Chapter 16 Maksim
MAKSIM
By the time I’ve handled business and we’re back in the car two and a half hours later, Ivy still refuses to look at me.
In fact, she hasn’t looked at me once since I was forced to get my hands dirty. Since I tied one of my contact’s employees up in a foldable chair and beat the truth out of him with my bare fists.
She saw it all.
The way I moved without hesitation. The way I issued commands like they were gospel. The way I stood there with blood on my knuckles as the man in front of me sobbed for mercy, my chest rising slow and steady, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just taken place.
And now she won’t look at me.
The whole drive back to the estate is silent, pointedly so. She’s angled toward the window, silently watching the city pass by with her hands laced in her lap.
I tell myself I should’ve known better. Taking her with me on a few stops had been… indulgent. I don’t take civilians out on business, not unless I’m making an example out of them. It always ends up getting far messier than I want it to, and that never makes for a great collaboration.
If I’m honest with myself, I took her with me because I didn’t want the day to end so soon after we’d finally found a rhythm, some fragile, fleeting middle ground where she wasn’t trying to claw my eyes out with every other sentence and had actually begun to let me see what had been hiding underneath all that self-preservation.
I wanted more of it. And maybe another part of me, the dark, insidious part that thirsted to test the limits of those around me, wanted to see how far I could push before she broke and decided it was too much for her.
Judging by the way her shoulders are locked tight and how set her jaw is, I’ve gotten my answer.
Too far.
The gate guards wave us through when we reach the compound. I pull through and up the long drive, killing the engine in front of the front steps. She gets out without waiting for one of the doormen to come over and open it for her, already shutting the door before I can talk to her.
I don’t bother trying to get her to stop and talk to me. Clearly, what’s done is done and I’ve ruined whatever fragile truce had been temporarily held between us.
As we make our way up the front steps, the front doors are pulled open for us.
“Go to your room,” I tell her when we step inside. “We’ll continue our conversation from earlier later.”
She doesn’t argue and walks off without so much as a glance over her shoulder.
It bothers me more than it should. Enough that my jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching my teeth together watching her figure retreat up the stairs and disappear around the corner heading to her suite.
Lev is waiting in the entryway for me, only stepping away from where he’s leaned up against the wall once I’ve finally let out a slow exhale. “Sergei’s been trying to reach you.”
I nearly sigh again. Of course he has. Nothing gets past him long—though I am interested to find out how he knew I was the one who took his glorified babysitter. Perhaps that man has more eyes in the city than I originally thought.
Nodding my thanks to Lev, I make the call from my study, needing the quiet and privacy while I still grapple with how deeply I’ve fucked up with Ivy. I have a feeling there’s no coming back from what I’ve done.
Though, perhaps in hindsight, that’s a good thing. I don’t need another distraction, especially one as tempting as her.
Sergei picks up on the second ring, already breathing fire. “Antonov. Tell me why you have my daughter’s tutor with you.”
“I needed to speak with her again about the cafe incident,” I reply simply.
“Then why the hell haven’t you returned her? It’s been days.”
Because I’m not in the habit of handing people back without knowing what they’re involved in. Even involuntarily.
Out loud, I say, “She’ll be back soon. I need to clear up a few things first.”
“What things?”
I let the silence stretch.
The truth is, I don’t know why she went back to that cafe, what compelled her to risk herself like that when she knows no one has been apprehended for it. She never actually explained herself while we were talking over lunch. Though, to play Devil’s advocate, I didn’t exactly ask, either.
While I’m not still married to the idea that she had something to do with the shootout, until I know whether it has anything to do with her employer, I’m not telling him a damn thing.
“It’s nothing for you to worry about, Sergei. I’ve got it handled.”
His temper flares. “I paid good money for that girl to come over here and teach my daughter. Good money, Antonov. And now Yulia’s been asking every day where she is. Do you understand me? She misses her and wants her back.”
Internally, I wince. Yulia has always been my soft spot. That girl has been surrounded by more darkness in her short little life than most men in my line of work ever will be. And yet somehow, she’s still bright, still kind, still curious. I’d seen Yulia soften under Ivy’s gentle persistence.
Taking that away from her is the last thing I want.
“I’ll make sure she gets back to you soon,” I tell him, and then I hang up before he can argue with me again.
I don’t like being rushed. Not by business, not by enemies, and certainly not by colleagues who think emotional leverage will get them what they want if they dig their fingers into my soft spots hard enough.
It never works the way they think it will.
If anything, it has the opposite effect. It makes me dig my heels in, forces me to put my foot down and tighten my grip on the reins until I’ve wrestled every ounce of control back into my own hands.
I do not respond well to manipulation, subtle or otherwise, and Sergei knows that. Which means he’s either growing careless or impatient.
Neither is ideal for our future together as business associates.
I take the stairs two at a time, heading up to Ivy’s room.
I’m still not entirely sure what I’m hoping to achieve when I get there, but it doesn’t slow me in the slightest. Maybe Yulia is the key.
That girl could soften stone with a smile, and Ivy clearly cares about her.
It’s one of the only things I know about her for certain.
She wouldn’t have thrown herself over Yulia, using her own body as a human shield, if she didn’t.
That’s something I can work with, a leverage point I didn’t even have to engineer in order to use in my favor.
I don’t like using the girl as a tool, but if it gets Ivy to start talking again—to start engaging with me, softening up those steel walls she wrapped herself up in after coming with me today, I’ll consider it necessary.
I don’t knock when I reach her door, a habit I’ve never once deviated from because I never knock in my own home. It’s a habit born of control, of ownership. There’s no one under this roof whose privacy supersedes mine. No one whose space I don’t already own, physically or otherwise.
Which makes what I walk in on all the more surprising.
I push the door open, fully expecting silence or her to give me the cold shoulder like she has been since we got in the car and came back here.
But instead, what I find is the complete opposite.
It has me stopping dead in my tracks.
She’s sprawled in the middle of the bed, eyes half-closed, legs parted just enough to give me a view I’ve never imagined before this but is now carved into my mind until the end of time.
One hand clutches the sheets by her side in a white-knuckled grip, the other is buried between her thighs, fingers shoved deep inside her cunt.
Her fingers are slick, glistening with her own arousal as she works herself in slow, uneven strokes.
Her back arches slightly off the mattress, chest rising and falling with the kind of desperation that only comes when you’ve nearly tipped over the edge and then dragged yourself back from it again and again. She’s close.
And she looks absolutely beautiful on display like this.
For a moment, I simply watch her.
Her lips are parted in a silent gasp, eyes half-lidded, too caught in the haze of pleasure to realize she’s no longer alone. Her hips jerk in tiny, unconscious movements against her hand, and her breaths come fast, sharp.
I feel heat coil low in my stomach, a slow, smoldering hunger I don’t even try to hide as my hand tightens around her door handle.
But then she freezes when she realizes she’s not alone.
She yanks her hand from between her legs like she’s been burned, the movement frantic and clumsy.
Her slick fingers smear against her inner thigh before she reaches blindly for the covers, trying to cover herself, trying to disappear, trying to pretend I didn’t just see exactly what she’s been doing.
Exactly how wet she is under those sheets.
How needy.
How desperate.
I shut the door behind me, letting the soft click of the lock settle into the air between us as I turn it.
Her eyes widen at the sound. “What are you—”
I don’t let her finish. I take a step forward. Then another. Like a man walking toward something he’s already claimed. Something that belongs to him, whether she’s willing to admit it or not.
She shifts back instinctively, curling the covers around her body to try and disappear into them, but there’s nowhere for her to go. “It’s… it’s not what it looked like.”
Her thighs press tightly together under the sheets, like she’s trying to trap the heat between them and lock it away where I can’t reach.
“Ivy,” I say, my voice low, almost a whisper. “You can lie to yourself if you want. But don’t lie to me. We both know what I just walked into.”
She opens her mouth, probably to deny it, to spin some deflection laced with that sharp tongue she always uses when she’s cornered. But nothing comes out because she knows I’m right.
It’s written across her skin in shades of red and pink. Still shimmering on the slick coating her fingers that she didn’t have time to lick clean. It’s in the dazed, glassy look in her eyes that hasn’t quite cleared yet.
“I didn’t…” she tries, voice hoarse, eyes darting to the side. “I wasn’t—”
My mouth curves up into something far too close to a smirk. “Now that I’ve seen what you’ve been hiding, I want more.”
Her eyes widen, chest rises and falls quickly.
Her chest heaves with a breath that sounds dangerously close to a gasp, and the air between us, already charged, sparks like a live wire.
I sit on the edge of the bed, not touching her yet, but close enough that the mattress dips under my weight and tilts her toward me.
My gaze drags down to her trembling hands, to the ones that were spreading her wide open just moments ago. “I could walk out right now and leave you to finish what you started…”
Her throat works in a swallow.
“Or,” I continue, leaning in until my mouth is close to her ear, “you could tell me what you were thinking about. What made you so desperate that you couldn’t wait until the whole house was asleep before touching yourself.”
She jerks back to look at me. “Stop it.”
The words snap out of her like a reflex. But there’s no weight behind them. No fire. It’s not the same venom she usually spits when she wants me to back off. This is something else. She’s begging me not to look too closely at what she can’t control.
I study her carefully. “You’re not telling me to leave.”
Her breath catches, and I catch the faint tremor in her hands when she pulls the blankets up to cover her chest. She’s not afraid of me in the way most people are, and that alone fascinates me more than it should.
Rationally, I need to leave, get myself as far away from her as possible, because if I don’t, I’m going to get dragged into something I’m not going to have the willpower to resist coming back to.
And with a war potentially brewing on the horizon, that’s a dangerous thing.
I can’t help myself when I curl my fingers gently under her chin, thumb brushing her jaw. “I don’t play games. If I want something, I take it. But I’m giving you one chance right now—tell me to walk out that door, and I will.”
She stares at me for a long moment. Long enough that I almost let go of her and back off.
But then she says something I’m not at all expecting, something that shatters my resolve completely.
“I was thinking about you.”