Chapter 19
Arkady
The words settle into my chest like embers finding fuel.
Ruined.
I said it, and I meant it, and the fact that I meant it should bother me a great deal more than it does.
I stand behind her in the mirror, hands on her hips, her hair loose and wild around her shoulders, and I watch my face like it belongs to a stranger.
Arkady Saranov, pakhan, killer, the man who has never once handed a single piece of himself to anyone, standing in a bedroom with a wedding ring on his finger and the taste of his wife on his tongue.
Ruined. Yes. That’s exactly the right word.
“Come on then,” she says, and slips away from under my hands before I can tighten them.
I follow her out of the bedroom and down the stairs.
The house is quiet. The men know not to disturb us. Mainly because I warned them, they would lose more than just their balls if they did. The kitchen light is on, spilling a warm strip across the hall floor.
Alina walks ahead of me into the kitchen. She opens the fridge and rummages through it with the focused energy of someone who has been denied basic pleasures for too long and intends to correct that immediately.
“Vodka,” she says, not looking up. “Where?”
“Freezer. Bottom left.”
She swings the freezer door open and pulls out the bottle like she’s won something. Beluga Gold. She holds it up and gives me a look that borders on reverent. “Now we’re talking.”
“Glasses are—”
“Let me find them,” she interrupts. She opens three cupboards before she finds them, and when she does, she holds up two short crystal glasses and looks at me over her shoulder. “Found them.”
“You were going to find them eventually.”
“Don’t be patronising.” She sets them on the island and pours with the confidence of someone who has done this a thousand times.
Generous measures. No ceremony. She slides mine across the marble without looking up.
Then she picks up her glass and holds it out.
“Za zdorov’ye.” She downs the shot in one, sets the glass down, and picks up the bottle again.
I watch her pour the second shot, and something tightens in my chest.
She’s barefoot in my kitchen on our wedding night, pouring vodka like she belongs here.
She does.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I’m aware.”
“It’s unsettling.”
“Good.” I bring the glass up to my lips and tip it back, swallowing the shot.
She rolls her eyes and pours my second measure without asking.
I drink it standing at the island, watching her open the fridge again and pull out whatever she can find.
Cold chicken. Cheese. Half a loaf of bread that Elena baked this morning.
She assembles it all on the board with the same efficiency she brings to everything, and I realise I’m memorising the way she moves.
The precise angle of her wrist when she cuts.
The way she tucks her hair behind her ear and then immediately pulls it free again.
Small things. Useless things. The kind of details that accumulate quietly until they become the architecture of something you can’t dismantle.
I pick up a slice of bread and fold it around a piece of chicken. I don’t even try to be elegant about it. I’m starving in the way that only comes after extreme exertion, the kind of hunger that doesn’t care about presentation.
“Elena is going to come down here tomorrow morning and have an aneurysm,” Alina says, gesturing at the chaos she’s made of the board.
“Elena has survived worse.”
“She looked at me like I was a problem she hadn’t been asked to solve.”
“That’s how Elena looks at everyone. She looked at me like that for the first seventeen years of my life.”
Alina pauses mid-bite. “She’s been with you that long?”
“She has been working for my family since before I was born. She splits her time between Nik and me… I guess not anymore.”
“You are pakhan now,” she says, coming around the island to stand next to me. She takes my hand. “It’s been a rough transition, I get that, but you need to step up tomorrow and show those brigs who is in charge. No faltering, no dithering, no weakness.”
I think I fall head over heels in love with her. But I don’t let it show because I’m not even sure what that kind of love looks like. “You are my weakness,” I say. “My only one. It goes against everything in me to have you there tomorrow.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You might be. I might have to murder half my Bratva family if they so much as look at you too long.”
“They are going to look. They are going to be curious. They will appraise me like livestock; they will try to intimidate me. They will make snide comments and be patronising as fuck. And I will sit through it all with my mouth shut, like a good little pakhan’s wife, assessing every single second while they posture. ”
I cup her face roughly, pulling her closer. “You make my dick so fucking hard.”
“Then do something with it instead of just telling me about it.”
“Fuck,” I growl and clamp my hands around her waist, lifting her onto the kitchen island before pulling her leggings down. She wraps her legs around me before I’ve got the leggings past her knees, and the laugh that comes out of her is low and wicked and does nothing to help my situation.
“You’re going to tear them,” she says.
“I’ll buy you more.”
“You’ll buy me more,” she repeats, like the concept is both absurd and inevitable, which is accurate on both counts.
She lifts her hips and helps me drag them off, and then she’s bare from the waist down on my kitchen island at two in the morning with her hair everywhere and vodka on her breath, and I stand between her thighs and just look at her for a second.
She lets me.
That’s the thing about Alina. She lets me look. She doesn’t perform it, doesn’t arrange herself for the audience. She just sits there in the full knowledge that she is devastating and waits to see what I do about it.
I release my cock and pull her down onto it, taking her full weight as I move back and fuck her standing in the middle of the kitchen.
She grips my shoulders hard and rides me, rising and sinking over my dick until I’m ready to come deep inside her, but I hold off.
I want her to break first. I need to see my wife, riding my cock as she falls apart.
“Eyes on me,” I say.
Her blue eyes find mine, and she doesn’t look away.
She holds my gaze while she rides me, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever seen from another person.
No armour. No performance. Just Alina, taking her pleasure and letting me watch every second of it.
She comes apart on my cock with her eyes still locked on mine, and the sound she makes goes straight through me like a blade finding the gap between ribs.
I feel every pulse of her around me, the clench and flutter, and I grip her hips harder and drive up into her through it, chasing my release with the kind of single-minded brutality that leaves nothing behind.
I come inside her with her name in my throat and her thighs shaking around me.
We stay like that for a moment. Her forehead drops to my shoulder. I feel her breath against my neck, ragged and warm, and I keep my arms around her as I place her back on the kitchen island. Her eyes go wide with mortification. “I’m making a mess.”
“Who cares?”
“I do!” She slides off and pulls on her leggings before she furiously scrubs at the cum pool on the granite top with a dishcloth, she finds hanging over the tap. “No one, and I mean no one, should be forced to clean up someone else’s cum for fuck’s sake.”
“What? Like you are doing now?”
She pauses and lifts her chin with dignity. “You are my husband. Your cum is my cum.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.” I laugh, and it’s the first actual laugh I’ve had in years. I feel the weight of the world lift slightly from my shoulders, and I have Alina to thank for that. My wife.