Chapter 17 - Nadya
He can fuck my body as hard as he wants and know it won’t break.
There is unparalleled fulfillment in that.
For him, obviously, but also for me. There's plenty I love about our sex, yet nothing more so than the athleticism with which you will ravage each other. This—the experience of being with Viktor—is such a wild, frenetic fucking ride, I can’t believe I ever ran out on him because I was worried about stillness.
He is as incapable of stillness as I am.
Our every movement seems to crescendo into one collision or another.
Had it really been only three days ago that I had been scouring this very warehouse for secrets and exits?
Now, only a few hours into surrendering to the passion between us, we’ve more or less christened every flat surface inside it.
From getting railed on top of the desk in the office behind the secret door, to a spooning-session-turned-sexual-encounter, to him using my throat for his release in the shower.
.. It's wild that I ever thought of Viktor as a stranger at all.
He is the opposite of a stranger.
I'm on my stomach on the kitchen floor, my chin propped in the cradle of his palm, and it is the most natural thing in the world, the way our flesh wetly slaps together. His hips are driving with such force that my ass ripples from the force of impact.
He knows, as he hears my cries turning more and more high-pitched, that I need his kiss now.
I need him to ground me with the hot, slick slide of his tongue against mine.
I need his groaning my name into my mouth and his thumbs digging into the dimples at the bottom of my spine, digging like he wants to deepen the craters to fill with pools of his cum.
That is, if he can bear to leave it anywhere but inside me.
I reached behind myself, my control quickly fraying—I grapple, clutching at fistfuls of his hair with both hands, crying out and devouring the groans and grunts he relinquishes in return.
I’m so close.
I feel like I’ve been fucking cumming for hours.
Like my body’s forgotten how to do anything else.
“Fuck, baby,” Viktor pants.
“Yeah,” I whine back. “Yeah, honey, don’t—don’t stop, give it to—”
The door explodes off its hinges.
In the midst of our entanglement, I'm not certain I haven't floated up outside my body again.
My first thought is that I've had an orgasm to earth shattering.
Surely my skull has cracked open from the force of his frenetic thrusts, and the milky white of my vision and the ringing in my ears are the beginning stages of a concussion.
The second is the ludicrous belief that a drunken driver has driven a truck through the warehouse wall.
As if he were my personal armadillo shell, Viktor curves his body over mine like a shield.
Like this, he protects me from the blow of shrapnel.
Nothing can save me from the concussive bang that reverberates in my very teeth.
Suddenly, distinctly, I am dragged back to a scene of bedlam months ago, when all hell broke loose, and a bullet punctured its way through my shoulder.
That moment had been the scariest of my life so far.
The boulder of dread in my stomach insists it's time for it to be dethroned as such.
I’m as helpless as a lost little girl, reduced to looking around the room, dazed and gasping for air that has left this smoke-filled room. All I register is the whiskey brown of Viktor’s eyes locking onto mine. His lips part, and I'm ready to hear my name from them.
Instead, a body collides with his tackling him to the ground. This is an apocalypse. I have approximately one second to register cool concrete against my bare back before I recall that I am, in fact, naked as the day I was born.
My system glitches.
This space, our haven, is filled with figure after figure cloaked in dark clothing, lethal weapons aimed every which way, step—and then it is filled with my brothers.
Leonid. Valentin. Miron.
Only then do I realize that the dark blur that tackled my lover to the ground… the man ruthlessly plowing his fists one after the other, over and over, is my brother, too. It’s Iosif. It’s Iosif who’s—
Gasping on sticky, garbled sounds, Viktor reaches for me.
His hand shakes. Blood drools out of his mouth where his lip has split open.
His face is swelling already. The whine of a wounded animal punctures the chaos.
It's only when Iosif whips around and stares at me, like he's looking right through me, that I realize that the wounded animal is me.
“Iosif.” It’s Trifon.
I never even saw him come.
He won’t look my way. None of my brothers will.
I understand when Iosif rips off his jacket like he doesn’t care if he dislocates his shoulder with the force.
He shrouds my shoulders in it, effectively covering me up.
At some point, I must’ve pulled my knees up to my chest. He slides his arm beneath those knees and scoops me up against his chest like a suffering bird.
“I can’t,” I wheeze, my head shaking. I can’t. I can’t.
All the contents of my stomach explode from my sandpaper mouth, and Iosif only just manages to tip me sideways. I choke on it, shaking and shaking and shaking.
“I’m going to fucking kill him,” my brother swears, and only when I look at his face do I notice his reddened eyes and the wetness on his face.
He’s crying? Why—why is he crying?
“What did he fucking do to you?” His voice comes out ragged, destroyed. “I knew something had to be wrong. I knew you wouldn’t keep secrets from me. I’m here. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“She’s mine,” someone—Viktor, it’s my Viktor—whines mindlessly.
He’s crawling across the floor on his hands and knees. He’s crawling to me. He’s—
Valentin comes so swiftly that neither Viktor nor I sees it coming. Iosif steers me away, bodily yanking me when I begin to shriek, “NO!” Val kicks at him with every ounce of force in his body, and the sound Viktor’s body makes on impact against the cabinets makes my stomach lurch again.
Bile floods my mouth, and senseless sobs wrack through my body.
No, no, no. No! This can’t be happening. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
“Get her out of here, Iosif. Go,” Trifon orders.
I’ve never seen fear in my eldest brother’s eyes before.
But it’s the last thing I process before Iosif’s chest becomes my whole world.
His arms are a vice around me, and he seems to run more than he walks, moving as quick as he can, it has arms with my broken body, trying to get me as far away from the chaos as possible.
I've already been stashed in a nondescript black van before I understand.
Every 3 seconds, my brother shoots me a look of concern, abject horror, and bone-deep devastation.
It takes this for me to piece together, parsing through the sheer flabbergasting mortification of being found in such a state by not one, not 2, but all of my brothers, to fully grasp what the subject of these grievous sentiments is.
“Stop!” I scream bloody murder. “Iosif—Iosif, you have to fucking stop!”
His hands won't stop smoothing through my hair. His hands become vice-like shackles around my arms when I try to hurl my body out of the van. I'm shrieking so loud, wearing my throat raw, that I don't even hear what he says. It doesn't matter.
I am here, kept and protected, taken out of sight and away from a reality that I have been a key participant in orchestrating.
Meanwhile, inside the warehouse, my counterpart and perpetrator and lover is being beaten.
They are beating him. They're going to kill him.
They'll do it not because they have figured out that he was the one who captured me on the street that fortuitous afternoon.
They will do it because they saw us—his body on top of mine and my screams spilling forth—and their first conclusion was that Viktor was inside of me without my consent.
He is barbaric in their eyes. They believe he has brutalized me.
They don't know that he would cut off his own hand before ever hurting me.
They don't, can't, won't understand that he would die for me.
I have to make them. “I need you to hear me. Iosif, I need you to listen to what I’m telling you. Viktor hasn’t hurt me. You have to stop them. He has never forced himself on me, I swear on your life.”
“Nadya.”
His face is grey. Now he looks like the one who’s going to be sick.
My lungs constrict in response to the stress.
Every breath subsequently leaves me in tears-soaked hiccups and gasps.
Through it all, I never stop pleading. “It’s not what you think!
He’s never forced himself on me! We met before I knew his name.
I lost my virginity to him, please. Please, you have to stop them! ”
The truth I should’ve told him weeks ago spills out of me now, in mindless spurts of words that string together so closely they’re almost slurred. I know, without looking at Iosif’s face, that it’s too little too late.
Maybe it's enough if it at least saves him.
Viktor.