Chapter Yevgeny
Yevgeny
She's at the kitchen table when I return from a morning meeting with Artem. Coffee in one hand, her phone in the other, wearing one of my t-shirts and nothing else. The hem hits her mid-thigh and the scar is visible. I love that she doesn't try to hide it.
She doesn't hide anything from me.
It's been three days since the wedding and two since the alley.
Two days of learning each other in ways that have nothing to do with the dark.
The way she drinks her coffee black but stirs it anyway, a habit from stirring sugar she stopped taking years ago.
The way she reads with her knees pulled up and the book balanced on her thighs.
The way she goes quiet when she's thinking about something important and how her voice changes when she is thinking about me.
I know her rhythms already and have no intention of ever stopping.
I set the morning paper on the table in front of her.
She glances at it. Then she sets her coffee down and picks it up, scanning the article on page five with the same calm, methodical focus she uses for everything.
MAN FOUND DEAD IN SUSPECTED MUGGING
Kyle-John Jones, 39. Found in an alley behind a shuttered laundromat. Single stab wound to the chest. Wallet missing. Police are treating it as a robbery gone wrong. No witnesses. No suspects. Investigation ongoing.
She reads it twice. Then she folds the paper and sets it down and picks her coffee back up.
"They bought it," she says.
"You staged it well."
"It wasn't complicated. Take the wallet, leave the body, let the scene tell the story.
" She takes a sip. "The police don't look hard at men like Kyle-John Jones.
He had a record. A history of low-level violence.
People like him die in alleys and the investigation file gets buried under cases that matter more to someone with a badge. "
There's no guilt or second-guessing in her voice. She speaks in that flat, factual tone of a woman who has done this before and knows exactly how the system works, because she's spent six years operating in the spaces it refuses to cover.
"How do you feel?" I ask.
She looks at me. Considers the question. "The same way I always feel after. Quiet. Like the noise stops for a while."
I pour my own coffee and sit across from her.
The morning light is coming through the kitchen window and it catches the side of her face as I think about how many mornings I want exactly this.
Her in my shirt. Coffee on the table. The paper between us with evidence of what we are folded neatly beside the fruit bowl.
Every morning. That's how many.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"Anything."
She wraps both hands around her mug. I've noticed she does this when she's about to say something that costs her. The mug is a prop. Something to hold onto while the words find their way out.
"I want to know if there's something more I can do. For you. In bed."
I set my coffee down. "More?"
"I don't have a frame of reference, Yevgeny. Everything I know about sex I've learned in the last three days from you. Which means everything I do is either instinct or imitation. And I don't want to just imitate. I want to know what you want. Specifically."
The honesty of it is raw and somehow surprising. Most women I've been with came to bed with assumptions and performances and a list of things they thought men wanted. Stefania comes with none of that.
"You're not lacking anything," I say. "What we've had has been—"
"I know it's been good. I can tell by the way you respond to me. But good isn't the same as everything, and I told you I don't do things halfway." She lifts her chin. "Tell me. Whatever you want. I'm not fragile and I'm not going to break. You know that better than anyone."
I look at her across the table. My wife who killed a man two nights ago and staged the scene like a professional and is now sitting in my kitchen asking me to teach her how to please me with the same focus she brings to a target profile.
I should not find that as sexy as I do.
"There is something," I say.
She waits.
"I want to watch you touch yourself."
Her coffee mug pauses halfway to her mouth. A flicker of something crosses her face. Not discomfort. Surprise. This is territory she hasn't considered.
"I've never..." She stops. Recalibrates. "I've done it, obviously. But alone. In the dark. It was functional. Quick. I never thought of it as something someone else would want to see."
"That's exactly why I want to see it."
She sets the mug down. Her eyes are steady on mine but I can see the pulse jumping in her throat. "Why?"
I lean forward. "Because you've spent six years controlling everything.
Every movement, every expression, every part of yourself that the world gets to see.
When you touch yourself for me, you can't control what your face does.
You can't control the sounds you make. You can't hide.
" I hold her gaze. "I've watched you take down a man twice your size without flinching.
I want to watch you come undone with nothing but your own hand and my instruction. "
The flush starts at her chest and climbs. I watch it travel up her neck and across her cheeks and I file it away with everything else I'm learning about her body.
"Your instruction," she repeats.
"I'll tell you what to do. Where to touch. How fast. How slow. You do as I say and I watch. That's it."
"That's it," she says, and the way her voice drops tells me she already understands that it's not that simple at all.
"You can say no."
"I'm not saying no." She pushes her coffee aside.
The silence between us is charged. I can feel the energy shift in the room, the way it does before a hunt, before a fight, before something irreversible happens. She's weighing it. Turning it over with that precise, analytical mind. Measuring the risk against the reward.
Then she stands up.
"Where?" she asks.
"On the table."
She leans against the edge of the varnished wood, and slides herself back, while I abandon my coffee in the sink. She positions herself in front of me.
“Open up my shirt and show me those tits I love so much.” I pull the chair out of the way while she does as I ask, and then stand facing her.
"Start with your neck. Run your fingers down the side of it. Slowly."
She lifts her right hand. Her fingers touch the column of her throat, trail down the tendon, trace her collarbone. The movement is stiff.
"Close your eyes," I say. "Stop thinking about me watching. Think about how it felt when my mouth was on your neck last night. Remember the way I kissed you right below your ear. The sound you made."
Her eyes close. Her fingers slow down. I watch her breathing change and her nipples pebble as the memory replaces the self-consciousness.
"Now your chest. Touch yourself the way you like me to touch you."
Her hand drifts lower. Over her collarbone. Down to her full tits. She cups the left one, her thumb brushing the nipple, and her lips part on a small exhale.
"That’s right, good girl" I murmur, pressing the heel of my hand against my aching cock.
The effect of my words is immediate. Her back arches slightly. The nipple tightens under her thumb. The praise response is hardwired into her now, connected to every nerve ending I've spent three days mapping.
"Other hand. Both at the same time."
She sits up a little more as she brings her left hand up. Palming both breasts now, her fingers circling her nipples, squeezing gently until the flesh presses between her fingers.
I groan as she tugs and rolls her nipples, speeding up as another moan is pulled from her throat.
Her knees start to part. Slowly, without instruction, her body opening as the arousal builds. I watch the flush spread down her chest and unbuckle my belt.
"Lower," I say. "Touch your stomach. That curve below your navel. The part you think isn't beautiful."
One hand slides down. Fingers tracing the softness of her belly. She hesitates there and I know she's fighting the impulse to skip past it, to rush to the place where the need is sharpest.
"Stay there. Feel it. That part of your body is going to carry our child someday. There's nothing about you that isn't perfect. I’ll spend every day proving it to you."
A sound comes out of her. Not a moan. Something deeper. Something that comes from the place where she's been carrying the belief that her body is built for function, not for wanting. My words are reaching that place and dismantling it piece by piece.
I watch her center as her pussy entrance clenches around nothing, a small amount of her creaminess leaking from her, glistening, tempting me to put my mouth on her. I don’t know how I manage to hold back.
"Now lower."
She pulls knees further apart, her toes curling on the edge of the table. The sight of her spread open on our table with her hands following my instructions makes every muscle in my body tighten.
"Touch yourself. Show me how you do it when you're alone."
She hesitates for just a second before her fingers slide between her thighs. She finds her clit and her whole body jerks. She lets out a sharp gasp, then begins a rhythm, tight circles, fast, the way she described it: functional, efficient.
"Slow down," I say unzipping my pants. "This isn't a race. Let it build."
She slows down. The efficiency gives way to something languid and her head tips back against as her mouth opens, and the sounds she makes are unfiltered now. Small, hitching breaths. A whimper when she finds the pressure that works. My name, barely whispered, like she doesn't know she's saying it.
"That's it. You're so beautiful like this. Legs open, fingers working that perfect pussy, doing exactly what I tell you. My wife. My queen."