Roman
Morning begins with her mouth on my shoulder and her leg over mine.
It should not be enough to wake me.
But I sleep lightly. Always have. A shift in air, a floorboard, a door opening in the wrong rhythm, and I’m awake before the threat knows it’s made a sound.
But this is different.
Katerina is warm against me, still half-asleep, her hair spread across my chest, her soft thigh thrown over my hip as if she has been sleeping in my bed for years instead of hours. Her hand rests over my ribs. Her breathing is slow. Her body trusts mine in a way it has no reason to.
That’s what wakes me.
Not danger, but trust.
For a moment, I do nothing. I lie there with the gray Moscow morning pressing against the windows and watch her sleep.
Last night should have been enough.
It wasn’t.
Sometime before dawn, she woke when I moved away from her. She blinked at me in the dark, sleepy and offended, as if my absence was a personal insult. Then she reached for me.
She had rolled on top of me, hair falling around both our faces, and said, “If you ask again, I’m going back to my room.”
She did not go back to her room.
Now she’s asleep beside me, naked under the sheets, with my marks on her throat and my come still leaking slowly from between her thighs.
The sight should satisfy something primitive in me.
It does, but it also unsettles me.
She had told me she was on the pill before I pushed inside her the second time last night. Calmly, directly, with flushed cheeks but steady eyes. I believed her.
Still, the memory of being bare inside her is a dangerous one. It’s too easy to want again. Too easy to mistake pleasure for claim.
Her eyelashes flutter.
I brush a strand of hair off her cheek.
She wakes slowly, then looks at me with the soft, dazed expression of a woman who remembers exactly why her body aches.
“Good morning,” she murmurs.
“It’s almost afternoon.”
Her eyes widen. “What?”
“You slept in.”
“Because someone tried to kill me with sex.”
I almost smile. “You survived.”
“Barely.” She shifts, then freezes. A blush climbs her throat.
I know the moment she feels it. The wetness between her legs. The slow slide of my come out of her, warm against her inner thigh. She glances down beneath the sheet, then back at me with a look caught between embarrassment and accusation.
“You’re looking very pleased with yourself,” she says.
“I’m pleased with you.”
She tries to turn away, but I catch her waist and pull her back. Her body slides easily over the sheets, soft and warm, and the moment her breast presses to my chest, I forget half the reasons I’m supposed to get out of this bed.
Her hand lands on my shoulder. “Roman.”
“Yes?”
“You have that look.”
“What look?”
“The one that means I’m not leaving this bed.”
“You’re learning.”
“I need food.”
“You need many things.”
Her eyes darken, despite the blush still on her face. “You’re impossible in the morning.”
“I’m worse at night.”
“I know.” The answer is quiet, almost smug.
It goes straight to my cock.
I kiss her before she can smile properly. She melts into it at once, which is becoming a problem. Katerina argues with words and surrenders with her mouth. My hand moves to her hip, then lower, over the curve of her ass, and she makes a low sound that has me hard against her stomach within seconds.
Her body is sensitive from last night.
I can tell by the way she gasps when my fingers slide between her thighs. She’s swollen, wet from me and from herself, and when I touch her, she clutches my wrist but does not pull away.
“You said food,” I remind her.
“I changed my mind.”
“Careless woman.”
“Hungry woman,” she corrects, and pulls me over her.
That’s how the morning disappears.
Slowly at first, because she’s sore and I’m not enough of an animal to ignore it.
Then less slowly, because she begs in a way that destroys good intentions.
I take my time with her, with her breasts, her mouth, the soft places inside her thighs.
I make her come once with my fingers before I enter her, because I like the way she looks after pleasure has already started to ruin her.
When I finally push into her, she wraps herself around me and says my name into my throat.
That’s the part I will remember.
Not the sex, though that’s good enough to ruin a man’s judgment permanently. Not the way she takes me, tight and slick and eager. Not even the way she comes around me, shaking so hard I have to hold her down with my body.
It’s my name in her mouth.
Afterward, she lies on her stomach with one cheek on the pillow, hair everywhere, one leg bent beneath the sheet. She looks thoroughly used and completely unashamed until she feels me looking. Then the blush returns.
I sit on the edge of the bed and check my phone.
A mistake.
Reality returns in a flood.
Elena has sent four messages. Mikhail has sent two. Oleg has confirmed the location again, which means he’s nervous. Nervous men either talk too much or bring backup. I will need to plan for both.
Katerina lifts her head from the pillow. “You’re leaving.”
It’s not a question.
I put the phone down. “This evening.”
“Where?”
“A meeting.”
“What kind of meeting?”
“The kind you don’t need to attend.”
She rolls onto her back, pulling the sheet with her. It covers very little. Less than she thinks. Her hair spills across the pillow, and her breasts rise beneath the white linen with every breath.
Her mouth curves slightly, but her eyes stay watchful. “That sounds suspicious.”
“It’s business.”
“Everything is business with you when you don’t want to answer.”
“Because the answer is usually business.”
“Boring business?”
“No.”
That stops her. She studies me for a moment. “Is it dangerous?”
“Yes.”
She sits up, holding the sheet to her chest. “Then why are you going?”
“Because that’s why I came to Moscow.”
Silence settles between us.
For the first time since she woke, Katerina looks uncertain. Not frightened exactly, but wounded by the reminder that there is a life around me she has barely seen the edges of.
“I thought you came to show me snow,” she says.
The pout is small. Almost childish. Completely uncalculated. It should not work on me, but…
It works.
I stand and reach for my trousers before I do something stupid, then realize I’m already considering it.
“No,” I say. “You thought I came to Moscow and found you on the way.”
“That’s what happened.”
“Partly.”
She watches me dress with an expression she tries to make casual and fails. The sheet slips an inch. My body reacts like a fool.
“You still have not told me what you do,” she says.
“I told you. Investments.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m an excellent liar. You’re simply inconvenient.”
That earns the faintest smile, though it does not last. “Can I come?”
“No.” The answer is immediate.
Her chin lifts. “You didn’t even think about it.”
“I did not need to.”
“I spent the entire day with you in Moscow, and now you’re going to vanish to some dangerous meeting while I sit here with your terrifying secretary glaring at me through walls?”
“Elena does not glare through walls.”
“She absolutely does.”
I button my shirt and say nothing.
Katerina swings her legs off the bed. The sheet slides, exposing the curve of her thigh. My gaze follows despite my better judgment.
“I won’t get in the way,” she says.
“You do not know what the way is.”
“Then explain it.”
“No.”
She stands, dragging the sheet with her like a queen wearing stolen linen. “I’m not asking because I want entertainment,” she says. “I’m asking because I don’t want to sit here imagining ten different terrible things.”
That’s fair.
It’s also exactly why she should not come.
Oleg is not a friend. The club is controlled, but no location in Moscow is truly safe, especially one tainted in my world.
I should leave her here.
I should call Elena, tell her to keep Katerina inside, take Mikhail and two cars, meet Oleg, get what I came for, and return before midnight.
The pout disappears. The stubbornness remains, but beneath it there’s something else. She’s trying not to show me that she wants to be chosen again, even for something as foolish as coming along to a meeting she does not understand.
That’s what decides it.
I’m going to regret this.
I know it before I speak.
“You will stay beside me,” I say.
Her eyes widen. “What?”
“You will not wander. You will not ask questions in front of anyone. You will not speak unless I tell you it’s safe to.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No. You’re a woman who walked into my life with no sense of self-preservation.”
“Very romantic.”
“This is not romance.”
Her expression softens, just a little. “Then what is it?”
A mistake. A weakness. The first unnecessary risk I have taken in years.
“Get dressed,” I say.
She just smiles at me.
It makes me want to put her back on the bed and cancel the entire night. Instead, I leave the room before my discipline fails completely.
By evening, she’s dressed in black.
The dress is simpler than the green one, long-sleeved and close to her body, with a coat over it and her hair pinned back loosely at the nape of her neck. She looks elegant enough to pass through any door in Moscow and soft enough to make men underestimate her.
Both are dangerous.
Elena sees her in the foyer and goes very still.
For once, I enjoy the woman’s disapproval.
“She’s coming?” Elena asks in Russian.
“Yes.”
“That’s unwise.”
“I know.”
Katerina looks between us. “I assume that was about me.”
“Yes,” I say.
“What did she say?”
“That you look beautiful.”
Elena’s mouth tightens.
Katerina glances at her and smiles sweetly. “I somehow doubt that.”
Smart girl.
The drive takes us through a different Moscow than the one I showed her earlier. No bright tourist square now. No pastries in the snow. The city outside the glass is darker, slick with melted ice and headlights, the buildings heavier under night.
Katerina is quieter this time. Her hand rests near mine on the seat.
Not touching.
I leave it that way for five minutes before I take it. She looks down at our joined hands. Then out the window.
She does not pull away.
The club sits behind an unmarked black door on a narrow street where the cars are too expensive and the men outside too still. There is no sign. Only a small brass number beside the entrance and two bouncers in dark coats who straighten before I reach them.
Katerina steps out of the car and looks up at the building.
Music pulses faintly from somewhere below street level.
A line of well-dressed people waits near the corner, pretending not to watch us walk straight to the door.
The bouncer opens it without a word.
Katerina raises one brow. “This is where you have your meetings?”
I look down at her.
“In Moscow,” I say, “the best conversations happen where everyone is pretending not to listen.”
Her eyes move to the doorway, then back to me. “And you brought me here because?”
Because I did not want to leave you behind.
Because I trust myself less when you’re not where I can see you.
Because tonight may be the beginning of a war, and I’m still thinking about your mouth.
I offer my hand instead of answering.
After a moment, she takes it.
We descend into the club together.