Chapter 18
Alina
My orgasm rips through me again in smaller waves, each one dragging a sound out of me I don’t recognise as mine.
When it ebbs, I collapse, face turned to the side, cheek damp with sweat.
My wrists throb where silk bites. Every inch of me feels owned in a way that lights up my spine and terrifies the sensible part of my brain that’s been screaming in a cupboard since he put that ring on my finger.
He strokes a palm down my back once, slow, then he fucks me like he owns me.
I cry out, half-whimper, half-moan of desire.
He goes deeper, measured, cruel, and my body answers like he trained it to.
Heat coils again, and I bite down a sound that still escapes anyway.
He holds me there, driving me through it until my mind white-noises out and the only thing left in the world is his rhythm and the ring biting into my finger.
With a feral sound, he slams into me and unloads, dumping his cum in my arse, pumping it out until there is nothing left.
He keeps me exactly where he wants me, one palm anchoring my waist. His breath is rough behind me. The tie pulls at my wrists, and it tips me straight back into that floaty place where I could agree to anything and mean it.
When he eases free, I hiss at the afterburn.
He palms my back, strokes once, then twice, and my lungs remember how to work.
He loosens the tie, and the silk slides over my skin as he frees my wrists and then he rubs my hands.
I flop onto my side and pull air into my chest like I’ve run a marathon through hell.
He climbs off the bed and goes to the bathroom. I hear running water, and then he is back, sliding a warm, damp washcloth over my skin, cleaning me, caring for me in ways I didn’t know he was capable of.
He is precise, not rushed, dragging the cloth in careful sweeps that make my skin prickle. He doesn’t talk. I don’t either. The silence isn’t awkward. It’s heavy. The kind that makes every little sound louder.
When he’s satisfied, he takes the cloth back to the bathroom and brings back a dry towel to blot me. My wrists ache. He gathers them, thumbs circling the red marks like he’s noticing the damage he put there. I can’t tell if that should enrage me or calm me. It does both.
I lift onto my elbows and wince at the pull everywhere. “I need food and vodka.”
He smirks, and it’s softer than the one he gives men before he maims them. “You are the perfect wife.”
“Don’t,” I say, and it comes out sharper than I intend. “Don’t call me that.”
He tilts his head, and I see the question form behind his eyes before he asks it. “Perfect wife?”
“It sounds like something you’d say to one of your Bratva bitches lining up to screw you.”
The silence stretches a beat too long. His expression doesn’t crack, but something shifts behind those blue eyes, subtle and quick, like a light changing in a room you’re not supposed to be watching.
“What I said bothers you,” he says.
“No.”
“Alina.”
“I said no.” I sit up properly, dragging the sheet up to my chest, which is ridiculous given that we’ve just got married and then fucked like savages.
He doesn’t move for a moment. He stands at the edge of the bed in nothing, all ink and scars and the kind of physicality that makes rational thought genuinely difficult, and he just looks at me.
Not the way men usually look at me. Not appraising, not calculating.
Something more unsettling than either of those things.
He is possessive of his property—me—but there is something much deeper and scarier there. He throws around the word obsession but before this moment, I thought it was just him being a brute.
It’s not. He is looking at me like I am his world, and he will die without me.
He crawls onto the bed and cups my face.
“That was a stupid comment to bait you. Not hurt you. I don’t have anyone lining up to screw me.
Unless you mean in the non-sex sense, then yes, there are probably a hundred Bratva families lining up to screw me. ”
“You’re rambling,” I murmur.
“I am. For the first time in my life, I don’t have the exact words to get my point across.”
My bottom lip trembles at the depth of emotion in his eyes. He’s raw, vulnerable, and I fall into an obsession with seeing it again. “Try.”
His thumb traces my cheekbone, and the tenderness of it is almost worse than the brutality. I know how to handle brutal. Brutal is familiar. This is something else.
“You are the first thing in as long as I can remember that I didn’t plan for,” he says, his voice stripped of its usual armour. “Every move I make is calculated. Every word. Every action. And then you were on that dancefloor in that dress, and I made a decision I hadn’t planned to make.”
“To abduct me.”
“To keep you.” His eyes don’t waver. “There’s a difference.”
“Arkady—”
“I don’t share,” he says, and it comes out fierce and quiet at the same time, which is somehow more frightening than the loud version.
“I have never wanted to. I have never cared enough to. What I said—it was deflection, and it was cruel, and I don’t do cruel without purpose.
That had no purpose except to put distance between us because you were getting too close, and I hadn’t decided yet what to do about it.
I have never brought a woman to this house.
I have never put a ring on anyone’s finger. I have never… I have never wanted to.”
“Until me,” I say, because someone has to.
“Until you.” He says it like he hates it and needs it in equal measure. “I saw you, and something in me decided. I don’t know exactly what it decided. I just know it wasn’t going to be reversed.”
“That’s not normal,” I whisper.
“No.”
“That’s terrifying.”
“Yes.”
I search his face for the smirk, for the deflection, for the weapon he usually makes of his words.
There isn’t one. Just Arkady Saranov in the wreckage of his first few days as pakhan, with his dead father and his enemies and his entire empire threatening to cave in around him, sitting on the edge of his bed, telling me I am the one thing that didn’t fit into his plans.
He didn’t fit into mine either.
I want to say something clever; something that puts the armour back on, for both of us, because this much honesty in one room feels like standing too close to a fire.
But I don’t have anything clever left. He burned it all out of me somewhere between the first orgasm and the last. “You weren’t supposed to happen. ”
Something in his expression eases. Not much. Barely enough to notice. But I notice.
“I was supposed to stay Alina Ashworth forever,” I continue, because apparently, I’m doing this now. Confessing things to a man I’ve known for less than a week, who has my name on a marriage certificate somewhere.
“Were you happy?”
The question lands simply, without agenda, and it’s somehow the most devastating thing he’s said to me all day. Including the part where he told me he owned my mouth.
I think about it properly. I owe him that much after what he just gave me. “I was fine,” I say eventually.
“Fine,” he repeats, and the word sits between us like something small and wounded.
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s the saddest thing you’ve ever heard. I had a life. Friends. A house I liked. A gym I went to three times a week when I wasn’t hungover.”
“And?”
“And it was fine. I wasn’t lying awake, miserable. I wasn’t pining for something else. I was just—” I stop, because the word is already there waiting, and I hate it. “Waiting. Without knowing, I was waiting.”
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. The silence does it for him.
I look down at the ring, at the wild diamond catching the low light of the bedroom, and I think about Alina Ashworth’s house in South Kensington with the window boxes I watered every Sunday and the bookshelf I organised by colour because it looked nice and meant nothing.
I think about the silver dress that is somewhere in this house, or in the bin, and I’ll never see again.
I think about Mina sending increasingly unhinged voice notes to my dad, who will reassure her I’m… fine.
“I should tell my dad about us.”
“He will probably try to kill me again.”
“I won’t let him.”
“My wife defending me from her dad,” he snorts. “Great.”
I chew the inside of my lip. “I don’t understand this. I didn’t marry you for love, but…”
“But what?”
“I think we might end up there,” I mumble, looking down.
He grasps my chin and tilts my head up to look at him.
“I won’t insult you by saying that I’m in love with you, Alina.
But I’m something. Obsessed, possessive, and other words that fit the narrative.
I know that if anyone hurt you, I would hunt them down and skin them alive before I burned them at the stake.
I know that if you left me, I would hunt you down and drag you back here.
My breathing eases around you. In ways that are completely foreign to me, I need you. ”
I gasp softly. But I know where he is coming from. “I need you too.”
The words sit between us, quiet and honest, and I watch something move across his face that he doesn’t bother hiding. Not relief exactly. More like recognition. The look of a man who’s found the thing he didn’t know he was searching for and isn’t sure whether to be grateful or furious about it.
He presses his lips to my forehead, slow and deliberate, and I close my eyes.
“Sleep,” he says against my hair.
“I’m not tired.”
“You’re exhausted. You’ve been running on adrenaline for three days.”
“So have you.”
“I’m built for it.”
“And I’m not?”
He pulls back enough to look at me, and the corner of his mouth lifts. Not the smirk. The other one. The one I’ve seen maybe twice and am already collecting like something rare. “You’re built for it. You just haven’t been using the right muscles.”
“I’m hungry, and I want that vodka,” I say. “I haven’t had a fucking drink in ages, and I’m detoxing.”
He snorts. “You had wine last night!”
“Pah,” I spit out. “A drink for pussies. I’m fucking Alina Saranova, Russian woman with a system built for something stronger.”
“Say that name again,” he murmurs.
“Alina Saranova. Your wife.”
“My wife never wants for anything. Stay here, I’ll bring it.”
“No, I’m not hiding in here, or being locked away anymore.” I climb off the bed before he can stop me. He catches my wrist before I take a step.
“Alina.”
“Don’t.” I pull free, not hard, just decisive. “I mean it. I’m not spending the rest of my wedding night locked in a bedroom like a Victorian wife with a nervous disposition.”
He stares at me for a long moment, and I watch him calculate whether this is a battle worth having. I can see the exact moment he decides it isn’t.
“Fine.” He stands and moves to the wardrobe, pulling on a pair of dark joggers, low on his hips, no shirt. The tattoos shift with every movement, and I make myself look away before I do something embarrassing like walk back to the bed voluntarily.
I grab a pair of leggings and a tee and drag them on before pulling whatever hair is left in the knot loose, and it falls around my shoulders, tangled and wild. The ring catches the light as I push it back.
I don’t take it off.
He comes up behind me and places his hands on my hips, kissing my shoulder before he bites down gently. “Mine.”
“Yours, and you are mine. If there are any Bratva bitches, know I will gouge their eyes out if they turn up here looking for a good time.”
He chuckles. “I would pay to see that, but you don’t have to worry, Alina. You have ruined me for any other woman. I am yours, heart, body and soul.”