and the achingly gentle way his thumb strokes my throat, makes my vision blur.
“Please,” I gasp, and I don’t know what I’m begging for anymore. Release. Oblivion. Something to anchor me when everything else has come untethered.
“Not yet,” he murmurs against my ear, and his fingers slow to a torturous crawl that has me whimpering. “Not until you say you’re mine. Not until you know that no matter what name they gave you, no matter who they say you are, right now you’re mine.”
His possessiveness brands me from the inside out, a savage claim that should make me recoil, but instead burns away the chaos threatening to devour me. Without it, I would splinter into a thousand jagged fragments, scattered beyond recovery, simply dust where a woman once stood.
His fingers quicken again, and the coil in my belly winds tighter, tighter, until I’m trembling against him, my nails scraping uselessly against the wet tile.
His hand on my throat tightens just enough to make my pulse thunder in my ears, and the restriction combined with the relentless pressure between my legs pushes me to the edge.
“Are you mine, Lidiya?”
I don’t hesitate. I don’t think. I just say the truth that’s been clawing at my insides since the moment he put his hands on me in that church car park.
“Yes,” I gasp. “I’m yours.”
The orgasm detonates through me with a violence that whites out my vision.
My body seizes, every muscle locking as pleasure crashes over me in waves so intense I can’t breathe.
I cry out, the sound swallowed by the rush of water and steam, and Damien’s hand on my throat holds me through it, keeps me from shattering completely while I come apart on his fingers.
He doesn’t stop. He works me through every aftershock, drawing it out until I’m sobbing against the tile, my legs completely useless, my entire body weight supported by his arm around my waist.
“Good girl,” he murmurs against my ear, and the praise does something to me that I don’t have the capacity to process right now. “My solnyshko.”
He withdraws his hand and turns me to face him. Water cascades between us as he lifts me, and I wrap my legs around his waist on instinct. The head of his cock presses against my pussy, and I’m so sensitive that the contact makes me whimper.
“One more,” he says, and it’s not a request.
He enters me in one slow thrust that feels like being split open and made whole simultaneously.
I’m still swollen from earlier, still tender, and the stretch borders on too much.
But I take him anyway, because the alternative is worse.
The alternative is letting go, and I can’t.
Not now. Not when he’s the only solid thing in a world that’s revealed itself to be constructed entirely of lies.