Chapter 13 - Nadya
There’s no relief to be found in the pretense of romance falling away. On the way back, Viktor drives the motorcycle, and I haunt the spot behind him. I’m there, except for how I’m not.
It’s funny, but I always thought, whenever I heard someone talk about it, that an ‘out-of-body experience’ sounded gnarly but fun. Curious, at the very least. The reality is something else.
There’s nothing fun about it.
Do you hate me, or just yourself?
His voice chases me every step of the way.
The minute we park outside the warehouse, I rush away from him. I don’t know if he thinks about grabbing me. I don’t fucking care if he does. All I know is that I need to get as far as I can goddamn get from Viktor motherfucking Zakharov.
But what can the distance do?
Yes, my stomach aches. Yes.
I can’t think about anything but how badly I need to wash him away. I need to scrub off the indelible marks he has left, even if I have to take off a layer of skin. I have to at least fucking try. How else am I going to live with myself?
When I awoke this morning, disoriented and aching, never in my wildest imagination could I have considered the day would end this way.
God. I couldn’t have joked that I would wind up huddling in the bathroom I’d started the day disparaging, shedding my clothes like they were on fire, burning all over with the knowledge that the damp state of my underwear would be courtesy of my kidnapper.
The very man I had wanted to kill had reduced me to a shuddering, squirming mess around his deft fingertips. I can’t bear to face my reflection. A twist of a faucet, and I step beneath the showerhead as it hisses to life. I take the bite of the cold.
Don’t I fucking deserve it?
No. I deserve worse.
They need to create a new brand of self-loathing for my ass.
It punishes me until it heats, and then, it scalds me anew.
I tip my face up to the spray and cry out, letting the droplets pool in my open mouth, like I can drown him out of my system. Yet, still, beneath my squeezed-shut eyes, smudges of memories ignite, and all of them star him.
Whatever paltry cover I still had left to cling to with my clenched fists is gone now. The defense that I hadn’t known he was the same man who’d been tormenting all the most important people in my life means nothing now. Those claims are moot.
I’ve obliterated them in the span of a lung-blistering orgasm.
What’s worse is that it wasn’t enough. I knew in the breath Viktor withdrew his hand from between my legs, just to plunge those shining fingers into his mouth, that it could never be enough.
I’m broken.
I am a fucked-up, performance art exhibit titled Self-Destructive Dumpster Fire.
There’s no other goddamn explanation for the way my hands linger against the jut of my clavicle where Viktor had first kissed me.
He hadn’t gone for my mouth. His head had dipped, and his lips had brushed a burning line across my collarbone.
His hot breath had fanned over the bone as he’d told me, “Come to bed with me.”
The memory of it—it conflates with the sensation of his palms kneading the swell of my breasts.
Even now, here, in this makeshift confessional for my unforgivable sins, the angry peaks of my nipples crave the pinch of his fingers in place of my own.
It is his palm this body needs to drag down soft skin to grind the heel against my pelvis.
This swollen clit demands the flick of his tongue.
No amount of scalding water can baptize it out of me.
My hair unravels from its thick braids, but nothing can wash out of my head the vision of Viktor shoving me back onto the mattress.
In my head, the sound of my giddy laughter goes off like fireworks, thrilled by the way my body had bounced on the bed before his body had covered it.
I can see the flashes of my glittering dress shoved around my hips and his head between my thighs, all the moments I could snatch while he had my eyes rolling back into my fucking head.
I squeeze my eyes shut and try to replace him. Fuck, I try so hard to wrench him out of my head and let him swirl down the fucking drain.
My fingers do a poor imitation of the hard stripe he’d licked up my slit. There’s no replacing the low, filthy drag of his laughter, branded into the apex of my thigh.
They still feel how swollen he’s left me, nerve-endings sensitive and still so, so keen for more, more, more of him. His touch. His brand on my body, like a scarlet V sliced into my heaving chest with the same boldness he’d slit his own palm to have me at his mercy.
I shake with need, consumed by him.
Memories layer one atop another, like fresh, wet paint: of him flipping me onto my stomach.
There was no crevice of my body he’d left unclaimed by his tongue.
He’d claimed me, and then he’d pulled me on top, held me poised atop the blunt head of his torturously thick cock.
“You can take it,” I can still hear him urge, a command and a plea, exhaled in guttural desperation.
The shower can muffle my whimpers here and now, but where is the mute button for the sounds of our sweat-slick skin slapping together that fills my traitorous head?
It doesn’t exist.
It isn’t possible to wash away the shame that burns me from the inside out when his name leaves my lips in a ruined cry. My knees buckle from the force of my sudden, vicious orgasm, my pussy spasming through wave after wave of wicked pleasure—and I think, Good. You belong on your knees.
And it doesn’t fucking matter whether it’s the shower or tears that blur my vision. I can’t stand the sight of myself anymore anyway.
***
Without the white noise of the shower, it’s maddeningly still.
I stay beneath the spray until my feverish flesh prunes. Even after, I take the longest time to towel off. Eventually, though, there’s just no fighting it. I have no clothes to wear, unless I want to change back into the ones that lay discarded on the bathroom floor.
My dripping hair sticks to my skin and frizzes against the terry, soaking the towel I knot at my chest in record time.
There’s no choice but to open the door.
Somehow, I just know Viktor awaits me on the other side.
And yeah, damn right, he’s right there, sprawled out on his couch like he’s posing for a GQ shoot.
The sleeves of his maroon sweatshirt are pushed up to his elbows, unveiling the Zakharov family crest inked plain and day into his skin. Why the fuck hadn’t I noticed it the night we first met? Or had I, and I’d just ignored it?
I deserve no more trust than Viktor deserves no less disdain when his whiskey eyes drag over me like he’s trying to eat me up with his eyes. I’m not Little Red Riding Hood, but I could be, if she’d really wanted to get railed by the Big, Bad Wolf.
Indignantly, I clutch my towel tighter around my body, fucking daring it to make its hunger for him known. I’d set myself on fire before I let him touch me again.
“You know,” Viktor drawls, obscenely arrogant, “I could’ve helped you out, Nadya. You needed only to ask.”
My stomach flips, stricken.
Fuck no. I refuse to give him a reaction to the slow, filthy once-over he treats me to again and again.
The thing is, it isn’t unexpected. I’d already considered the likelihood of Viktor rubbing in my body’s fickle response to him.
There is no erasing the knowing gleam to his gaze, because there is no undoing what has inspired it.
Whichever way this situation is turned, I have allowed him to make this mess of me.
I have craved him, and he has no reason to deny me.
I’m his bait.
It burns me up that he can undo me. How seamlessly it happens, our bodies slotting together, like we’re two beasts in the wild. As if there is no reason—instead of there being piles and piles of them—that put his motives into question. Whatever the fuck those motives even are.
It shouldn’t even matter to me that there are any justifications at all.
“If you wanted to fucking help me, you’d let me talk to them.”
It’s like blowing out a match. In a single huffed breath, the spark in Viktor’s eyes gutters out. It is a sight that should bring vindication. But no satisfaction is to be found.
“Them,” he repeats flatly.
He isn’t asking.
“My family,” I spit regardless, my fury at myself augmenting with the loathing I harbor for this man I desire the most. “You know them? You like to torment them. You’ve gone after the people they love, just to hurt them the worst? Yuris—that name ring a fucking bell?”
“I’m familiar.” Viktor’s expression is so passive, it would be unnerving if I weren’t already so far gone. I’m already unraveling. There’s no way to reverse it.
My laughter is mirthless and pained. “God, you really don’t give a fuck, do you? It doesn’t matter to you that you took me off the fucking street while I was on the way to see my sister. You don’t care that my brothers will, eventually, find you. They will find out what—what you’ve done—”
He stares at me. “By which you mean marrying you.”
“That was not marriage. This is a fucking hostage situation!” I shriek, scrambling on the spot for something—for anything—that I can hurl at his thick fucking skull.
But then I’d risk dropping my towel.
Even in the haze of my mental breakdown, I know there’s only one place that I can go. I can’t risk it. I’ve already risked so much that I should never have risked.
Or maybe I don’t.
There’s no desire left in Viktor’s vacant features. Where there had been an appetite, there is now an abyss.
The words are as vacant as his expression as he rises to his feet and says, “There is a bag under the bed you can take clothes from. Thank you for letting me know how you feel. Goodnight.”
And that’s it.
That’s all he fucking says before he walks away from me, with the same cruel haste he’d abandoned me last night, without a second glance. He leaves me standing in this dressed-up prison. I see no fucking victory in the fact that he doesn’t lock me in this time.
He’s already handcuffed me to the spell I’m under.
Together, we’ve damned me to this fate.
Unlike my enraged rampage last night, I stand here with my joints locked and my heart sinking. I stand there and watch him leave, disappearing out of view past the sliding doors that Maxim had appeared from this morning.
I stand there until it becomes undeniable, how fucking freezing the concrete is beneath my damp feet. The pipes all around the warehouse groan in discordant, haunting music. All the while, I am outside of my body.
Somewhere along the line, I may as well have floated up outside my body.
Like a spider on the wall, I spectate myself walking into the room I had spent hours trying to break out of.
I watch myself move on autopilot, extricating the biggest t-shirt I can find.
I bear witness to the way I inhale the warm, musky smell of Viktor’s skin from the fabric that swathes my worn-out body.
I feel inescapably fucking stupid, seeing tears fill my eyes and blinking against the blurring, just for the tears to spill over regardless.
The sting of hot tears against my raw cheeks is nothing compared to the corrosion of this awful shame that consumes me from the inside out.