Chapter 38 Lidiya #2
“Unofficially. I don’t have a title. I don’t sit in on the formal meetings unless Baron wants me there.
I’m the son he sends when diplomacy has failed, and the only language left is violence.
” He picks up the pen and turns it between his fingers, a restless habit I’m starting to recognise.
“Roman resents it because he thinks I have freedom. I resent it because he thinks freedom is what this is.”
“What is it, then?”
“Exile with a long leash.” He says it so casually, like he’s describing the weather, and the quiet devastation of it makes my ribs ache. “I can do what I want, go where I want, spend what I want. But I’m not the heir.”
“That sounds lonely.”
His eyes meet mine, and for a fraction of a second, the mask slips completely.
Not the controlled vulnerability he showed me earlier, not the calculated honesty of a man who knows when to deploy emotion as a weapon.
This is something raw and unguarded, something he didn’t mean to let me see, and the pain in it is so familiar it takes my breath away.
Because I know that look. I’ve worn it my entire life.
The look of someone who belongs nowhere. Who exists in the spaces between other people’s certainties, filling gaps they didn’t ask to fill, serving purposes they didn’t choose, and calling it home because the alternative—admitting you don’t have one—is unbearable.
“It is,” he says quietly. Then the mask slides back, smooth as glass, and he’s Damien Voronov again. Dangerous. Controlled. Untouchable. “But loneliness is a luxury complaint when you have a black card and a weapons cache.”
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Deflect with humour when you’ve just told me something real.”
His pen stops turning. He sets it down on the desk with a precision that tells me I’ve hit something he wasn’t expecting me to find. “You’re annoyingly perceptive for a woman with a head injury.”
“And you’re annoyingly evasive for a man who wants me to trust him.”
The silence that follows is loaded. He stares at me from across the desk, and I stare back, and the distance between us feels like both a chasm and a dare.
I take the risk. I stand up and move around the desk slowly, trailing my hand over the wood until I reach him. He scoots his chair back so he can get a better look at me, and I use it as an opportunity to crawl into his lap.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” he murmurs, scooping my hair up at the nape of my neck and tugging gently.
“Yes,” I admit, settling deeper into his lap anyway. “I want this. I want you. Despite your faults, despite the fact that you were a total dick to me. I want you.”
His grip tightens in my hair, just enough to send a cascade of heat down my spine. “Inevitable.”
I press my palm flat against his chest, feeling the steady thud beneath the fabric. Real. Solid. The only heartbeat in this city that seems to sync with mine, and isn’t that the most terrifying thing of all?
“You said you were exiled,” I say, keeping my voice low, like if I speak too loudly, the honesty will scatter. “But you’re not. Not really. You chose to be the wild card because the alternative was fighting Roman for something you didn’t want.”
His jaw flexes beneath my fingertips as I trace the line of it. “That’s a generous interpretation.”
“It’s an accurate one. You don’t want the crown. You want the chaos.”
“And you’ve figured this out in, what, a few days?”
“I’ve figured out a lot of things in a few days.
Most of them about myself. Some of them about you.
” I shift in his lap, and his hand moves from my hair to my hip, steadying me with a grip that’s more reflex than intention.
“You hide behind the violence because it’s easier than admitting you care about things. People. Me.”
“I don’t hide behind anything.”
“You hide behind everything. The money, the knuckleduster, the tattoos, the reputation. You build walls out of weapons and call it strength.”
His eyes darken, and I feel the shift in him, the coil of something dangerous that lives just beneath the surface, something I’ve poked with a stick and now has to decide whether to strike or retreat.
“Careful,” he says, and the word is silk wrapped around a razor.
“No.” I cup his face with both hands, forcing him to look at me without the armour, without the calculation.
“I’m done being careful. Careful got me nowhere.
Careful got me a bedsit and a café job and a debt I didn’t owe.
Careful got me counting coins while the man collecting them was falling for me and too stubborn to say it. ”
His breath catches. His fingers dig into my hip hard enough to bruise, and I let them because the pain is grounding and real and ours.
“I wasn’t falling,” he says roughly. “I fell. Past tense. Hit the ground months ago. I’ve just been lying there pretending the impact didn’t shatter anything.”
The confession hangs between us, raw and bleeding and more honest than anything he’s given me yet.
More honest than the money. More honest than the apology.
This is the marrow of him, the thing beneath the bone, and he’s offering it to me like a man who doesn’t know what to do with it anymore and needs someone else to pull it out of him.
It’s an honesty that deserves something in return.
“I hated you,” I murmur. “I hated you so much, I would fantasise about pouring cyanide into your coffee order. But I couldn’t help thinking you were hot, out of reach, out of my league and powerful. Even when you exerted that power over me. I hated you, and it made me hate myself.”
“And now? You use past tense. Do you still hate me?”
“No,” I whisper, and it feels like swallowing glass.
“I don’t.” His breath leaves him like I’ve hit something vital.
My fingers are still on his face, and his skin is hot, tight over bone, eyes gone dark enough to pull me under if I let them.
“I don’t hate you,” I say again, steadier.
“I hate what you did. I hate that I’m the kind of woman who could still want you after it.
I hate that I feel safer in your lap than I did in my own flat with the rusty deadbolt on. ”
His mouth tips, not a smile, not relief. Something rougher. “Honesty suits you.”
“It hurts.”
“It should.”
“Does yours?”
He doesn’t parry. “Yes.”
My pulse settles against his thumb where it rests under my jaw, and I realise I can breathe again. “Tomorrow,” I say, because the future is a cliff edge and I need to name it before it swallows me. “If Orlov plays games, if Stanislav appears, if any of it goes sideways—”
“It won’t.”
“If.” I press my nails into his chest just enough to make him listen. “You do not leave me. You do not shove me into a safe room while you turn the reading room into a crime scene. If this is my life, I stand in it.”
His gaze cuts through me. “I don’t leave you.”
I nod once and drop my hands to his zip. I lower it slowly, flicking the button undone so I can slide my hand in over his stiff cock. His breath stutters as my fingers wrap around him, and I squeeze, slow and deliberate, just to feel the way his control frays.
“Careful,” he says, but his voice is rough satin, and his hips rise into my hand like he can’t help it.
“I told you I’m done being careful.” I stroke him from base to tip, my thumb dragging over the slick bead at the crown. His eyes flash, then go dark, and the chair creaks as he grips the armrests hard enough to make a sound.
“Solnyshko,” he warns.
“Say please,” I murmur, because there is power in this moment and I want it. Here, with my hand on him, I’m a woman who makes a monster breathe unevenly.
His jaw tightens. For a second, I think he’ll refuse out of principle. Then he bows his head a fraction. “Please.”
The word hangs between us. I change my rhythm, faster now, twisting my wrist at the top, learning him in real time. He’s hot in my hand, heavy and greedy, and the sound that drags out of his chest when I scrape my nails lightly along the veined underside makes me ache.
“Look at me,” I whisper.
His eyes lift. Blue fire. Ownership and surrender in the same glance.
It’s everything I asked for earlier, all the walls down, no theatre, no distance.
Just Damien and the way he is for me. I rise and rub the head over my clit.
I’m slippery, ready for him. Always ready for him.
I sink down slowly, the thick crown stretching me as I take him in inch by inch.
His breath hisses out on a curse, hands clamping my hips.
Heat spikes through me, bright and immediate, and I grip the back of the chair with one hand while the other anchors in his hair.
“Fuck,” he rasps. “Look at me.”
I hold his gaze because I want him helpless under me, pinned by nothing but the way I move.
I set a rhythm—deliberate, slow at first, then quicker when the ache turns to need, and the need turns to frenzy.
He drives up to meet me, every upward thrust precise, savage in its control.
The chair protests. My name leaves him on a low sound that makes me clench around him.
“Damien,” I breathe, greedy for the way he frays when I say it. I roll my hips and find that angle that drags against something perfect, and the world tunnels to the slip of slick heat and his cock filling me and his fingers biting bruises I’ll trace in the morning.
He slides a hand between us, thumb finding my clit. He circles it before pinching lightly. My head drops back, and the office blurs at the edges.
“Say it,” he orders, voice gone dark velvet.
“Yours,” I gasp, the word torn out of me as everything coils tight. “I’m yours.”
“Good girl.”
The praise detonates inside me. I break with a cry I can’t swallow, my pussy clamps around him as he drives harder, rougher, chasing me down.
He follows me over the edge with a vicious grind that drags another aftershock out of me.
Heat spills into me, and I shiver, clinging to him, wanting to stay exactly where I am.
We breathe. I hear the clock on his desk. The faint hum of the house. My own pulse in my ears easing to something human.
He strokes a thumb over my cheekbone, then drags it down to my mouth and presses it in gently until my lips part. A promise sits behind his gaze, along with a threat. Both aimed at everyone who isn’t me.