CHAPTER 10
Siena
I got up the stairs on legs that had stopped taking orders.
Below me the house started putting itself back together by cleaning up the evidence. Two floors up, Maksim was breathing on his own with my sutures holding him shut. He would see the morning. I’d done that.
The work was finished. Nobody had told my body.
I shut my door behind me. I didn’t lock it. I had stopped locking it days ago and had never once asked myself why. This time a part of me hoped that Kolya would change his mind and make up for denying me.
The bathroom light was surgical. I stood under it and took inventory instead of screaming.
Blood coated my arms up to both elbows, gone brown at the edges.
A stripe of it dressed my throat where I had shoved my hair back with the flat of my wrist. My dirty blonde hair was tangled and spots of blood had knotted there.
My shirt was destroyed. Torn at the shoulder where he dragged it off me.
Two buttons were gone somewhere on the hallway floor.
Blood and Kolya’s hands on the same silk, in the same hour.
I could not separate them. I didn’t try.
I turned the water up past hot and got in.
The blood left my body in watered down threads. It hung in the water around my feet. It went pink. Then it became nothing at all.
I washed my hands like I did before surgery. Nail beds. The webs between the fingers. Up past the wrist and back down. I did it twice.
The second time had nothing to do with Maksim.
I have been washing somebody off my hands since I was sixteen years old. I didn’t explore that. The water was very hot, and I let it hurt. Then I put my face into the spray and waited to come back to myself.
I did not come back.
Because I hadn’t finished. The man I craved had worked me up, let me have it, then kept going only to stop before we got what we needed. He’d stepped back and left my want with nowhere to go.
I told myself I was too tired. I wasn’t.
I told myself it was adrenaline. A doctor’s lie to sound reasonable.
My palm went flat against the tile. I stopped arguing.
In my head, he didn’t stop.
His hand stayed exactly where it was. Two fingers deep, his palm hard against my clit, and he did not go still. He never said, ‘not like this.’ He said my name into my throat in that wrecked voice and he kept going.
His fingers curled. He found the place inside me that took my spine out from under me. He stayed there. He worked it until my legs stopped being useful. His mouth came open against my pulse. His breath went ragged on my wet skin.
That was the part I kept. The breath. The great cold pakhan of the Volkov Bratva, breathing like a man who had been running.
He got my slacks off. Not gently. In my head I let him ruin them.
Then he turned me and put me against the tile. My cheek to the wall. My palms flat. His hand spread between my shoulder blades, holding me there. He put a knee between my feet and moved them apart. He took his time about it, because he wanted to savor me, which I loved and hated.
"Say it again," he ordered against my ear. "Say you want it."
"I want it."
"Louder, Siena."
I said it louder. In my head I said it loud enough that the men downstairs heard their pakhan's wife and understood exactly what she was.
His teeth closed on the nape of my neck. Not enough to break anything. Enough that everything in me went loose at once. Then his mouth opened over the bite and he kissed it, slow and open and wet, apologising for nothing.
His hand found my breast. He pulled at the nipple, rolled it between his ,and pinched until the ache ran straight between my legs.
His other hand goes back where it was. Two fingers, then three, and my body opens for them.
His thumb worked slow circles on my clit while he held me up against the tile with his weight.
He was hard against the small of my back through his trousers.
I wanted him inside me so badly I made a noise I’d never made in my life.
"You're soaked," he said wrecked. "You made me obey. In front of my men. You gave the pakhan an order and I took it."
"Yes."
"Say what you want."
I showed him instead.
I turned round in his arms. In the hallway I got my hand on him and he caught my wrist and stopped me. Here, nobody stopped me.
I got his belt open, got his pants down, then got my hand around him.
He was hot and hard and heavy in my palm. Heavier than I expected. The sound that came out of him went straight down through the middle of me. I worked him slowly. Every muscle in his jaw tightened.
"Siena." Half a warning. Half a prayer.
"You told me to say what I want." I dropped down onto my knees on the wet tile. "This."
I took him into my mouth.
He was too much for it to be graceful and I had no interest in graceful.
I took as much of him as I could and used my hand for the rest. The heat of him.
The salt. The muscle in his thigh jumping under my other palm every time I took him deeper.
He got bigger in my mouth and I did it again just to feel it happen.
"Bozhe moy," he rasped. "Stop. Siena. Stop, or this ends here."
I took him all the way to the edge and held him there.
Then his patience died.
"Enough." He got his hands under my arms and hauled me up off the floor. His mouth was on mine before I was standing. "Enough. I want to be inside you."
He lifted me. My back hit the tile. My legs wrapped around his waist, because there was nowhere else in the world for them to be.
He pushed into me in one long stroke. I felt every inch of him go in. I felt the exact moment he was all the way home and my body had to make room for what it had been given.
He held still there, buried, his forehead down on mine.
Then he moved. He dragged almost the whole way out, then drove back up into me. Again. Harder. He fucked me against the wall of his own house. My ruined shirt on the floor. The water coming down over both of us. His mouth was at my ear the whole time. English, then Russian.
I dug my fingers into his shoulders. My nails went into the muscle over the blades. I dragged them all the way down his back. He made a low sound and fucked me harder. So I did it again. I wanted marks on him. I wanted him finding them tomorrow, under his shirt, in a room full of his men.
His breath came apart against my throat. That one whispered Russian word he gave me in the hallway filled my ear.
That was the one that did it. One word in a language I do not speak, said like it had been dragged out of him against his will. It undid me faster than either of his hands.
I came with my mouth open against a throat that was not there. His name was in my moan. The water took the sound before it could leave the room.
My knees went out from under me on the way down. I caught the tap with my hip hard enough to bruise. Then I sat on the floor of the shower. The water ran over my back. I panted.
Then it was very quiet.
I was a woman sitting alone in a shower in a house full of armed men. My hand was still between my legs. Somebody else's blood was in the drain.
The water went cold before I moved.
I got out. I dried off. I put on clothes another person had chosen for me and folded on a chair.
And I made myself say the true thing out loud, once, the way I make residents say aloud the thing they got wrong. "You're in trouble."
Because the hallway I could have filed. The hallway had a gun in it.
A boy bleeding at the foot of the stairs, a body by the door, and my pulse running at a hundred and forty.
Bodies do stupid arithmetic under threat.
I had an entire vocabulary for the hallway, and I had been assembling it since the moment he walked away.
There was no gun in the shower.
Nobody died in the shower. Nothing threatened me in the shower. No man in the shower at all. Only me, six days of him, and a want that had gone on perfectly happily without a single thing to explain it.
There is a thing I am going to do. It is already in me.
He hadn’t said it as a threat. He’d said it as a diagnosis. Whatever it was, he’d chosen it before I ran into that hallway. And because of it, he had stopped himself in the middle of what we both wanted.
And I understood two things with a surgeon's cold certainty.
I was falling for a man who could be a monster.
And even now, even wrecked, even honest, he was keeping one door shut that I could not see.