Lena
His face.
The shock on it lasts exactly three seconds then it’s gone, replaced by something that hardens so fast and so completely that I watch it happen and my stomach drops straight through the floor.
What did I do? What did I just do?
I came here. I ran across a city with a bleeding hand and a screaming ankle and men behind me and I ran straight to Razvan Volkov because my brain said he was the answer, but my brain didn’t stop to ask a single intelligent question on the way.
Like whether the man who has wanted me dead for five years would help me. Like whether walking into his compound was any different from walking into a cell. Like whether—
What if it was him?
The thought arrives and it’s ice cold, and I feel it move through me from the top of my skull downward.
What if it’s him? What if Razvan is the one who took Theo, what if this is how he found me, what if I have just walked my own stupid terrified self directly into the trap and handed him everything he needed by showing up at his gate and saying my real name out loud?
I take one small step back without meaning to. My heel catches on the rug.
His jaw tightens. The shock is completely gone now and what’s replaced it is anger, dark and rising, and he looks at me across the room. “Why would you ever come here?”
Not a question. An accusation.
“You are the daughter of the man who killed my father.” His voice is quiet and that’s worse than if he’d raised it, that specific quiet he has that means something is being held back by a very short leash.
“I had you in a cell. I was going to kill you. You stole from me and you ran and you have been gone for five years and you walk back through my gate and ask me for help.” His head tilts.
“Why would you think, for even one second, that I would—”
“You talk like you are some sort of saint. You’re not, Razvan, you killed my father.
” The words come out of me flat and final and I watch them land on him.
“Whatever hatred you think you have for me? I have it multiplied by ten for you. Every single day for five years I have thought about finding you and putting a bullet through your skull and one day…one day, I will do exactly that.”
It stretches between us, thick and suffocating.
His brow goes up. Slowly.
Then he moves.
He crosses the room and he moves the way he has always moved, like something that has never once had to hurry because the outcome was never in question, and my body gets the message three seconds before my brain does because I’m already stepping back, one step and then another, and the backs of my knees find the wall then my shoulders find it and then I have nowhere left to go and he’s right there.
His hand comes up to my throat.
Not squeezing. Just…resting. His fingers are curved against my pulse, and I know he can feel my heart hammering against his palm like a trapped bird. I hate that he knows. I hate that I can’t hide it.
His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there. “A bullet through my skull,” he says, his voice a low, vibrating hum. His thumb traces a slow, agonizing line along my jaw. “Can you, zayka? Do you actually dare?”
Say no. My brain sends the command, but my mouth is a traitor.
I stare up at him, paralyzed by the heat of him, the sheer gravity of being this close to the center of my own destruction.
His thumb moves again, and my jaw clamps shut because the sound that wants to escape me, a soft, broken whimper, is not the sound of a woman who hates this.
But I do. I hate him. I hate the way my body has remembered every single thing about him in the span of thirty seconds—the smell of him, clean and sharp like winter air and expensive soap.
I hate that I can feel the traitorous ache between my thighs, a heavy, pulsing heat that makes me want to scream.
How? How can I feel this—this sick, dark attraction—in his sitting room while my son is God knows where? My son is in a car, or a basement, or a cage, and I am standing here vibrating under the touch of the man who started it all.
Focus on Theo, I tell myself, digging my nails into my palms until the pain clears the fog for a second. Use him. Don’t let him see you break.
“Razvan,” I breathe, and even my voice sounds like it’s betraying me. “Please.”
A low, deep throb starts up between my legs, an insistent pulse that makes my inner muscles clench around nothing.
I’m wearing jeans and the rough denim is suddenly an unbearable friction against my swollen lips. I feel them, puffy and hot, and I know if I were to look, my panties would be soaked through.
The self-loathing of it is enormous and does absolutely nothing to fix the problem.
My nipples are hard, tight little points that rub against the soft cotton of my bra with every shallow breath I take.
They feel heavy, too. A familiar, deep fullness begins to radiate from the center of my breasts, a telltale sign I’ve come to dread and, in secret moments, crave.
His hand moves. Down from my throat, slow and deliberate, tracing my collarbone.
His fingers are calloused, rough against my skin, and the contrast is electric.
They skim the top of my shoulder and then lower, barely grazing the side of my breast through my thin shirt, and I arch forward without permission.
My body just does it, closes the distance toward his hand like it has a separate agenda entirely, and a soft, choked sound leaves me that I swallow half of but not the other half.
The sound is pure need. My tits are so sensitive.
The casual brush of his knuckles sends a shockwave of sensation straight to my core, and I feel a fresh gush of wetness seep out, coating my inner thighs.
He growls. Low and close to my ear, his mouth almost touching it. “Five years,” he says, and his voice has dropped into something rough that I feel in my spine, a vibration that travels straight to my clit. “And you still do that.”
Stop. I turn my face away from his mouth. Stop stop stop, this is not why you are here.
I put both hands on his chest and push.
He steps back. Easily, like he was already deciding to, and I hate that too, hate that he goes when he wants to go and not because I moved him.
I drag a breath in and press the back of my wrist against my mouth and make myself focus.
Theo. My son. That’s why I’m here. That’s the only thing.
“I will do anything,” I say, and my voice only shakes slightly. “Whatever you want. Whatever it costs. If you help me get him back, I will do anything you ask.” I make myself look at him directly. “Anything.”
Something moves in his expression. He looks at me for a long moment. “When did you have a son?”
I go rigid. “That’s not relevant.”
“It is if you want my help.”
“His age is not relevant to—”
“When.” His voice doesn’t rise. Doesn’t have to.
“Four years ago,” I say, because fighting him on this is time I don’t have. “He’s four. He’ll be five next month and he is somewhere with men who took him from school and I need—”
“Where is his father?”
The question hits me in the chest and I look away, at the window, at the floor, anywhere that isn’t his face right now. “There is no father,” I say. “He’s not in the picture.”
The room goes very quiet.
I make the mistake of looking back at him.
His eyes have gone pitch black.
He moves toward me again, slower this time, a deliberate, agonizing crawl. He doesn’t touch me, just leans in until his mouth is inches from my ear. I am pinned flat against the cool wall, my heart hammering so hard I’m surprised it hasn’t bruised my ribs.
His breath is warm, stirring the fine hairs on my neck. The musky scent of him floods my senses. My mouth actually waters. I have the absurd, sickeningly traitorous urge to turn my head just an inch and lick the sharp, clean line of his jaw.
“There’s no father,” he repeats, very quietly. Something in his voice that isn’t quite a question and isn’t quite satisfaction but lives somewhere between them. His breath fans my skin. “That’s better for everyone, zayka. Because if there was a father, I would kill the bastard myself.”
A fresh, hot pulse of pure unadulterated lust punches through my belly. It’s violent. It’s shameful. My body clenches, empty and desperate, and I am so wet I can feel the slickness spreading, a warm, shameful secret.
I want to hide, but I am frozen. I am a mother whose child has been kidnapped, and I am standing in a monster’s house, leaking for him. The self-loathing is a bitter, oily taste in the back of my throat.
Then my brain registers what he just said.
I pull back so fast I nearly crack my head against the wall. “What is wrong with you?” My voice has gone high and thin and I don’t care. “Get away from me.”
He doesn’t move. Of course he doesn’t move.
“Get away from me!” I put both hands on his chest and shove. This time I put everything behind it and he takes one step back and I am already moving, already turning for the door, because coming here was a mistake.
It was a catastrophic, soul-crushing, desperate mistake. Theo is out there, scared and alone, and I am standing in this room letting this monster breathe on me until my own body betrays my son. The shame is a physical weight, a sickening heat that makes me want to claw my own skin off.
My eyes are burning. I will not cry in front of him again. I will not give him the satisfaction of seeing me shatter. I reach the doorframe, my hand trembling as I grip the wood.
“What makes you think,” his voice comes from behind me, still that same quiet that carries across any room, “that if I find the boy, I won’t kill him too?”
I stop walking.
The words “kill him” go through me like a physical blade, shearing through the lust and the shame and the exhaustion.
For a heartbeat, the air in the room feels like it’s been replaced by shards of glass.
My vision whites out. The tears finally tip over, hot and silent, tracking through the dirt and blood on my cheeks.
But behind the tears, something else rises. It’s huge. It’s clarifying. It’s a rage so cold and so absolute that it feels like a religious experience.
You think you can threaten him? I think, staring at the grain of the wood under my fingers. You think you can talk about my son that way?
I turn around.
He’s standing in the center of the room, hands loose at his sides, his face that unreadable, beautiful mask of cruelty. He looks like a god deciding which mortal to crush next. I look at him across the space, this man I have hated and feared, and I make a decision that I can never, ever take back.
The “Mara” who lived in Budapest is dead. The “Lena” who ran from Moscow is gone. There is only a mother now.
“You won’t kill him,” I say. My voice isn’t shaking anymore. It’s as steady as a sniper’s aim.
“And why is that?”
“Because he’s your son.”
Your move, you asshole, I think, my heart finally steadying into a slow, rhythmic drumbeat of war. Save him or kill us both. But don’t you dare threaten him again.