Chapter 29
Arkady
Her throat works under my palm. The flutter of her pulse ticks against my fingers—one, two, three. She doesn’t pull away. Instead, she tips her chin up, exposing more of her neck to me. Something cracks inside my chest, something I’ve been holding together since we started this conversation.
I loosen my grip, my thumb dragging across her skin as I do.
“I’m not trying to frighten you,” I say.
“I know.” The words scrape out of her throat. She reaches up, her cool fingers circling my wrist. Not to pull away. To anchor me there. “I know what you are. I know what this is.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
Her eyes lock with mine, going completely still while the rest of her face remains mobile. Her lips press together, not in displeasure but concentration. I’ve seen this look before, when she’s stripping away the clever responses, the deflections.
“I want you,” she finally says, her voice dropping to nearly a whisper. “I want this. Whatever this is.” Her fingers tighten on my wrist. “I want the rest of it too, eventually.”
“And what else?”
“Fuck me. Fuck me like you can ease the pressure of this knowledge on your soul.”
The permission lands in me like a fuse finding flame.
I don’t ease into it. I don’t give her time to brace or adjust or prepare. I take her mouth like I’m reclaiming something that was stolen from me, and the sound she makes is half gasp, half surrender. It goes straight through me like a current finding ground.
My hands are on her before I’ve finished the thought.
I grip the fabric of the dress at her hip and pull roughly.
The midnight blue slides up her thigh, exposing the holster strap and the bruised skin beneath it.
I unclip the holster and toss it onto the chair without looking, the gun landing with a dull thud that neither of us acknowledges.
She bites my bottom lip. Hard enough to draw blood.
I taste copper and her, and the combination does something primal to the wiring in my brain.
I back her into the wall, one hand flat against the plaster beside her head, the other yanking the dress higher until I can get my hand between her thighs.
She’s already wet.
Alina doesn’t do anything by halves. Not the fear, not the fury, not the desire that runs through her like a live wire every time I put my hands on her.
I drag her underwear to the side and push two fingers into her, and the moan that tears out of her is raw and unfiltered and makes me want to wreck her. She clenches around me immediately, her hips rolling forward, her nails digging into my forearms.
“Harder,” she says.
I give her a third finger and curl them, watching her face contort with something that lives in the space between pain and pleasure where she seems to exist most comfortably.
Her head falls back against the wall, the loose hair cascading around her face, and I press my mouth to the exposed column of her throat and suck hard enough to leave a mark that will still be visible tomorrow.
I want every man who sat in that room tonight and calculated my weaknesses to understand that this woman wears my bruises because she wants to.
“Arkady—”
“Quiet.”
She makes a sound that is the opposite of quiet, and I feel her tighten around my fingers as her body builds toward something she’s trying to rush. I slow the pace deliberately, pulling my fingers back to a torturous drag that makes her whimper and grab at my wrist.
“Don’t rush it,” I murmur against her throat. “I decide when.”
She groans—a sound that vibrates against my chest—when I twist my hand just so.
Her knees give out beneath her. I pin her against the wall with my hips, my thigh wedged between hers, feeling each shudder ripple through her body: first her shoulders, then her spine, finally her thighs clenching around my leg as she gasps for air against my neck, her teeth grazing skin.
I pull my fingers free, and she makes a sound of protest that I swallow with my mouth.
I lift her, one arm under her thighs, the other braced against the wall, and carry her to the bed.
I drop her onto it, and she bounces once, the midnight-blue dress rucked up around her waist, her hair fanned across the black silk like something from a painting I’d burn a museum down to own.
I unbuckle my belt. The sound of it sliding free is loud in the room, deliberate, and her eyes track it with a hunger that makes my blood sing.
I strip the shirt off and let it fall. Her eyes move over the ink, the scars, the topography of violence that maps my torso, and she doesn’t look away.
She never does. That’s the thing about Alina.
She doesn’t flinch from the ugliness. She absorbs it, metabolises it, turns it into something she can use.
I drop my pants and free my cock, already hard enough that it aches, and I see her breath catch in anticipation.
Her pupils swallow the blue of her irises until only a thin ring remains.
Her lips part, a breath caught between them like a secret about to spill.
The mattress barely supports her as her spine curves up, offering herself to hands that haven’t yet claimed her.
I grip her ankles and drag her to the edge of the bed.
She gasps, fingers clutching at the sheets.
I hook my hands under her knees and spread her open.
The underwear is still pushed to the side, a flimsy scrap of silk that’s doing nothing useful.
I rip it. The sound is sharp and satisfying, and she laughs, breathless and wicked.
“Those were new,” she says.
“I’ll buy you more.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I keep meaning it.” I settle myself between her thighs and drive into her in one brutal stroke that tears a cry from both of us.
She arches off the bed, her hands flying to my forearms, nails sinking in hard enough to draw blood. I don’t care. I welcome it. Every mark she leaves on me is a receipt for something I’ve earned.
I set a pace that’s punishing from the first thrust. No warm-up.
No easing in. She asked me to fuck the knowledge out of my soul, and that’s exactly what I intend to do, because right now, the only thing keeping me from putting my fist through a wall is the feeling of her cunt taking my cock like it was engineered for this specific purpose.
My father is alive.
I slam into her, and she cries out.
My father faked his death so I could become what he needed me to be.
Again. Deeper. Her back bows off the mattress.
My father let me grieve him. Let me stand in that room with his open eyes and his single wound and feel the bottom drop out of my world, and he did it on purpose, and I understand why, and understanding why is the thing that’s going to eat me alive if I don’t find something else to do with the fury.
This. This is what I do with it.
I grip her hips hard enough to bruise and drive into her with everything I’ve been holding back since the phone call. Since the silence. Since the shot that cracked through the speaker and rewired my entire existence around a lie that was designed to save me.
“Eyes on me,” I growl.
Her eyes snap to mine. Feral. Hungry. When she sucks air between her teeth, I mirror it, both of us breathing hard.
My pulse pounds in my cock while her pussy throbs around it, both of us in service to the same brutal need.
She holds my gaze while I fuck her, and I hold hers, and somewhere in the space between us, something shifts. Slow and enormous and irreversible.
She comes first. It builds in her like a storm brewing in blood, her breathing turning to ragged gasps that match the bruising rhythm of my thrusts.
Her thighs clamp against me with enough force to crack bone, her nails digging points into my forearms deep enough to scar.
When it hits, her eyes don’t flutter closed in bliss.
They lock onto mine with a savage intensity.
She lets me witness her complete destruction, her surrender not gentle but violent, the dangerous vulnerability of a woman who has chosen to let someone see her drown and burn simultaneously.
I let it take her, hold her there while it rips through, and I ride the aftershocks with my jaw clenched and my hands locked to her hips.
When she loosens, when the tremor fades to small shivers, I push harder.
I don’t stop. I can’t. Her nails rake me again, and it pushes me over the cliff.
I drive in once, twice, and empty into her with a low sound that feels dragged out of bone.
The world narrows to heat and pulse and the sharp ache of release that leaves me scraped clean.
For a few breaths, I don’t move. Her thighs still grip me, warm, slick, mine. Then I ease out and lean over her, my palms braced by her ribs, and look at her face. Flushed. Sated. Defiant even like this. My ruin and my repair at the same time.
I undress her, getting rid of all barriers between us before I get a cloth from the bathroom and clean her with quick, efficient strokes.
She lets me, and I get lost in her. When she’s clean, I leave her perched on the bed while I throw the cloth in the sink.
When I return, I help her over to the chair, then I strip the sweaty, rumpled sheets and throw them in the laundry basket.
Getting a fresh set from the cupboard, I make the bed military tight, because no matter how fucked up the rest of my life is, I can always make a bed.
Discipline is the only inheritance I respect.
She watches me from the chair, naked and gorgeous, and there’s something open in her expression that makes my chest tight.
She’s trying to memorise this exact moment, in case it never comes again.
I cross the room and draw her up by the nape of her neck, threading my fingers through her hair.
I drag her mouth to mine, slow this time, and taste her.
I let my hands claim her back, digging into flesh that yields and muscle that doesn’t.
She stands on her toes, body arching against me, and for a second, there’s no world outside this room.
No waiting, no threats, just the taste of copper where she’s bitten my lip and the promise that we could destroy each other more thoroughly than any enemy ever could.
I’m greedy with her. I want every inch, every inhale, every second she’ll let me take.
I want to drown in her and surface only when I’m convinced what we made here is permanent.
I want to erase everyone else who ever touched her, every man in every room who ever made her feel like a transaction instead of a person.
I want to be the only thing she remembers when the adrenaline fades, and the city starts spinning again.