27. Yaromir
YAROMIR
The next few weeks pass without another open attack.
That doesn’t mean nothing happens.
Nothing is sometimes more dangerous than gunfire. It gives men time to plan, to talk, to weigh which side of a war looks safer. It gives my father room to pretend he hasn’t lost control. It gives Dmitri room to sober up and become stupid in more creative ways.
So I stay alert.
The estate changes around us. More men at the gates. New cameras on the eastern wall. Rotating guards at night. Deliveries checked twice before they’re allowed past the service entrance. Staff screened again, quietly enough that Anya doesn’t hear about most of it.
She notices anyway.
She notices everything.
On the third day after the warehouse attack, she stands at the library window and says, “There are more guards near the stables.”
I look up from my papers. “Yes.”
“Were you going to mention it?”
“No.”
She turns from the window. “You are very committed to being stubborn and brooding.”
“It has served me well.”
“It must be lonely.”
That shuts me up longer than I like.
She knows it too, because her mouth softens, and then she looks away before the moment becomes something either of us has to name.
I take my revenge for the warehouse quietly at first.
A man from Chernov’s side tries to leave the city through a private airstrip and doesn’t make the flight.
The owner of the yard that provided the trucks signs over his river contracts before lunch and leaves town before dinner.
The surviving shooter talks after Viktor spends twenty minutes alone with him, and by morning three names reach my desk.
I don’t touch any of it.
That would be crude.
I take what matters.
A dock supervisor who laughed at my offer in October now lowers his eyes in my office and signs without reading the second page.
My father understands the message. He sends one back.
A black wreath at the gate.
Anya sees it before anyone can remove it. She stands on the gravel path in a gray coat, staring at the flowers. For a second, she looks very young.
Then she turns to me. “That is from him?”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“That he wants me to think about funerals.”
“Yours?”
“Possibly.”
Her face tightens. “Mine?”
I don’t answer quickly enough.
Her expression changes. She understands.
That night, she comes to me in bed without saying anything.
She climbs onto my lap while I’m still reading reports, takes the file from my hand, and sets it aside. Her hair is loose. She wears one of my shirts again, though she has more dresses now than she can wear in a month.
I prefer the shirt.
She knows.
“You’re brooding,” she says.
“I’m working.”
“You’re brooding with paper.”
I lean back against the headboard. “Do you intend to distract me?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Her mouth curves, and then she kisses me.
With Anya, kissing is never only kissing anymore. It turns quickly. Her hands slide into my hair. Her thighs tighten around my hips. She makes those small sounds she still tries to swallow, and I have learned every one of them.
The one when I bite her neck.
The one when I cup her tit and drag my thumb over her nipple.
The one when my hand slips between her legs and I find her already wet.
That night, I take my time with her.
I push the shirt open and kiss down her chest, over the marks I left the night before, then lower.
She grips the sheets when I put my mouth on her pussy, and by now she knows better than to pretend she doesn’t want it.
Her thighs open for me, her hips lifting into my mouth as I lick her clit slowly, then harder when she starts breathing my name.
She comes with one hand in my hair and the other pressed to her own mouth.
I pull her hand away. “No hiding.”
Her eyes open, dazed and furious. “The guards are outside.”
“They’re paid enough to survive hearing things.”
She laughs, breathless and embarrassed, and that laugh becomes a moan when I slide two fingers into her and work her through the last of it.
Later, when she’s still trembling, she reaches for my cock with a confidence she didn’t have before.
Not polished, not practiced, but eager. Honest. She watches my face while she strokes me, learning what makes my jaw lock, what makes my breath change, what makes my hand close around her wrist before she pushes me too far.
“You like this,” she whispers.
“You know I do.”
“I like knowing.”
That nearly undoes me.
I put her beneath me and fuck her until the headboard hits the wall and she forgets to be quiet. Her legs wrap around my waist, her nails dig into my back, and when she comes again around my cock, she looks at me like she’s choosing me all over again.
That’s the part I can’t defend against.
The sex is easy to understand. Hunger, heat, possession, release.
It’s the after that becomes dangerous.
The way she curls into me without asking. The way she falls asleep with her hand on my chest, as if my heartbeat is something she has the right to keep. The way I wake before dawn and find myself still holding her.
I have never held anyone in sleep. Now I do it like a habit.
She also knows the house and its staff like the back of her hand.
“They act like I need permission to breathe,” she says one afternoon.
“You don’t.”
“No, only to leave, ride, walk near the east wall, speak to delivery boys, open certain doors, or ask about anything interesting.”
“You have a gift for exaggeration.”
“I have a gift for accuracy.”
She says it in the breakfast room, wearing pale yellow, one bare foot tucked under her chair. Three weeks ago, she would have sat perfectly straight and waited for someone to tell her what role to play. Now she argues over tea and steals strawberries from my plate because she says mine look better.
I let her.
That’s another thing I don’t examine too closely.
Buran becomes hers before either of us admits it.
At first, she only visits the stables when I’m with her. She brings apples in the pockets of coats that cost more than some horses. The stablemen learn quickly not to warn her away every time Buran pins his ears back.
“He’s pretending,” she says on the fourth visit.
“He has bitten six people.”
“Maybe they were annoying.”
“They were.”
She looks at me. “See?”
I shouldn’t smile.
I do.
Buran takes the apple from her palm with insulting gentleness. The horse that has tried to kick two of my best men lowers his head so she can touch the white mark on his face.
The stable goes quiet when it happens.
Anya notices. Her hand stills. “Is this bad?”
“No,” I say. “It’s unusual.”
She strokes his face once, careful and slow. “He’s not terrible.”
“He is.”
“He likes me.”
“That doesn’t improve his character.”
“It improves his taste.”
This time, I do laugh.
Not much. Enough that the stableman looks at me like he has seen the dead rise.
A few days later, she asks to ride him.
“No.”
She doesn’t even blink. “You said that too quickly.”
“Because the answer is obvious.”
“You ride him.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Then teach me.”
“On another horse.”
“No.”
Now it’s my turn to stare at her.
She stands outside Buran’s stall in a dark riding habit that arrived that morning, fitted close to her waist, her hair braided back, her chin lifted in that stubborn way that makes me want to kiss her and lock her in a room at the same time.
“Anya.”
“I want to ride him.”
“He’s not a pet.”
“I know.”
“He throws experienced riders.”
“Then don’t let him throw me.”
The stableman suddenly becomes fascinated by a saddle strap.
I look at Buran. The horse looks back at me with the bored malice of an animal who enjoys inconvenience.
“No galloping,” I say finally.
Anya’s face changes. Victory. “You’ll teach me?”
“I will regret it.”
“Yes, probably.”
She learns quickly. Annoyingly quickly.
At first, she’s stiff in the saddle, hands too careful on the reins, thighs tense against Buran’s sides. He feels it immediately and tosses his head.
“Don’t fight his mouth,” I tell her, walking beside them with one hand near the bridle. “He hates that.”
“What does he not hate?”
“Apples. Silence. Me, occasionally.”
“And now me.”
“It’s not the time to become arrogant.”
She looks down at me. “You first.”
Buran snorts. Traitor.
I adjust her foot in the stirrup, my hand closing around her ankle. “Heel down.”
“I know.”
“Then do it.”
She mutters something under her breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, husband.”
The word are witty in her mouth, but it no longer sounds strange.
Some words become true through repetition. Others become true because I’ve accepted this.
By the end of the week, she can ride Buran around the enclosed arena without my hand on the bridle. By the end of the second, she takes him through the garden path at a walk while I ride beside her on a gray mare I barely tolerate.
“She looks smug,” Alexei says from the fence one afternoon.
“She is smug,” I answer.
Anya hears and turns in the saddle. “I’m accomplished.”
“You’re still not allowed to canter him.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were about to.”
She smiles at me, bright and wicked. “Eventually.”
Buran chooses that moment to toss his head, nearly ruining the effect.
She corrects herself before I have to move. Pride moves through me, satisfying, leaving some warm in its wake.
Aleksei sees this and smirks. “Look at you,” he says quietly. “Teaching your wife to ride your murderous horse. Domesticity suits you.”
“Leave.”
He grins. “No.”
Anya rides past us, pretending not to listen. “Alexei can stay.”
“Thank you, Madam Volkova.”
“No,” I say.
She glances back at me, smile widening. “Jealousy suits you less.”
Alexei nearly chokes laughing. I consider killing him again.
Most nights, I return to her with the city still on my skin.
Smoke. Anger. News I don’t share all of. Some days, my men bring me the kind of information that keeps empires alive and marriages impossible. Some days, my father’s name appears too often. Some days, Dmitri’s.
But when I go upstairs, Anya is there.
Reading in my chair. Lying across my bed. Sitting at the window in one of my shirts. Once, asleep with a book open on her chest and Buran’s apple hidden in the pocket of a robe.
I stand in the doorway too long.
I do that now.
Watch. Wait. Let the sight of her teach my body that there’s something inside my walls worth returning to.
When she wakes and sees me, she smiles before she remembers not to.
Those are the moments that undo me.
Not the sex, though the sex is enough to make me stupid.
Not the way she rides my cock with her head thrown back, tits flushed, mouth open around my name.
Not the way she lets me pin her wrists above her head when she wants to be overwhelmed, then bites my shoulder afterward because she hates that I know it.
Not even the mornings when she curls against me, soft and sore and satisfied, and demands coffee like a queen held hostage by a bad mattress.
One night, after I come home late from meeting the last man connected to the warehouse attack, she’s waiting awake.
“Is it done?” she asks.
I remove my cuff links. “Yes.”
She knows what I mean. I haven’t told her every detail, but she knows enough.
“The warehouse?”
“Paid for.”
“By whom?”
“Everyone who touched it.”
She sits against the headboard, quiet for a moment. Then she nods.
No horror. No approval either. Understanding.
I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. “Does that bother you?”
She studies me. “Should it?”
“Most people would say yes.”
“I’m learning most people lie about what they need men like you to do.”
I look at her. She moves closer, kneeling behind me, and rests her hands on my shoulders. Her fingers press into the tight muscle there, careful at first, then firmer when I don’t stop her.
“You’re tense,” she says.
“I had a long day.”
“Then come to bed.”
“Is that an order?”
Her mouth touches the back of my neck.
My eyes close.
“No,” she says. “A suggestion.”
Her hand slides down my chest. Then lower. My cock hardens under her palm, and I hear her smile against my skin.
“Anya.”
“You sound tired.”
“I am.”
“I’ll do the work.”
She does. She pushes me back onto the bed, climbs over me, and takes me in her mouth with a shy determination that turns filthy as soon as she realizes what it does to me. By the time I stop her and pull her up my body, she’s laughing under her breath, proud of herself.
Then she sinks onto my cock and rides me slowly until neither of us is laughing.
After, she lies beside me, fingers tracing old scars on my ribs. “Who gave you this one?” she asks.
“Knife.”
“I assumed it wasn’t a gardening accident.”
I look down at her. She looks back, innocent and not innocent at all.
“You’re becoming disrespectful,” I say.
“I learned from you.”
“That’s concerning.”
She smiles.
There it is. That smile. I touch her face before I can stop myself.
Her expression softens immediately, and for a second, the room goes still.
The next morning, she rides Buran again, without me holding the bridle. The horse moves beneath her, powerful and difficult, but she sits straight, calm hands, focused eyes. I stand near the fence while the stableman watches with open disbelief.
“She has good instincts,” he says.
“Yes.”
“She trusts him.”
“No,” I say. “She understands him.”
There’s a difference.
Buran doesn’t need trust. He needs clarity. So does Anya.
She brings him to a halt near the fence and looks down at me, cheeks pink from the cold, eyes bright with triumph. “Well?”
I study her posture, the reins, the horse, her lifted chin. “You survived.”
Her smile fades into offense. “That’s your praise?”
“For now.”
She rolls her eyes, then leans down slightly. “Help me dismount.”
“You know how.”
“Yaromir.”
I step closer.
The moment her foot leaves the stirrup, she shifts her weight wrong on purpose. I catch her around the waist before she can slide badly. She lands against me, laughing softly, hands on my shoulders.
“You did that intentionally,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Dangerous.”
“A little.” Her laughter fades when she realizes how close we are.
The stableman suddenly decides to leave. Smart man.
Buran snorts behind us.
Anya looks toward him, then back to me. “Your horse is judging us.”
“He does that.”
Her hands stay on my shoulders, and the cold air turns warm between us.
Weeks ago, I thought I was bringing a weapon into my house. A pretty insult. A bride taken to wound my brother and my father.
Now she stands in my arms with wind in her hair, dirt on the hem of her riding habit, and triumph in her eyes because she has just conquered a horse half my men are afraid to approach.
She’s still a weapon.
But not one I hold. One I stand beside.
That distinction should worry me.
It does.
I kiss her anyway.