Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kazimir
I didn’t know what I was thinking taking her to dinner, but all I knew was, an hour at the gym and two cold showers later, the heat in my veins had barely died down and my cock was almost straining.
While dinner was uneventful and mostly consisted of small talk—an act I’d never thought I’d be caught dead indulging in—I couldn’t tear my eyes from her lips and the occasional brush of her thighs against mine.
I’d been wound tight since the elevator and I meant it when I said I was toying with the idea of emptying out the room, but I also knew she was struggling with a couple of things and I couldn’t be a selfish bastard about it; hence my decision to call an early night to dinner despite the protest from my little friend and her inviting eyes.
With her probably tucked in bed and sleeping, and my struggle to relax, I realized the foolishness of my decision.
I picked up my phone, answering a couple of emails and sending a few documents to Nikolai to review.
It took a total of thirty minutes before I was back to square one and scrolling through our texts from noon.
A quarter past one was a time any sane human should be deep asleep, but somehow I’d figured if I couldn’t sleep, she had to be aware of the role she played in my misery.
‘I should’ve brought you home.’
I clicked on the send button, preparing to toss my phone when the text double-ticked and the typing bubble appeared on my screen before disappearing almost immediately.
My senses perked up and I was immediately alert. I gave it another second and when nothing came in, I texted again.
‘Don’t ignore me, little bird.’
The bubble appeared again, but this time, it didn’t disappear into nothingness.
‘You barely said anything that requires a response.’
I got into a comfortable position, my dick forming a half-mast tent in my pants.
‘Why are you still up?’
‘Some of us have demanding bosses and have to make sure everything is in order for the next day.’
My lips curled. Of course she had a sassy reply.
‘And this boss of yours, is he nice to you?’
Her response came slower.
‘He has his moments.’
‘And was tonight one of those moments?’
‘I’ll give him a fair pass.’
‘So he gets his reward then? It’s not good to owe your boss, you know.’
‘Really? And what would he do if I kept his prize?’
I clicked on the call button without thinking; she picked up on the second ring.
“He will bend you over and spank you till your ass adapts a permanent dent of his fingers on them.”
Her breath hitched over the phone and I could picture her struggling to regain composure.
“I never said you got it right.”
“You never said I was wrong, either.”
A heavy silence passed before she spoke. “You were right.”
My lips curled. “Of course I was. How do I get my prize?”
“We never discussed one.”
“You promised one and I want it now.”
“Now?” Her voice was a tiny squeak that took my half-mast to a full tent.
My hand wandered to my pants, squeezing lightly. I felt like a stupid teenager indulging in phone sex, but I was damn near exploding and I knew her voice was enough to tip me over.
“I don’t know, Gen. Do you have other ideas?”
“No.” Her voice was hardly steady, followed by a shallow intake of air.
I smirked, knowing exactly what was going on. I loved how responsive she was. “You don’t get to do anything behind my back.”
“I’m not doing anything.” Her voice started off strong but ended as a plea.
“You’re saying if I dipped my hand in your panties, I wouldn’t find you wet and waiting?”
Her breath hitched again, this one sharper than the other. “I don’t know.”
Tension curled up my veins. I couldn’t remember the last time I had enough patience to play around or jerk off.
I always had someone for when I needed to blow off steam and couldn’t care much for theatrics and tension, but with her, everything felt new and I was ready to explore every boundary.
“How about you dip your fingers and let me know.”
The line was silent for a moment before the soft rustling of sheets leaked through, pushing more blood to my cock.
Genevieve drew in a sharp intake of air and I felt it shoot through me like a bullet. “So?”
“Wet,” she murmured.
I closed my eyes, picturing the view of her pussy when I fucked her from behind. The perfect stretch and the juices coating my cock. My erection became too painful to ignore.
“How wet?” I asked mid-stroke.
“Dripping.” Her voice had gained a little confidence and became clearer.
“You’re going to do as I say, little bird.”
“Alright.”
I was fucked. The way she said it, I knew I would do anything to keep hearing her sound like that.
“You’re going to dip two fingers, pretend it’s my cock, and tell me how it feels.”
If I wasn’t painfully hard, her response would’ve gotten me there in a flash.
“Can I use my vibrator?”
I nearly passed out from visual overload. The sight of her sprawled in bed, two fingers in her pussy and a vibrator on her clit was a view I would pay fortunes to see, but I knew a picture would be too much.
“Yes.” The word sounded like an animal’s growl and hardly like me.
A light hum started on her side of the line and it wasn’t lost on me how she didn’t have to move to retrieve it.
“Seems like I interrupted you.”
“I’m not complaining.” She didn’t deny the insinuation. Another nail to my coffin.
It marveled me how she was able to be both shy and sensual at the same time.
The hum increased, followed by a soft moan. “Kazimir…”
My blood turned to lava, rushing to my dick and blurring my vision.
My strokes came harsher. “Tell me how you feel, baby.”
“You feel so good.”
“Yeah?”
“I wish you were here instead.”
“We can fix that, but now I need you to go faster.”
The hum of her vibrator increased and I could make out the wet sounds of her fingers entering her pussy.
It was a heavenly combination that filled my ears and melted into my blood.
Genevieve’s moans became louder, her fingers moving faster and filling my speaker with wet, squishy sounds I wished were from my cock fucking her.
“I’m gonna cum,” she said at the same time I felt my balls tighten.
“Go for it.”
It took less than a second for her and two thrusts before I let out a low growl and she exploded into a muffled scream.
My cock throbbed in my palm, ropes of cum staining my sheets instead of filling her up.
It took longer before her breath slowed into deep, heavy breaths.
“Why do you have a vibrator, little bird?” I asked the question that’s been itching my brain.
“I wouldn’t need it if you stopped teasing me.”
The line died off before I could give a reply, drawing a throaty smile from me.
Typical.
“Kazimir,” Dimitri Russo, the new Don of the Cosa Nostra and a close friend of Nikolai, cut through whatever fog I’d been sitting in. “You’ve been somewhere else all night.”
“I’m here.”
“Your body’s here. The rest of you left an hour ago.” He leaned back, swirling the whiskey in his glass with the easy confidence of a man who’d never had to question his place in the world, and not the one who set his uncle on fire two days ago. “What is it? Business?”
“Business is fine.” It was. The Voss contract had closed favorably, the shipments through the eastern corridor were running clean, and the man who’d thought my absence in Moscow meant weakness was no longer in a position to think anything at all.
By every measure that should have mattered to me, the empire was running exactly as it should.
I still couldn’t focus on a single conversation happening at this table.
Dimitri nodded, choosing not to push further. I nursed my drink, telling myself if I stayed longer, the old me would return.
It was close to midnight and the old me was a no-show when a blonde, confident in the way women trained themselves to be around men with my kind of money, sauntered towards me and settled into the empty chair beside me without waiting for an invitation.
I’d been approached by women like her more times than I could count over the years, and there had been a time, not so long ago, when I would have found her attractive enough to indulge for an hour, maybe two, before sending her home in a car with nothing owed on either side.
I looked at her now and felt nothing. Not distaste, exactly. Just a flat, complete absence of interest, like trying to find heat in a room with no fire in it, and the knowledge that Genevieve would never be caught tits out and desperate.
“Buy me a drink?” she asked, her hand settling lightly on my forearm.
“He will.” I pointed to Nikolai, who was in the middle of a conversation with a minister whose name I’d forgotten.
She regarded me for a moment before walking off to Nico. He took one look at her and the direction she came in before giving his head a shake and waving a waiter over.
My attention shifted from them and back to my drink and the face that was almost too real to be an imagination.
Genevieve Sinclair, and how she stumbled into my life like a clumsy kid caught where they shouldn’t be.
I was not a man given to sentiment. I’d buried that particular weakness early, somewhere around the time I buried my father and inherited a throne soaked in blood that wasn’t entirely his own.
Sentiment got men killed in my world. It made them slow, made them predictable, gave their enemies a lever to pull when they needed one.
And yet here I sat, surrounded by good whiskey and willing women and men who would have died for me without hesitation, wanting nothing more than to leave this entire room behind and find her instead.
My eyes darted to the right, finding Francis Sokolov, a close friend of Vasily’s, face deep in a woman’s bosom, and with the thought of Vasily came Svetlana.
Svetlana’s father controlled half the ports along the northern coast, ports my organization needed unimpeded access to if we wanted to keep moving product without friction.
I controlled a greater majority of the arms, connections and manpower and could’ve fought for the ports, but it’d create a friction that time wouldn’t heal, and with the already existing wars, it was the last thing we needed.
The marriage, when it eventually happened, would cement an alliance that had kept two decades of relative peace intact. And business running smoothly on both ends.
Breaking it would not be a quiet decision. Svetlana’s father was not a man who absorbed insult gracefully, and an insult to his daughter, however informal the arrangement technically remained on paper, would not be received as a personal matter.
It would be received as a provocation and a declaration of war.
I ran a fist through my hair as the waiter filled my glass for the nth time.
The fuck was I thinking about calling off the arrangement?
As Pakhan, I understood exactly where my loyalty lay.
The organization came first. It always had.
My father had drilled that lesson into me before I was old enough to understand what it would eventually cost me, and I’d spent thirty years proving I’d learned it well, sacrificing whatever needed sacrificing to keep the machine running smoothly.
Men. Money. Relationships and blood, and none of it had weighed a thing. They were all worthy sacrifices, but this shook the fragments of all I held dear and tilted the scale a little.
It weighed now. That was the problem.
I couldn’t make myself regret the elevator. I couldn’t make myself regret Moscow, or the soup, or the dozen small moments since then where I’d caught myself softening in ways I didn’t recognize and didn’t particularly want to stop.
I left the bar shortly after one, citing an early morning that wasn’t entirely a lie, and let my driver take the long route home along the avenue rather than the faster route through the financial district.
We were halfway through when a flashing banner caught my eye, but it wasn't the bright lights that had me ordering the driver to pull to a stop.
A banner stretched across the front of the opera house, illuminated against the dark street, announcing a limited run of Hamilton, the theatre show I’d seen her watching on the flight to Moscow and the same one that played on her TV.
I had zero interest in cinema and had only picked the name because she wouldn’t stop yapping about the opening to Rose and Caroline, with the duo reiterating their lack of interest in theatre.
I sat there longer, staring at the neon lights and wondering what the fuck I was doing and coming to a conclusion that would sound insane to a madman.
The decision about Genevieve wasn’t going to resolve itself simply because I avoided thinking about her for a few hours.
I’d spent my entire life making the difficult calculations my position demanded, weighing costs against benefits with the same cold precision my father had taught me, and somewhere in the last several weeks, the calculation involving her had stopped balancing out the way it should have.
So, I did exactly what no sane Pakhan in my place would do. I told myself I would figure out Svetlana later. The organization wasn’t going to fall apart because I was nursing unexplored feelings for my assistant.
For now, there was a banner advertising an opera she’d wanted to see. It was hardly enough reason to trigger the backlash that might draw from it, nor was it enough to solve the problem I’d be facing the moment Svetlana’s father learned exactly how distracted his daughter’s intended had become.
However, it was enough to lighten my mood and make the drive home feel less like returning to an empty apartment and more like looking forward to something I hadn’t let myself want in longer than I could remember.
And I guess that was something. I had always been a selfish bastard.