3. Dmitri
DMITRI
This woman is going to get me killed, and I’m not sure I mind.
I stare down at the top of Cara’s head, my hands burying into the mattress so hard I think the wood underneath is cracking. She’s kneeling between my thighs like a little dark-haired priestess about to perform a sacrifice, and my cock is the item on the altar.
“Cara,” I grunt, the syllable scraping against my throat like gravel.
She doesn’t answer. She just wraps her small, clever hand around the base of my shaft—gripping it so tight it makes my vision blur—and buries my cock into her mouth.
Bozhe.
She’s small for this. I’m rather big for her. I know the math. But the second her wet, hot throat clamps down around the crown, the math goes out the window. She sucks hard, pulling me down into her heat, her tongue swirling around the sensitive ridge beneath the head.
I lift my hips an inch off the bed, an involuntary jerk of pure survival instinct. “Careful,” I growl, my knuckles turning white.
She ignores me. She slides lower, taking another two inches, her throat stretching to accommodate the thickness.
Then she hits her limit. Her throat tightens, her chest heaving as she gurgles around me, the sound wet, desperate, and filthy.
She swallows hard, trying to take the mass of me, the suction so intense that my balls tighten and a heavy charge of pre-cum shoots straight out of the tip, hitting the back of her throat.
She gurgles again, swallowing the fluid down without breaking the seal, her eyes lifting to mine through her messy hair. They’re dark, blown-out, and completely smug. She thinks she has me. She thinks she’s the one controlling the server now.
I’m about to come. The heat is boiling in my gut, a second away from exploding right down her throat.
“No,” I rasp.
I don’t give her a choice. I grab her by the hair—not gently—and haul her up. She gasps as my cock slides out of her mouth with a loud, wet Pop, a string of saliva stretching between her lips and my wet head. She looks flushed, breathless, and thoroughly debauched.
“My turn,” I tell her.
I swing my legs off the bed, grabbing her by the waist and pulling her with me.
She’s laughing, a breathless, wicked little sound, but I don’t let her finish it.
I march her across the room, my bare feet sinking into the carpet, until her front hits the massive plate-glass window overlooking the Boston skyline.
The glass is freezing. Her skin is boiling. The contrast makes her gasp, her palms slapping against the window as I press my heavy chest against her bare back, pinning her there.
“Look at that,” I murmur in her ear, my hand sliding between her thighs from behind, finding her completely soaked, dripping down her own legs. “The whole city out there, and you're getting ruined against the glass.”
“Dmitri—”
I don’t let her talk. I lift her left leg, hooking her knee over my hip, and guide my wet, throbbing head straight back against her slit. I push forward in one heavy, blunt stroke.
She shrieks against the glass, her breath fogging up the cold pane as I bury myself to the root.
She is so tight after the orgasm that it feels like sliding into hot velvet.
I grip her hip with one hand, my fingers digging bruises into her skin, and use the other to hold her head steady by the hair so she has to watch the city while I pound into her.
Slap. Slap. Slap.
The sound of our skin hitting is loud in the empty room. Every thrust is hard, deep, and unmerciful. I’m thirty-eight years old. I should have more discipline than this. I’ve executed men without my pulse rising, but this little hacker has me sweating like a conscript.
Her ass bounces against my hips with every stroke, her inner muscles squeezing my shaft like they’re trying to milk me dry.
I can feel the orgasm building again in my balls, heavy and hot, threatening to break through my control.
I’m deep inside her, the friction so intense that I know I’m only three or four thrusts away from letting go.
I slow down for a fraction of a second, my chest heaving against her back. “I'm going to come,” I growl into her neck, my teeth biting into her shoulder. “I’m pulling out.”
“No,” she gasps, her hands clawing at the glass, her hips bucking backward into me, forcing my cock even deeper into her wetness. “Don't you dare, Dmitri. Fill me up.”
That’s all the permission my animal brain needs.
“Yeah?” I growl, my voice dropping an octave.
I grab both of her hips, locking her in place, and drive myself into her with everything I have. One. Two. On the third thrust, I bury myself so deep my pubic bone slams against her ass, and my control snaps.
A thick, heavy stream of semen fires deep inside her womb, pulsing over and over. She whimper-cries against the glass, her own walls clamping down on me in frantic, tight waves as she rides the back of my orgasm, her body shaking from head to toe.
I stay inside her for a long minute, panting, my forehead resting against her hot shoulder, watching the fog from our breath slowly fade from the glass.
Cara’s hands are still braced in front of her, fingers spread, legs shaky enough that I keep one arm locked around her waist. She tries to turn her head and look at me, but I press my mouth to the side of her neck before she can say something clever and ruin me again. “You alive?” she asks, breathless.
“Barely.”
She laughs, soft and pleased with herself. “Good. I like measurable results.”
I ease us back from the window, and she gives a little hiss when her feet find the carpet. My hand tightens at her waist. “Sore?”
Her eyes cut to mine. “Fishing for compliments?”
“I don’t fish.”
“No, you probably stand near rivers until they surrender.”
That gets a laugh out of me before I can stop it. I don’t laugh much. I don’t have the habit anymore, and I already know this woman could become one if I let her.
I lift her before she can argue, and she makes an indignant sound that turns into another laugh when I carry her back to the bed. Naked, flushed, hair tangled around her face, mouth swollen from mine, she still manages to look like she might hack a bank if I leave her bored for long.
Her smile fades a little when my hand moves over her palm and my phone rings. She has ink on one finger from earlier office work, a tiny, dark smear near the nail. She catches me looking and closes her hand.
“What?” she asks.
“You notice everything.”
“So do you.”
The answer settles somewhere under my ribs. She watches me for a second, more serious now. “Are you going to tell me who keeps calling?”
“My life.”
She quirks a brow at me. “Rude of it.”
“Yes.”
“You can answer.”
“I know.” I shrug and focus on her. “I’ll do it later.”
Her mouth curves, and I kiss her again because I don’t trust myself with words tonight. With her, words keep trying to become things I cannot afford.
The second time is slower. She stops joking halfway through and holds onto me as if she wants to memorize the shape of my shoulders, my breathing, the scar at my ribs when her hand finds it.
She doesn’t ask about the scar. I like her more for that.
I hate her a little for how easy she makes it to forget.
I ask for her number, and she gives it to me.
“Use it wisely,” she says. “I charge emotionally for stupid calls.”
Afterward, she falls asleep with one hand against my chest, fingers curled there like she’s claimed a piece of me for the night.
I stay awake because men like me don’t sleep easily beside women like her.
I watch the tiny movements of her face and think of every reason I should be gone before morning.
The phone lights again. No name this time. Just the emergency code every Volkov lieutenant knows and hopes never to see. I slide out from under Cara’s hand and take the call before it can ring a second time.
For three seconds, no one speaks.
Then a man in Moscow says, “Antonov residence. Fire.”
I stand before I understand standing. Cara shifts on the bed, one bare shoulder exposed, her hair across her cheek.
A few minutes ago, this suite belonged to heat, skin, and the stupid peace men like me are trained to distrust. Now I’m naked in a hotel kitchen with a phone pressed to my ear, and my body feels like it has stepped away from me.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Security feed cut. Gate feed gone. Fire inside the house. Multiple points.”
“My parents?”
The man doesn’t answer fast enough.
I place the next call myself.
Maksim answers on the first ring. No greeting. “I know.”
The tile beneath my feet is cold. I notice that because my mind has become useless and wants small facts. Tile. Phone. Counter. Cara asleep behind a half-closed door. My mother’s message still in my phone from hours ago.
Goodnight. Come home safely.
“Maksim.”
“I’m moving men now,” he says. “Stay on the line.”
The screen changes. A live feed opens, jerking and grainy, carried by one of our men running through snow toward the house where I was born.
My house is burning in Moscow. Flames have eaten the west side already. Black smoke pours from shattered windows. Men shout in Russian. Someone drags a hose across the frozen ground. Another team moves toward the rear entrance, then backs off when the door belches flame from inside.
“They blocked the exits,” Maksim says, breath rough from movement. “Suppression system is dead. Accelerant everywhere.”
I can see him now. Coat open. No hat. Men part for him because even fire doesn’t make them forget who he is.
My place is at his back. Instead, I’m standing in Boston with a phone and Cara’s taste in my mouth.
My hand grips the phone. I do nothing. That’s the worst part. Doing nothing. Being nothing. A body in another country, while everything that made me a son burns on a screen the size of my palm.
“Get them out,” I say.
Maksim doesn’t promise. He never wastes mercy on lies.