Chapter Eight #2
I stopped at the edge of the doorway, half-hidden in shadow, watching her. She looked different today. Lighter, somehow. She was wearing a soft cream sweater that made her skin glow, and her hair was loose around her shoulders in waves that I remembered tangling my fingers through just hours ago.
When Anya said something particularly outrageous—I couldn’t hear what, but I knew my sister—Mila laughed. The sound was soft and disarming. It was completely unguarded, hitting me like a fist to the sternum.
I’d seen Mila frightened. I’d seen her wary, angry, and defiant. I’d seen her come apart beneath me with my name on her lips. But this—this ease, this moment of genuine happiness—was something new. Something she was giving, not something I was taking.
And it was that realization, more than anything else, that made me understand just how dangerous this was becoming.
Somewhere between the gunfire at the engagement party and the way she’d curled into me last night like she belonged there, I’d lost my footing entirely.
And now I was standing at the mouth of a cliff, looking down into something terrifying and inevitable.
This wasn’t what I planned.
But fate, I’d come to learn, doesn’t care about plans.
Anya spotted me first. “Alexei! Done hiding in your cave?”
Mila’s head turned, and our eyes met.
The laughter died on her lips, replaced by something else. Something that coiled between us like smoke—heat and a fragile awareness that neither of us had named yet. She didn’t look away. Didn’t retreat into the careful distance she’d maintained during our first days of marriage.
As I approached, she chuckled at something Anya said as she stood. I swallowed, tamping down my surprise as she started walking towards me. She met me halfway.
Her quiet defiance—that refusal to pretend last night didn’t happen, that willingness to face whatever it was between us—sealed something inside me that I couldn’t admit out loud.
“Mila,” I uttered, my voice low and my tone reverent.
“Alexei.” Her voice was steady, but I could see the color rising in her cheeks.
“Well. I should probably go check on… literally anything else. The flowers. The hedges. That very interesting rock over there,” Anya remarked from where she stood a few feet away from us.
“Anya—” Mila started, but my sister was already turning to the side, shooting me a look that clearly said ‘don’t be an idiot’ before she swept back toward the house with all the subtlety of a freight train.
And then we were alone.
Carefully but deliberately, I brought my hands to her waist. It was the first time I held her like this.
It was intimate and casual at the same time.
I liked it. Too much. Which explained my pulling her into my chest and pressing a kiss to her cheek.
I could feel the rapid beating of her heart, and I would have been surprised if mine weren’t doing something similar.
I didn’t know how to say any of the things crowding my throat.
I watched you dream.
You’re beginning to terrify me.
“Last night,” she started, stepping back to look up at me. Then she stopped. And then started again. “Last night wasn’t about protection.”
It was not a question. But I answered anyway.
“No,” I uttered, patting her hair down as my eyes gazed into her warm ones.
“Then what was it about?”
I could lie now. I could wrap this in pretty words or cold dismissals, could give her the version of myself that I’d spent years perfecting—the one that kept women at a safe distance. But when I looked at Mila, at the way she was watching me with that devastating honesty, I found I didn’t want to.
“You,” I said simply. “It was about you.”
Her breath caught. “Alexei—”
“I don’t know how to do this,” I continued, the admission feeling like pulling shrapnel from a wound.
“I don’t know how to be… anything close to what you deserve.
I’ve spent my entire life building walls, Mila.
And then you—” I stopped, my jaw tight. “Hell, I don’t know…
but I do know that you… you matter. To me. A lot.”
For a long moment, Mila didn’t speak. She just looked at me, making me feel more exposed than I’d ever felt with my clothes off. Then, slowly, she blinked.
“I know what you are.” She reached up, her fingers cool as they brushed against my jaw. “I know what you do. And I’m still here.”
I caught her wrist—not roughly, but firmly—and pulled her against me again, but with a hunger that had been building all day beneath the work strategy and carefully maintained facade.
Her mouth opened on a soft gasp, and I swallowed it in an open-mouthed kiss.
I kissed her with none of the gentleness I’d tried to show her last night.
This kiss was raw. Desperate. The truth of what I felt stripped down to bone and nerve. Mila made a sound low in her throat and kissed me back just as fiercely, her hands fisting the material of my shirt.
And I realized with a clarity that was almost painful that she was the most dangerous thing I’d ever allowed myself to want.
When we finally broke apart, both breathing hard, Mila’s lips were swollen, and her eyes were bright with something that made everything in me hunger for more.
“You’ve been drinking,” she remarked, her soft voice devoid of any accusation.
“Yeah. I drink whenever I want to. Morning or midnight,” I told her truthfully.
She gave me a small smile, like it was the answer she’d been expecting.
“Tonight,” I uttered into her ear, “I’m taking you to bed again.”
Her cheeks flushed, but she didn’t look away. “Tonight?”
I raised a questioning brow, and that was when I realized what her question meant.
Oh, no.
It might be too soon. Yesterday was her first time.
The last thing I wanted was for her to see me as a sex-hungry beast who only cared about his pleasure.
“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” I corrected myself, shaking my head.
A look of confusion crossed her face. “Wh… what? Why the sudden change of mind? I don’t mean to… I totally understand you might be busy… You have work stuff to handle and… ”
I interrupted her. “It just crossed my mind that you might be sore.”
“Oh?” Her eyelids dropped before she went on. “I’m okay. You were very gentle.”
“Are you sure?” I questioned, lifting her chin and forcing her to look up at me again.
“I am.”
“Well, then nothing can stop me from taking you again tonight.”
She swallowed but didn’t say anything.
Then I chuckled.
“What’s funny?”
“You, Mila. You ramble when you’re… nervous or shy.”
“Who said that?” she asked, her tone a bit higher than usual.
“Nobody,” I replied, shrugging. “You did it just now. And today was the second time.”
She pursed her lips before releasing them again, squinting her eyes playfully. “On the balcony.”
I nodded in affirmation, and she chuckled.
“It’s adorable. I like it. Not that I like you being worried or nervous to the point of rambling, but I like hearing you talk. Really talk. Not just two words.”
A slow smile crossed her face before she looked to the side.
My hands cupping her face and bringing her to look at me, I told her, “I have some things to deal with. I’ll join you in the room later.” “Okay,” she answered softly just before I dropped a kiss to her lips.
“You’re beautiful,” I told her, my forehead touching hers. “So beautiful.”
Her smile widened.
**********
The rest of the day passed in a strange, suspended tension.
I returned to my office, to the calls and careful orchestration of power that kept my world spinning. But my mind kept drifting back to the garden. To the way Mila had looked at me with fear and desire tangled together—and had chosen the desire anyway.
I’d never wanted to keep something the way I wanted to keep her.
By the time night fell and the estate settled into its nighttime rhythms, I felt like I’d been wound too tight—a spring compressed past its breaking point. I finished my last call, poured myself another drink, and tried to remember the last time I’d felt this off-balance.
I couldn’t.
When I finally made my way upstairs, the hallway was quiet except for the soft sound of my footsteps on the carpet. I paused outside our bedroom door—because it was ours now, wasn’t it? Not just mine. Not anymore.
I opened the door.
Mila was standing by the window, backlit by the lights of the city beyond. She had changed into something simple—a champagne silk robe that skimmed her curves and made her skin look like honey in the low light.
When she turned to face me, there was no hesitation in her eyes. Only certainty.
“I thought you got stuck with work,” she said softly.
“I promised.”
I closed the door behind me, the click of the lock sounding impossibly loud in the quiet room. I moved towards her slowly, giving her time to change her mind. To say she didn’t want it.
She didn’t.
Instead, when I reached for her, she came willingly. Eagerly. Her hands slid up my chest to loop around my neck, and I let myself sink into the warmth of her, into the impossible gift of being wanted by someone who knew exactly what kind of monster I was.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said in the garden,” Mila whispered against my mouth. “Is that crazy?”
“If it is, then I’m just as insane.” My hands found her waist, then slid lower, pulling her flush against me so she could feel exactly what she did to me. “Because I couldn’t stop thinking about you either.”
This time, when I kissed her, it was slower.
Deeper. A claiming and a surrender all at once.
I walked her backward toward the bed, her fingers already working the buttons of my shirt.
There was a desperation to her movements that matched mine—like we were both trying to crawl inside each other’s skin, to get close enough that nothing could come between us.
When the backs of her knees hit the mattress, Mila fell back with a soft gasp, and I followed her down.
The robe fell open, revealing smooth skin and soft curves.
I took my time mapping every inch of her with my hands and mouth.
Learning what made her sigh, what made her arch, what made her say my name like a prayer.
“Alexei,” she breathed, her nails digging into my shoulders. “Please—”
“I know.” I kissed the hollow of her throat, the swell of her breast, the soft skin of her stomach. “I know, milaya.”
I took her harder than last night. Slower, too—savoring every gasp and tremor, every moment she came undone beneath me, every moment I came apart over her beautiful body.
There was no distance now. No pretense that this was anything other than what it was: the kind of consuming connection that rewrote the architecture of a man’s soul.
When Mila finally shattered, my name breaking from her lips like something sacred, I followed her over the edge with a rawness I hadn’t felt in years. Maybe ever.
Afterward, we lay tangled together in the darkness, sweat cooling on skin and heartbeats gradually slowing. Mila’s head was on my chest again, her fingers tracing idle patterns over my ribs—over the tattoos she couldn’t see but must be able to feel.
“What does this one mean?” she asked drowsily, her fingertip following what I knew was the outline of a crowned wolf on my left side.
“Loyalty,” I rasped. “To family. To the brotherhood.”
“And this one?” She traced higher, toward my shoulder.
“The coordinates of a place I can never go back to.”
Mila lifted her head to look at me, and even in the dim light, I could see the questions in her eyes. But she didn’t push. She just settled back against me with a soft sigh, and I was grateful for the mercy of her silence.
“I meant what I said earlier,” I told her quietly. “I don’t know how to do this. How to be… soft. But I’m trying.”
“I know,” she answered, pressing a kiss into my chest, right over my heart. “That’s enough.”
It shouldn’t be. A man like me should never be enough for a woman like her—someone good and gentle and untouched by blood.
But as I held her in the darkness, feeling the steady rhythm of her breathing, I allowed myself to believe what she said.
Just for tonight.
Tomorrow, I’d go back to being the monster the world needed me to be. I’d strategize and do whatever it took to keep Moretti away from what’s mine. I’d be ruthless, cold, and uncompromising, because that was what survival in this world demanded.
But here, now, with Mila warm and trusting in my arms, I would let myself be just a man.
In the silence that wrapped around us, a growing, dangerous truth revealed itself: I would never let her go.