Chapter 8 - Viktor
There’s no bite of liquor to our kiss this time around.
Nadya’s mouth is only heat and sweetness.
But the innate rhythm of our frenetic give-and-take returns tenfold.
Before long, her coerced moan coats my tongue, and I curl it right back between her lips.
We don’t meet in desire; this is pure, primal hunger.
It makes it evident, quickly, that the first time wasn’t a one-off.
This is how it is between us.
Aggressive. Vicious. Primitive.
She fights valiantly against my grip. But it sure as shit isn’t a fight to get away from me.
It’s safe to say this wasn’t part of the plan.
Truthfully, nothing since the moment she woke up has been.
Not the glass she flung at my head, the smithereens of which crunch beneath my soles now. And surely not the way she falls back on the mattress, atop her stacked forearms in my single-handed hold. Nadya squirms needily, and her thin sweater rides up her waistline.
I feel her smooth skin—and, like it is with any addict, a hit is all it takes.
I’m lost to her in a groan that I bury into the hollow of her throat.
My pelvis grinds into the hot, welcoming apex of her split thighs.
Her gasps of heady breath pulse beneath my wandering mouth.
I bear down on her body enough not to need the grip anymore.
Besides, my hands are inspired. They’ve got other fucking ideas. Starting with slipping up beneath the thin layer of wool, running twin trails up the muscled ridges of her divine torso up to those perky mounds.
Stiff buds jut against my palms, and I pinch the one I don’t palm, rolling it roughly between my fingers.
This time, she doesn’t have to ask me to go harder.
Instead, in the wake of a cry that goes straight to my cock, she shrieks, “Stop.”
That panicked, high-pitched yelp that cracks my universe down the middle in the blink of an eye.
It’s one of those moments. In an instant, my hands fall away from her body, and I roll off of her.
I wind up on my knees on the rug, prone between her still-parted thighs.
I swallow thickly and rein myself in the fuck back—before I do something stupid like burying my face in her pussy and replacing any other feeling in her body with pleasure.
Her hands, once she extricates them from beneath herself, shake.
I force my gaze to her flushed face. Nadya doesn’t look back at me. She’s too busy panting up at the ceiling. I don’t consider the risk when my palms plant themselves at her knees.
I experience the repercussions a heartbeat after, when she’s smacking the shit out of me once again. She mixes it up. This time, she backhands me. Now, if only the heat lancing through my body were fury.
Unmistakable arousal pierces like an arrow through my belly.
Fuck, everything about this wildfire woman just gets me.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Nadya hisses.
Okay. Fine. Not everything.
The obvious, smartass remark is right there at the tip of my tongue. It falls out of my mouth in a curse when she shoves at my shoulders with considerable strength. I brace my core and rise to my feet with an irate roll of my eyes, striding a few steps away.
Still, my eyes never leave her pissed-off, heart-shaped face.
This is how I see it when her expression steels itself.
Dismay already brims inside me before she says, “Did you honestly believe I’d let you fuck me again?
” Let me? “You should’ve just gotten it over with when I was still unconscious, because that’s the only way I’d ever let you inside my body again. ”
The crude accusation turns my stomach.
“Nadya.” I grit her name out between clenched teeth like profanity.
It only fucking incites her. I see the knowledge of how she’s getting to me flare in her eyes. I’d objectively appreciate her cruelty if the wounds she inflicted weren’t so surprisingly deep.
“You thought,” she accuses, each word sharp as a razor-blade, “that because you’ve got me here, I’m at your mercy. So, what, you can take whatever you want from me, Zakharov?”
She spits the syllables of my family name out. Her disgust drips from each one, corrosive and toxic. It burns in all the wrong ways.
“Or maybe you need me fucking conscious now, while you fuck me, so no one can fight that marriage certificate you had handy, huh? All you need to do is consummate, and no annulment.”
The idea had never occurred to me. And I can’t admit it to her. I can’t admit that I didn’t think that far ahead. My satisfaction at seeing our names together—at making her fucking mine—had momentarily blinded me. She can’t know it. She doesn’t get to see that she makes me weak.
“Is that how your brothers did it?” I counter with a flat, cold smile.
I whip around and blaze a path toward the door she hasn’t located yet. She’s only managed to shriek, “Keep my brothers’ names out of your fucking m—” when the slam of the door behind me cuts her tirade off.
It’s fucking fine.
I get the fucking point.
Without a second look, I turn the lock twice, sealing her on the other side. It’s for her own fucking good. I need to get the hell away from her before I say something I just might regret later.
Part of me worries I won’t talk at all, in fact.
I could so easily wait for her to let the steam out—and then show her exactly why I want her conscious while I take her apart.
It would feel so fucking good to make her cry out for me.
To bring her to the edge over and over again.
I wouldn’t let up until her stomach was quivering in need for a release, her face red and breaths erratic, and the only words her perfect lips could form were I’m sorry and Please and Viktor.
Maybe not even then.
I fucking hate the way that this night has gotten away from me.
It isn’t as if I ever expected this to be simple, easy, or a never-ending parade of good times.
I’ve never been a man who conflates romantic notions with cold, hard reality.
This was never going to be a blissful wedding night, overflowing with sweet nothings and rose petals.
That’s no more Nadya’s style than it is mine.
An uphill battle is fine. I guess I didn’t know until now just how intent she is on hating me.
In assassinating my character to whatever extent that she fucking has to in order to achieve it.
Or maybe I just didn’t expect her hatred to fuck with me this hard.
I’d honestly thought I could cope effortlessly.
I have practice being loathed. Yet it’s different to be on the other side of Nadya’s, when I’ve already been acquainted with her adulation.
I roll my neck until tension releases with a pop of the joint, shove my frustration in my pockets alongside my itching hands, and force myself step after step away from her, all the way to the other end of the warehouse.
***
“So, safe to say the honeymoon didn’t last too long?” Maxim chortles the second I throw open the door to my makeshift office.
I glower at him and sink, exhausted, next to him. I eye the drink in his hand enviously and then pluck up the bottle of water from the table.
“I hate you, by the way,” I say.
My cousin, and, unfortunately, my closest friend, grins, unbothered. “As much as the missus hates you?”
Touché. “She doesn’t fucking hate me.”
“No?” He tilts his head to shoot me a look of insulting disbelief. “Well, I guess that’s good. I always knew I’d be your best man, Vik, but I didn’t envision being witness to a notary assisting an unconscious woman in signing…”
He has the good sense to trail off when the plastic protests within my grip.
“Not funny yet. Got it.”
I sigh heavily, my chest deflating. “No. It’s not fucking funny.”
That, of course, doesn’t mean I wish for him to go.
He knows this. It’s why he stays there on the couch, right next to me, and slaps my knee.
I don’t need consoling, I maintain. But the companionship does stave off some of the weight bearing down on my chest. It does help to have Maxim by my side, even with the mockery, because there have never been any conditions or calculations in his support.
Since we were troublemaking little fucks with knobby knees and the same-colored hair we wear in vastly different styles, we’ve just been solid.
He doesn’t have to say it out loud for me to know he thinks I’m batshit fucking insane. Kind of like he just knows that I don’t need to hear his doubts aired. I don’t need this questioned, because I’m well-aware of this being the most unhinged fucking shit I’ve ever pulled.
I can’t expect him to stay quiet forever, however.
Barely a minute goes by, and he pipes up, “Did I hear glass shattering?”
Despite myself, I find myself snorting. “Yes. My lovely bride threw a glass at my head.”
The faintest hint of my amusement is enough permission for Max to begin snickering at my expense anew. “So, what you’re saying is that you found someone to match your freak?”
I roll my eyes, the corners of my mouth threatening to upturn. “No. She’s not like me. She’s…”
“Hotter?”
I whip my head around to snap at him. “Yes. But fuck off. Don’t talk about her like that. Besides, that’s not what I fucking meant. She’s just different.”
“Different,” Maxim echoes. “Please, tell me you’re not about to peddle me some ‘not like other girls’ shit. Should I call my sister?”
Anastasia would have a field day with that, it’s true.
Still, “I’m not afraid of your fucking sister, bitch,” I say.
“Oh-ho-ho, I’ll be sure to tell Stasi that.”
In the background, a cacophonous crash sounds from what is obviously the other side of the warehouse. Nadya, I think. Just the thought of her name, even now, has inexplicable warmth spreading through my chest.
Slowly, I shake my head.
It surprises me more than him, I’ll bet, that I’m willing to talk about this. I am not a sentimental motherfucker. Though this isn’t sentimentality.
It feels like nothing more than a fact to say, “No, that’s not it.
It isn’t about matching. Her freak, whatever the hell that means, wars with mine.
She cuts right through all the shit and calls it like it is.
There’s no performance there. It is what it is with her.
Impossible, difficult, fucking insane. It just clicked with her. It was like when a horse births—”
“Horse birth? You’re talking about fucking horse birth right now?” he squawks, his face twisting in disgust.
“Shut up,” I grunt, the back of my neck heating. “Yes! A horse just gives way to another fucking horse. It isn’t this fragile, goo-covered baby.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s goo involved, man.”
I glare at him. “It’s a fully-formed thing, Max. Ready to run.”
Maxim says nothing. I fill the lull with a gulp of water. I don’t choke on it when he points out, “She’s a Yuri, though, man. And it sounds like the only place she wants to run is away from your unhinged ass.”
It isn’t untrue. “Because she doesn’t have all the information I do. Yet.”
“Okay, and what about Anton?”
“What about him?”
He scoffs, another laugh. “Viktor, come on. Even if Anton can somehow wrap his head around what you’re pulling with the Solntsevskaya, you really think you can get away with this?”
No, I think.
But I say, “There’s no point in thinking that far ahead, Max. You know that. Not in our world. It’s a smart next move. I really believe that. Her being off the map will give the Yuris something new to fucking worry about, which buys me time. I’m so close to pulling New York off.”
Maxim downs his drink, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling. When he speaks again, the bite of mockery has vacated his tone entirely. “This is a mighty big hole you’re digging yourself into, Bratan.”
Brother, he calls me. The closest thing I have to one. A helluva sight closer than Anton has ever fucking been.
I slide him a wry smile.
“A leap looks a lot like falling until you hit the ground on the other side, Maxie. You ever think about that?”