Chapter 33
Damien
I’m lost in her.
Not metaphorically. Literally. The moment I sink into her heat, everything else—the crash, Kirill bleeding out, Gorbachev’s shadow looming over us like a guillotine—it all dissolves into static.
There’s just her. The way her body grips me like she’s afraid I’ll disappear.
The way her nails dig into my back hard enough to leave marks.
The way she says my name, like it’s the only word that matters.
I should be gentler. She’s concussed. Battered.
Running on adrenaline and sheer bloody-mindedness.
But gentle isn’t what she needs right now, and I know that because I’ve spent my entire life reading people for weaknesses I can exploit.
Only this time, I’m reading her to give her what she actually wants, not what she thinks she should want.
She wants me to fuck her like I own her. Like there’s no question about who she belongs to. Like the entire world can burn as long as I keep her pinned exactly where she is.
So I do.
I brace one hand against the tile beside her head and grip her arse with the other, angling her hips to take me deeper.
The sound she makes is broken, desperate, and it rewires something fundamental in my brain.
I thrust into her with a rhythm that’s punishing, deliberate, each stroke designed to make her feel me everywhere—in her bones, in her blood, in the parts of her that have nothing to do with flesh.
“Look at me,” I demand, because I need to see her eyes when she falls apart again.
She does. Those blue eyes lock onto mine, and the trust in them is a weapon I didn’t ask for but will guard with my life. She’s giving me everything. Her body, her fear, her fractured identity, the raw edges of a woman who’s just discovered her entire existence was built on theft.
The water pounds against my back as I drive into her harder, faster, chasing something that has nothing to do with release and everything to do with possession. I want to mark her so deeply that no DNA test, no grandfather, no revelation about who she was before can touch what she is now.
Mine.
The word pulses through me with every thrust, and I know I’m being irrational.
I know this level of possessiveness is dangerous, that it makes me vulnerable in ways I’ve spent thirty years avoiding.
But I don’t care. I can’t care. Not when she’s looking at me like I’m the only fixed point in a universe that’s just revealed itself to be spinning out of control.
I want to keep her like this. Pinned. Possessed. Mine in a way that has nothing to do with auctions or money or the strategic calculation I’ve built my entire life around. This is primal. Base. The kind of claim that exists below language, in the space where instinct lives.
Her pussy clenches around me, and I grit my teeth against the urge to finish. Not yet. Not until I’ve wrung every last tremor from her body, until she understands that this—us—is the only real thing in her world right now.
“Say it again,” I growl against her mouth.
“I’m yours,” she gasps, and her pussy clenches around me like punctuation.
The orgasm builds at the base of my spine, and I let it tear through me with a savagery that borders on violent.
I spill into her with a groan that echoes off the tile, my hips jerking as I empty myself completely.
The climax shatters me, carving out my insides and replacing them with a raw, burning truth I won’t acknowledge even to myself.
Her body goes limp against me, held up only by my grip and the wall at her back. I stay inside her, unwilling to break the connection yet, and press my forehead against hers. Our breathing syncs, ragged and harsh, the only sound besides the relentless spray of water.
“I’ve got you,” I murmur, and I mean it in every possible way. In all the ways that matter when someone’s entire world has just been revealed as fiction.
She doesn’t respond. She just breathes against me, her face buried in the crook of my neck, and I feel the sob wrack her body.
Fuck.
I withdraw carefully, and she winces. The guilt hits immediately and sharply, because I just fucked a concussed woman against my shower wall like a man with no self-control.
“Did I hurt you?” I ask, tilting her chin up so I can see her face.
“No,” she says, but her eyes are glassy. “It’s not you. Or it is you, but in a good way. Why me? Why do you want me? I’m a nobody. You could have your pick of Bratva princesses, but you chose me. The lowly peasant.”
I tighten my grip on her chin, forcing her to hold my gaze while water cascades over us both. The question she’s asking deserves an answer that isn’t wrapped in deflection or the kind of smooth bullshit I’ve spent years perfecting.
“You think I want a Bratva princess?” I say, my voice rough. “Women who were raised to smile at the right moments and look the other way when the bodies pile up? Women who see me as a stepping stone to power or a trophy to parade at functions?”
Her eyes search mine, damp with tears.
“I don’t want someone who knows how to navigate my world,” I continue. “I want someone who fights it. Someone who slapped my face twice and meant it both times.” I run my thumb across her bottom lip, the same lip I’ve kissed, bitten, claimed. “You’re not a nobody, Lidiya. You never were.”
A tear escapes, tracking down her cheek to mingle with the shower spray. “So, you only want me because of who my grandfather is.”
“Which part of my monologue implied that? I wanted you the second I laid eyes on you. You do realise that the son of the Pakhan, heir or not, doesn’t do debt visits, don’t you? Why do you think I showed up every week?”
“To torture me,” she says, but there is no bitterness.
“No,” I say, gripping her chin. “To see you. To obsess about you. To know that you wouldn’t look twice at me, but I could look twice as hard as a result.”
Her breath catches, and I watch the realisation dawn across her face that the man who collected her debt every Friday wasn’t doing it out of duty but out of obsession.
That every time I walked into that café, it wasn’t about the hundred pounds.
It was about her. I’m not sure what she will do when I hand her back the stack of bills I collected from her.
She needs to know I was paying off her debt, week by week, but she will fucking kill me knowing I kept the money.
Not for myself, but for her. To give it to her when the amount was life-changing enough for her to act on those changes without fear, because I knew she wouldn’t save it herself.
I know now that she couldn’t. The level of poverty she was in is something that was overlooked, or, if I’m being truly honest with myself, I didn’t see it through eyes that understand.
I’ve never had to worry about money for a single second of my life, and that makes me a complete arsehole for taking this money from her.
“You’re insane,” she whispers.
“Probably.” I turn off the water with my free hand, the sudden silence almost deafening. “But that doesn’t make it less true.”
I grab a towel from the heated rail and wrap it around her, tucking it carefully under her arms like she’s something precious. She stands there, dripping and exhausted, while I dry myself with quick, efficient movements and wrap the towel around my hips.
Knowing this is the time to come clean, I take her hand and lead her into the bedroom.
Letting her go, I move to the wall safe, tucked behind an ordinary-looking painting of a seascape.
I punch in the code and swing the door open.
Inside, beneath a stack of documents and a velvet box containing one of my grandmother’s rings, is a black lockbox. I pull it out and turn to face Lidiya.
She’s watching me with wary eyes, the towel clutched tight around her body like armour.
“What’s that?” she asks.
I cross the room and hold it out to her. “Open it.”
Her fingers tremble as she takes the lockbox, turns the key, and flips back the lid.
Money. Stacks of it. Twenties, tens, fives. Some of the notes are creased, clearly handled multiple times. She stares at it like it’s a live grenade.
“What is this?” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“Every pound you gave me,” I say. “Every Friday. Every hundred pounds. I never gave it to Baron. I paid it myself. I kept this for you. As an investment in your future.”
The colour drains from her face. “You... what?”
“I was paying your debt myself. Week by week. The money you gave me went into that box. I was going to give it back when there was enough to actually change something for you.”
She picks up one of the notes with shaking fingers. I recognise it—a crumpled twenty with a corner torn off. She gave me that one three months ago, apologising because it was damaged.
“You let me starve,” she says, and the words are hollow. “You let me…”
I watch her face as the words die on her lips, and the silence that follows is worse than any accusation she could throw at me. She’s staring at the money like it’s evidence of a crime—which, I know now, it is. A crime of arrogance. Of thinking I knew better than she did what she needed.
“I didn’t let you do anything,” I say, because the defence is already forming even though I know it’s weak. “You were paying a debt that wasn’t yours. I was trying to—”
“To what?” She drops the note back into the box like it’s burned her. “To be my saviour? To watch me struggle while you hoarded money that I needed?”
“It was never going to Baron,” I say quietly. “That’s the point.”
“The point?” Her laugh is sharp enough to draw blood.
“The point is that I skipped meals. I wore the same three outfits on rotation. I counted pennies like they were oxygen. And you—” Her voice cracks.
“You stood there every Friday with your expensive coat and your fucking smirk and watched me scrape together money you were just going to give back when it suited you?”