16. Artem #3
"I know it won't change it." Her voice drops, and something in it shifts — still furious, but underneath the fury is something rawer, something exhausted.
"Nothing I do changes anything. That's the whole point, isn't it?
You've arranged it so that I have no moves.
No options. Nothing that's actually mine.
" She looks around the penthouse, the cold, beautiful, impersonal space I have lived in for a year without making it feel like anywhere.
"Even my anger doesn't matter. You'll just stand there and absorb it and go back to your plan. "
"Generally, yes."
"I hate you."
"You've mentioned that."
"I want you to know I mean it. Not as a figure of speech. I genuinely, specifically hate you."
"Noted."
She looks at me for a long moment, and I look back, and something shifts in the air between us — some quality of the silence changes, becomes charged with something that has nothing to do with anger and everything to do with the fact that we are alone in this room, three feet apart, and we have been here before under very different circumstances.
She feels it too. I see her register it, see the moment she recognizes what's happening and decides, consciously, not to step back.
"This doesn't mean anything," she says. Her voice has changed. "I'm just making my own choices."
"Of course, Katya."
It's nothing like the first time.
The first time I was controlled, deliberate — I knew exactly what I was doing and why, and I executed it with the precision of a man who plans everything three moves ahead. This is about absorbing her anger, about fucking my ownership into her.
We are both people in control, but this time, we are at war.
"Fuck," I groan against her mouth, tasting blood as she bites my lip between her teeth.
She pulls back. Her lips are red with it, and her chest is heaving, and she looks at me like she's won something. "Fuck you."
I wrap my hand around her throat as I kiss her harshly. She wants to be a brat — well, then, I'll show her how I treat defiance.
I push her skirt up over her hips, tear her underwear away, and bend her over the arm of the couch. My fingers find the zipper of my tailored trousers and I free myself, hard and ready, before she's finished gasping.
"You want me to be a monster?" I say against her hair.
She lifts her chin. "You already are."
"Not yet." I lean forward, bringing my lips to her ear. "But I can be."
I bring my palm down hard on her bare ass.
She cries out, the sound sharp in the quiet penthouse, and I do it again — not hard enough to cause real harm, but hard enough that the pale skin flushes pink immediately, hard enough that she feels it, that she understands who she belongs to — whether she likes it or not.
"Count," I order.
She doesn't. She presses her lips together and says nothing, which is its own kind of answer.
I continue anyway. Each blow measured, deliberate, painting her skin a deeper shade of rose.
I expect tears. I expect her to break. Instead what I get is the sharp, unmistakable scent of her arousal and the sight of her shifting her hips, seeking friction against the arm of the couch, trying to relieve the ache building in her.
She hates that she wants this. I can feel it in the tension of her body, the way she fights her own responses even as they betray her.
"There she is," I say quietly, sliding my hand between her thighs to find her slick and swollen. "Good girl."
"Go fuck yourself."
I stroke her once, slowly, and feel her whole body shudder. "As you like."
Then I push inside her.
The sound she makes goes straight through me — half outrage, half relief, completely unguarded.
I set a pace that gives her no time to think, no room to maintain any of the composure she walked in with, and she takes it, braced against the couch with her skirt around her waist and her hair falling forward, and she is magnificent.
Neither of us lasts long. She comes first, clenching around me with a muffled cry she bites into the back of her hand, and I follow seconds later, pressing deep and holding there until I've spent myself entirely.
The silence that follows is absolute.
I step back. Straighten myself. Close my zipper with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be.
Katya stands up slowly, smooths her skirt back down over her hips, and pushes her hair out of her face. She turns to look at me, and her expression is the one I've started to recognize — the one that means she's decided something.
"If you ever go through my things again without asking," she says, "I will make your life significantly more difficult."
"A threat?"
"A promise." She picks up her bag from where she dropped it near the door. "I'll be here Saturday, not a moment before."
She leaves without waiting for a response.
The door closes behind her.
I stand in the middle of my living room in the silence she's left behind and try to locate the feeling that's settled in my chest — not satisfaction, not the cold clarity of a plan advancing. Something without a clean name. Something I don't particularly want to examine.
I go back to my desk.
There's work to do.