Chapter 2 #2
I follow her into the corridor.
"Where did you learn that?" I ask.
She glances over her shoulder. "Harvard doesn't just teach law. It teaches leverage."
We don't talk on the drive back to the penthouse. Don't need to. She stares out the window, one hand resting on her knee, and I can practically see her mind working: filing, sorting, calculating.
By the time Peter pulls into the garage, I've made a decision.
We make it back to my office before I decide I'm done talking.
She's mid-sentence—outlining a strategy for restructuring the shell companies—when I round the desk, grab the back of her neck, and bend her over the mahogany.
She gasps. Papers scatter. The crystal whiskey glass topples and shatters on the floor.
My hand stays on the back of her neck, pressing her cheek against the cold wood.
She doesn't fight, doesn't resist, but she doesn't submit easily either—there's tension in her body, a coiled readiness, like she's deciding whether to let this happen.
"You walked into that room," I say against her ear, "and handled a situation that would have made most men in my organization vomit."
"Yes." Her voice is steady despite the position.
"You restructured a debt recovery in under two minutes."
"Yes."
"And you did it wearing my collar."
I feel her smile against the desk. "Of course."
I push the skirt of her dress up around her waist, run my fingers along the edge of her underwear without removing it.
Just tracing. Making her wait.
"Everything you learned…" I tell her. "Every skill. Every connection. Every ounce of power you gained in that year." I lean down, lips brushing the shell of her ear. "I gave you that. I decided to send you away. I decided to let you grow. You exist like this because I allowed it."
Her breath hitches. "Allowed it?"
"Allowed it."
"That's a dangerous word to use with me now."
I pull her underwear aside. Don't bother removing it. Slide two fingers inside her from behind and she's already wet—her body answering my dominance even as her mouth talks back.
My thumb finds her clit and makes slow, torturous circles.
"You think because you learned some tricks, the hierarchy changed?" I unbuckle my belt with one hand. Don't drop it. Wrap it around her wrists behind her back instead. Leather against skin. I pull it snug. She tests the restraint.
She can't move.
"That's not—"
"It's exactly what you think." I pull my fingers out. She makes a sound of protest that she immediately tries to swallow. "You're smarter now. Sharper. More dangerous. But this?" I grip the belt holding her wrists. "This hasn't changed."
I enter her in one stroke.
She moans against the desk.
The sound vibrates through the wood and I feel it in my hands where they're gripping her.
Every thrust pushes her hips into the edge of the mahogany—that friction between pain and pleasure that makes her back arch and her fingers clench inside the belt restraint.
I set a punishing pace.
One hand on the belt, the other fisted in her hair, arching her back so I can see her face in profile.
Her lips are parted, eyes half-closed.
Cheek pressed against the desk where I sign death warrants and distribution agreements.
Halfway through, I come to a complete stop, still buried inside her.
She makes a sound. Frustrated. Desperate.
"Ask me," I tell her.
"No."
I wait. Don't move. Keep her pinned.
Her jaw clenches. Ten seconds. Twenty. I can feel her pulse around me, her body clenching, trying to create the friction I'm denying her.
"Cassius."
"That's not asking."
"Please."
There she is. This new Selene wrapped around old Selene's need, and the combination is the most intoxicating thing I've ever experienced. I reward her with a hard spank—open-palmed, sharp, the crack echoing off the office walls—and then I resume.
Harder than before.
"Say you're mine."
She moans.
"Say it."
"I'm yours."
"Again."
"I'm yours. God, I'm yours."
The words dissolve into sounds.
I drive into her with a rhythm that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with the twelve months I spent staring at photos and pretending I wasn't counting the days until I could do this again.
She comes with her hands bound, face pressed against my desk, my name the only coherent word left in her mouth.
I feel her clench around me, feel the tremors run through her body, and the sight of her wrecked, restrained, wearing my collar over my desk in the heart of my empire, breaks me.
I pull out at the last second and finish on the small of her back. Marking her where the welts from my belt will bloom red by morning.
Territorial. Deliberate. Mine.
For a long moment, neither of us moves.
We’re just breathing.
The office smells like sex and spilled whiskey and leather.
I unbuckle the belt, rub her wrists where the leather pressed grooves into her skin.
She stays bent over the desk for another beat, catching her breath.
Then she stands, smooths her dress down, and turns to face me with smudged lipstick and wrecked hair and an expression that shows me she’s satisfied and defiant.
"So," she says. "About those shell companies."
I smile. Genuinely. Maybe for the first time in a year.
She's perfect.
Later, while she showers, I call Vincent.
"The girl," he says. It's not a question.
"She handled the Gerald Fink situation."
Pause. "How?"
"Restructured his debt. Kept him alive, kept him useful, kept him terrified. In under two minutes."
A longer pause. I can hear Vincent recalibrating behind the silence. "That's...not what I expected."
"No." I look at the scratches on my desk where the whiskey glass dragged across the finish. At the belt still draped over the chair. At the scattered papers on the floor. "She's not what I expected."
"Cassius." His voice carries the weight of thirty years as my father's consigliere and mine. "If you're thinking of integrating her—"
"I'm not thinking about it. I'm doing it."
"The Russians won't see her as an asset. They'll see her as a target."
"Then they'll learn the same thing I'm learning." I pick up the belt. Run the leather through my fingers. "She's not a target. She's a weapon."
Vincent is quiet for a moment. "What do you need from me?"
"Set up a meeting. Full organization. Tomorrow night." I fold the belt and set it on the desk. "I'm introducing them to their queen."
The shower cuts off in the other room.
Through the open doorway, I can see steam curling into the bedroom, and then she steps out with a towel around her body, collar still on, water dripping down her collarbones.
She catches me watching and doesn't look away.
A year ago, she would have blushed. Now she drops the towel. I end the call without saying goodbye.
She walks to the closet—my closet, now apparently hers—and starts going through the clothes I had tailored for her.
Dresses, suits, silks in blacks and deep reds.
She holds a dress up against her body, checks herself in the mirror, discards it, and tries another.
"Vincent thinks you're a liability," I tell her.
"Vincent hasn't seen what I can do yet." She selects a dress. Blood red. "He will."
"The organization won't accept you overnight."
"I don't need that long." She turns to face me, the dress draped over her arm, completely naked except for the collar. "I need one meeting."
There it is again. That certainty.
I killed her parents when I was twenty-seven, put a bullet in her father and a knife in her mother because Judge Deveraux was building a case that would have brought down everything my father built.
The girl was barely sixteen, asleep upstairs while I worked. I wore a mask. She never saw my face.
And now she's standing in my bedroom, naked and dripping wet and planning her coronation, and she has no idea that the man she just fucked built his empire on her family's graves.
The thought should bother me.
It doesn't.
What bothers me is the realization settling into my bones like concrete: if she ever finds out, she won't just leave me.
That girl would try to destroy me.
And the woman standing in front of me now? The one who dismantled Gerald Fink with a smile?
She might actually succeed.
I push the thought down, lock it in the same vault where I keep the memory of that night—the blood, the silence, the shadow of a teenage girl in an upstairs window.
"Tomorrow night," I tell her. "My full organization will meet us."
She smiles. It's sharp enough to cut glass.
"I'll wear the red."
I watch her disappear into the bathroom to finish getting ready, and two thoughts collide in my chest with enough force to crack a rib.
She's everything I always wanted, and she's the one thing that could end me.