Chapter 35 Polina
Polina
With seven hours left before Lev walks into hell, I give up on sleep.
I get up before I can talk myself out of it.
The west wing is quiet at this hour. One guard nods when I pass the junction, and I keep walking before he can ask why I’m wandering hallways in the middle of the night with bare feet. I have an answer, and it is humiliating, so I move faster.
Lev opens the door before I knock. He’s already dressed in dark trousers, a dark shirt, and a tactical jacket. He looks at me standing in the corridor in my sleep shorts, and he drags in a long breath.
“After everything, were you really going to leave in the morning with things like this between us?” I ask.
He looks around before he steps back and opens the door wider. I go in because I have already made my worst decision of the night by coming here.
Maps are scattered all over the table next to a glass he hasn’t touched. He has been sitting in this room alone, waiting for morning, and the sight of it pulls something loose in my chest that I can’t afford to lose right now.
“I thought you came to say goodbye,” he comments.
“I came because I couldn’t stay away.” I get it out before I can dress it in something more dignified. “And for the record, I hate that.”
He crosses the room to me, and I hold my ground because I always hold my ground, but my pulse hammers with every step. When he stops close enough that I have to tip my chin up, his eyes move over my face with the attention that has always made me feel both entirely seen and completely undone.
“You should go back to your room,” he tells me.
He doesn’t move away. Neither do I.
The space between us is nothing. I can feel his body heat through my sweater, and we both stand here doing the very adult thing of pretending we can’t. His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly one second before they come back up.
The control he usually carries dissolves right in front of me, and what replaces it is something I’ve never seen from him before. Not want alone, though that’s there, but something closer to desperation. Like he’s out of time and fully aware of it.
“I wrote you a letter tonight.” He pauses once, then pushes through it. “In case I don’t come back.”
“Don’t,” I snap.
“There are things in it I should have said months ago.” He takes one more step, and now nothing separates us but the decision neither of us has made yet.
“Say them now,” I tell him. “To my face.”
He looks at me for one long, destructive moment. Then his hand finds the back of my neck, and he walks me backward against the wall with his forehead dropping to mine. His breath hits my mouth, and I relish in how familiar it feels.
“I know I don’t deserve this,” he mumbles. “I know what I did. I’m not asking you to forget it.”
“Then what are you asking?”
“Nothing.” He slides his thumb along my nape, and my knees lose the structural integrity I was counting on. “I’m not asking for a single thing.”
He kisses me then, the way a man does when he’s run out of reasons not to and time has finally called his bluff.
Both of his hands cup my face, and his full weight flattens my back against the wall.
I grab his jacket and pull him in, and the sound he makes against my mouth is low and broken and nothing like any version of him I’ve seen hold himself together in front of men who wanted him dead.
He swivels us and walks me toward the bed without losing contact with my mouth.
When the backs of my knees find the mattress, he steps back.
He lifts my sweater over my head slowly, nowhere near teasing tonight, paying attention to every inch of me like he needs to memorize all of it before morning comes and takes this from him.
He unhooks my bra and slides my sleep shorts and underwear down in one move before he steps back and draws one long, unsteady breath through his nose.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he declares, and it doesn’t sound like a line. It sounds like relief.
I reach for his jacket and push it off. He lets me work through his shirt buttons while he holds eye contact, motionless except for the muscle working in his throat and the way his hands keep finding my waist like he can’t stop them.
Then he catches my face and kisses me again, slower this time, and his fingers thread into my hair while I finish with the buttons and push the fabric off his shoulders.
Then he sinks to his knees.
He looks up at me from the floor with both hands curled around my hips, and his face carries none of the armor he wears in every other room of this house. No performance. Just Lev.
“Don’t come here in the middle of the night and ask me to survive this without touching you,” he pleads against my stomach, and his mouth presses there first—just below my navel, not quite a kiss, more like a vow made quietly against skin. We both know what he’s thinking about when he does it.
Then he moves lower.
He takes his time, working me open with his tongue and two fingers.
When I fist my hand in his hair and tug, he groans against my clit, and the vibration moves all the way through my body.
He curls his fingers forward and finds the spot that makes my hips buck hard off his hand, and I have to grab his shoulder to stay upright.
“Lev,” I practically sob into the air.
“I’ve got you,” he says against me. “I’ve got you.”
He doesn’t rush. He builds me slowly, pulling back every time I get close, and every time I try to grind against his mouth, he eases off and holds my hips in place until I stop fighting him, and then he starts again from the beginning.
By the third time, I can’t stay quiet. He adds a third finger and works them deep while his tongue does something merciless to my clit, and I come with my fist in his hair and my heels dug into the floor, clenching through every wave while he stays with me until the last one passes.
He rises, strips the rest of his clothes, and lays me back across the mattress. I reach for him before he can second-guess a single thing.
“I need to feel you,” I tell him.
He wraps one hand around my thigh, holds it open, and pushes inside me in one slow, full stroke.
This time, we both go quiet. His forehead drops to mine, and he holds there without moving, just breathing, and I feel every inch of him and every terrible week between us and something underneath all of it that I’ve got no name for.
His cock fills me completely, and I feel him everywhere. His fingers dig into my hips with bruising force, and I want every one of them. I want proof of tonight on my body when he walks into that compound, because if he goes, I need something of his to stay behind.
Then he thrusts forward, hard enough to jerk me upward.
“You’re mine, and I should have said it long before tonight.”
He presses his mouth to my temple as he strokes again, deeper. “I know what I did. I’m not asking you to forgive it.” He pulls back and drives in hard enough that I have to grab his shoulder, and my nails score into his skin. “You were never a mission. Not for one single day.”
Those words land somewhere I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to wall off. I pull him down by the back of his neck and kiss him hard enough to hurt, and he makes a sound that belongs to a man who’s decided to lose entirely and found some peace in it.
He rolls my hips to a different angle, and a gasp tears out of me.
The rhythm he sets doesn’t give ground, and I stop pretending I want him to ease up.
He pulls back to the tip and drives forward, and I feel all of it, every stroke landing exactly where it needs to.
My body locks around him each time he pushes in, and the low sound he makes every time that happens is the most satisfying thing I’ve heard in weeks.
“This child is mine to protect.” His mouth drags over my skin. “I’m coming back to you both. That’s not negotiable.”
I look at him. The man who hid the worst truth I’ve ever received. The man who wrote a letter tonight because he wasn’t certain he’d make it back to say the words himself. He’s watching my face with those pale eyes that have always seen too much, and I can’t look away from him. I don’t want to.
“I know,” I confess, and I mean it.
He thrusts harder and slides his thumb down to my clit, and the layered pressure builds so fast it catches me off guard. I come before I can brace for it, with his name in my mouth, my heels locked behind his hips, and my body clenching around him in waves.
He follows within seconds with his palm flat on the headboard and his hips driving once, twice, and the sound he makes is quiet and devastated and nothing I’ll ever be able to unhear.
Afterward, he doesn’t move right away.
His mouth finds my shoulder, then my collarbone, and finally, the underside of my jaw. He’s not asking for anything. Not performing anything. Just staying, the way he always stays, and I let him.
I stare at the ceiling and try to find the version of myself that walked through that door certain and resolved. She seems to have gone somewhere without telling me.
“You have to come back,” I whisper into the darkness.
He lifts his head.
“That’s not negotiable,” I add, and throw his words back at him with everything behind them.
His face goes through something I’ve got no single word for. He takes my hand and brings it to his ribs—to the scar I stitched closed the night he came through my ER doors—and presses my palm flat against it.
“Understood,” he says against my skin.
I keep my palm there, feeling his heartbeat beneath it, and realize that somewhere between the night I saved his life and right now, coming home started meaning me.