15. Thea #2
His voice reaches me before the stairs do, low and terrible, and Pasha leaves with the carrier and a look of pure sympathy. We both know I’m in trouble. Not sure who he’s talking to, but it’s about me. And it’s angry.
I go up to my room, and I’m hardly through the door when it opens behind me, and the frame shudders when the door slams closed. Maxim stands in my bedroom with a face I’ve never seen.
Not the boardroom, bedroom, or the garage. His cold blue eyes are ice. Lips set in a line. Everything else is frosted granite, hard set. He steps closer, and I back into the window seat and sit down. There’s nowhere else to escape his wrath.
The words quietly snarl out of him. “A dockmaster’s wife who knew nothing was held for four days in a fish plant so cold her skin and lungs never recovered.
She was released not because Alexei got what he wanted, but because her coughing annoyed him.
She lived another four months before the damage suffocated her. ”
“I know it was stupid to—”
“An accountant’s mother suffered the loss of her fingers. Each was mailed to her son. Ten digits to encourage him to fix the ten digits in a tax return that Sokolov thought he had screwed up.”
I swallow hard. “I get it, Maxim—”
“A journalist’s dog, left on a doorstep, and I’ll spare you that one on account of your cat.”
“Okay. I know I shouldn’t have tried to leave, but—”
“There’s no floor, do you understand me? No line, no code, nothing underneath Sokolov’s surface. The man has no soul, Thea. And this afternoon you walked into an open forest, alone. No weapons, no plan, no map, nothing. Your nothing won’t survive his nothing. Tell me you understand—”
“I do.” I stare down at my hands, because I can’t take the expression on his handsome face. It’s worry and disappointment and sadness, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it.
The room’s very quiet. My heart’s everywhere. And the part I hate most is that I can’t find anything unfair in what he said. There’s nothing to fight against with Maxim. He’s trying to keep me alive.
He didn’t build this prison for me. Another man did.
“I get it,” I say, sanded flat. “But I can’t just exist in here. Give me a purpose, or I swear to God I’ll burn this gorgeous mansion down with both of us inside out of boredom.”
His shoulders slump, the fear settling now that I’ve stopped swinging. He takes off his coat and drops it on my chair.
“As it happens, I came home to offer you one. My son fed three years of files into a shredder. Somewhere in what survives is the thing he was hiding, and my forensic men don’t know how Klaus thinks or where he buries what he wants to ignore.
On top of that, you’re the only person alive who can read his handwriting. Help me.”
I felt relief with Pasha. This is something else. Something light in my chest. “You’re giving me a job? A real job?”
“I’m employing my guest.”
“Your guest needs better coffee and a desk that isn’t in her bedroom.” I stand, steadier, because I know how to do this.
“I can arrange that.”
“And I get the office with the fireplace twice a week.”
There’s that smirk of his. The one that got me naked. “If you prefer.”
“I prefer a lot of things, but I suspect I won’t be getting any of them here.”
“Such as?”
I bite my bottom lip and look up at him, closer with every step. “I want to walk the grounds. I promise to stay in the fenceline.”
“That could be arranged. What else?” He crosses to me slow, giving me every chance to object.
My heartbeat kicks up when I smell his cologne. “I prefer you without your shirt.”
“Is that a fact?” His big hand works the top button.
“It is. Pants, too, if we’re talking about my preferences.”
When his shirt is unbuttoned, he reaches past my shoulder to pull the curtain across the glass and asks, “You’re done running for tonight, aren’t you, bratty girl?”
I grab his collar with both hands and pull him to my mouth. This. This is what I needed. His tongue sweeps past my lips, and then his hands are on me. Everywhere.
He undresses me like he’s making sure of what came back from the woods, checking every part thoroughly.
Sweater over my head, bra gone, his mouth following his hands on my collarbone, breasts.
He lays me back onto the bed to snatch my pants away and kisses the cold-flushed skin of my stomach, and when I shiver, it isn’t from the forest anymore.
It’s his tongue. Lower. Lower. There.
He pushes my thighs wide and out of his way until they hook over his shoulders.
That tongue plunges deep, and it’s delicious and confusing, because it’s not hard, so I can’t work myself against it, but the sensation intoxicates me all the same.
My heels dig into his back anyway as I roll my hips toward his face.
Just as his tongue slides up against my clit, a finger penetrates me, and my mind whites out.
Curses pour from my lips and my fingers dig into his hair and I ride his finger and his face so hard that I worry I might hurt him. But I can’t stop. I’ll never stop. Not until—
“Oh, fuck!” I shout as I come, body tightening, blood boiling, bliss taking over.
Then he’s over me, inside me in one slow press that empties my head of Yakuza and forests and everything else with a name. Everything but him.
“There,” he says, against my throat, barely moving, making me feel every inch of it. Of him. “This is where you run to. Not from.”
I take his face in my hands, meeting his gaze. The word takes my final breath. “Yes.”
It’s slow and close and deep, and I want it all.
His hand under my hips angling me until every stroke drags a sound out of me.
The taste of me on his lips. When I come again, it rolls through me like thunder, and he snarls like a beast when he follows me down.
His face in my hair and my name in that voice until it stops sounding like a name and starts sounding like a prayer until he gasps just as hard as I am.
After, when the room has gone soft and dark, the strangest thing in this strange house happens.
He spoons me.
Every man I’ve ever shared a bed with has been an all-night negotiation for blanket and distance, even if only in my head. It was always me lying rigid, doing the math on when I could take back my square footage or leave. Whichever got me alone faster.
But Maxim pulls me into him with one heavy arm, his hand settling warm at my hip, and my body, the traitor, just settles. His breathing goes long and even alongside my own. His body feels like safety and comfort, not like an enemy made of heat and sweat. Not a space invader.
I must be broken. Leave it to me to sleep well somewhere I can’t leave.