17. Lena
LENA
The metal of the SUV is a shock against my bare shoulder blades, a biting cold that does nothing to douse the fire roaring under my skin.
Razvan is a wall of heat pressing me into the vehicle, his hand a heavy, familiar weight at my throat.
He isn’t squeezing, not yet, but the threat is there, vibrating through his palm and into my pulse.
“Now,” he growls, his breath ghosting over my lips, smelling of dark liquor and possessiveness. “Let’s discuss tonight, zayka.”
My heart is a trapped bird hammering against my ribs.
I should be terrified. I should be thinking of the cellar, of the days he kept me in the dark until I forgot what the sun looked like.
But my body is a traitor. The red silk of the dress is so thin it feels like nothing, and where his thighs pin mine against the door I am agonizingly aware of the friction.
The dress, the golden chains, the way he watched me move for the last three hours—it’s all sitting in my blood like a toxin. I’m breathless, my lungs struggling to find air that isn’t him.
“You wanted a show,” I rasp, my hands curling into the expensive wool of his coat. I don’t push him away. I pull him closer. “I gave you one.”
His eyes are black voids in the moonlight, stripped of everything but predatory intent. “You played me. You used that mouth to stop an execution. You think you’re clever, Lena? You think you can manipulate me with a kiss?”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
His grip tightens, just a fraction, just enough to make me gasp. “Don’t mistake my hunger for weakness. If you ever cross me like that in public again, the punishment won’t be something you enjoy.”
He hauls me away from the car, his hand sliding from my throat to the small of my back, his fingers digging into the exposed skin.
He marches me toward the house, his pace relentless.
The compound is a tomb of silence. The guards are shadows at the perimeter, the staff long gone to their quarters and Theo fast asleep.
It’s just us. The dark, the gravel under my heels, and the suffocating weight of what’s coming.
The moment we step through the heavy oak doors, I jerk away.
I need distance. I need to breathe without the scent of him filling my head.
I stumble toward the center of the foyer, my heels clicking sharply on the marble.
I don’t look back. I can feel him watching me, a physical pressure at my spine.
He doesn’t chase. He doesn’t move. He just stands by the door, his silhouette tall and terrifying against the moonlight spilling through the glass.
The silence is worse than the shouting. It’s a vacuum, sucking the resolve out of me.
“I’m going upstairs,” I say, my voice cracking. I start for the stairs, my hand gripping the banister like a lifeline.
“The dress, Lena.”
I stop, my foot on the first step. I turn slowly. He’s moved. He’s at the base of the stairs now, his coat discarded on a chair. He’s unbuttoning his cuffs, the movements slow and methodical.
“Take it off,” he commands.
“No.”
He’s up the stairs before I can scream. He doesn’t grab me; he simply crowds me against the railing, his arm barring my path.
He gives a sharp tug and the silk gives way, sliding down my body in a cool, red wave until it pools around my hips.
I feel the air hit my skin, raising goosebumps, but the chill is instantly replaced by the heat radiating off him.
He doesn’t touch me at first. He just looks. His gaze is a physical weight, traveling from my throat to my breasts, lingering on the way they heave with my frantic breathing.
“Fucking beautiful,” he murmurs, and the word feels like a brand.
Before I can find my breath, his hand is at the nape of my neck, his fingers tangling in my hair to tilt my head back.
He doesn’t ask. He steers me the rest of the way up the stairs, his chest a solid wall against my shoulder, guiding me into the darkened master suite.
The moment the door clicks shut behind us, he maneuvers me toward the expanse of the mattress.
I fall back, the silk of the discarded dress left somewhere in the hallway, and my head hits the headboard with a dull thud.
He sinks to his knees between my thighs. I let out a jagged breath. His large hands find my waist, his thumbs digging into the soft dip of my hips, anchoring me. Then, he leans forward.
His first kiss is on my inner thigh, just above the knee.
It’s dry and lingering. Then comes the heat.
His tongue traces a slow, deliberate path upward, and I bite my lip so hard I taste copper.
I want to push him away; I want to scream at him for the cellar, for the threats, for the way he owns me.
But as his mouth moves higher, my legs fall open of their own accord.
“Razvan,” I gasp, my fingers knotting in his dark hair.
“Hush, zayka,” he breathes against my skin. “You wanted to be the center of attention tonight. Now you have it. All of it.”
He finds me with a sudden, shocking precision.
I cry out, my back arching off the bed as his tongue flickers against me.
It’s a rhythmic, relentless torture. He knows exactly how much pressure to apply, exactly when to slow down and when to drive me to the edge.
I’m a submissive creature under his hands, my body betraying every ounce of my hatred.
The tension builds until it’s a physical ache in my bones. I’m hovering on the precipice, my breath coming in broken, rhythmic sobs.
“Please,” I whisper, though I’m not even sure what I’m asking for.
“Tell me what you want,” he growls, looking up at me, his eyes dark with a terrifying hunger.
“I…I can’t—”
“Tell me.”
“Please…let me…”
He doesn’t wait for me to finish. He dives back in, his pace increasing until the world narrows down to the point of contact between us. The orgasm hits me like a tidal wave, violent and total. I shake in his grip, my fingers digging into his shoulders, my vision blurring.
As the waves start to recede, I try to pull back, to regain some shred of my dignity. I’m exhausted, my muscles twitching with the aftershock. But Razvan’s hands don’t loosen. If anything, they tighten.
“Not yet,” he says, his voice a dark promise.
He continues, his mouth and fingers working in a coordinated assault that makes my eyes go wide. “Razvan, no, I—I can’t again, please—”
“You can,” he says, his thumb moving with a maddening, slow deliberation. “But you’re going to ask me for it this time. Properly.”
“No,” I moan, even as the heat starts to coil in my gut again, swifter and hotter than before.
“Yes. Ask me, Lena. Ask your Pakhan to make you come again.”
I shake my head, my hair whipping across my face. I hate him. I hate how well he knows my body. The sensation is building, sharper now, more sensitive, bordering on pain but dripping with pleasure. I’m squirming under him, my hips bucking instinctively.
“Ask me.”
The coiling tension is unbearable. It’s a scream building in my throat. My pride is the last thing I have, and I feel it slipping away, melting in the heat of his gaze.
“Please,” I sob, my voice breaking. “Please, Razvan… Make me…make me come. Please.”
“Good girl.”
He doesn’t show mercy. He drives me upward with a ruthless intensity.
This time, there is no bracing myself. There is no holding on to the anger.
I lose the ability to think, to remember why I’m supposed to fight him.
When the second peak hits, it’s deeper, more primal.
I let go completely, my voice rising in a high, thin wail that echoes through the silent room. I am completely, utterly undone.
Before I can even find my breath, he is over me.
He sheds his clothes with a violent efficiency and moves between my legs. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t wait. He enters me in one deep, commanding thrust that fills me so completely I can only gasp his name into the dark.
It isn’t gentle. It’s a reclamation. Every movement is a reminder of the power he holds, the way he has woven himself into the very fabric of my survival.
I meet him thrust for thrust, my legs wrapped tight around his waist, my hands clutching his back as if I’m trying to pull his very soul into me.
In the dark, with the sound of our breathing and the rhythm of the bed, the lines between us blur. I’m not the captive and he isn’t the captor—we are just two jagged pieces of a broken world, grinding against each other until there’s nothing left but the fire.
When he finally spills into me, his body rigid and his head buried in the crook of my neck, I feel a strange, hollow sense of peace. The peace of the defeated.
He collapses against me, his heart thudding against my own. We lie there for a long time, the sweat cooling on our skin, the ruin of the red dress a dark stain on the floor.
I lie in the silence, processing the weight of him and the terrifying truth that even when I hate him most I am most alive when I am his.
Razvan moves to the other side of the bed, his breathing slowing.
The space between us is only a few feet of mattress, but it feels like a canyon.
Neither of us speaks. There are no words for this—for the way we destroy each other and call it love, for the way he holds my life in his hands and I let him.
Something has shifted. The performative mask of the nightclub has left a residue. We aren’t just Pakhan and captive wife anymore; we are two people locked in a burning building and we’ve stopped looking for the exit.
Hours later, I lie staring at the ceiling. The moonlight has moved, casting long, skeletal shadows across the room. Razvan is asleep, or pretending to be, his silhouette a jagged mountain range under the sheets.
The anger is back.
It’s not the white-hot rage of the nightclub. It’s a cold, crystalline thing. It’s the realization of my own pathetic helplessness. If someone decided to send a hit squad through those gates tonight, what could I do? If Razvan decided to take Theo and leave me in a ditch, how would I stop him?
I have no weapons. I have no skills. I am a ghost in a silk dress, haunting a house that belongs to a monster.
I feel naked. Not because of the lack of clothes, but because I am exposed. I am a liability. I am the “prize” that men like Borodin think they can just reach out and touch.
I won’t be a girl running through the snow again. I won’t be the woman weeping in a cellar, waiting for a door to open.
I sit up, the sheets pooling around my waist. I look at the back of Razvan’s head.
“Teach me,” I say.
The silence stretches. I know he’s awake. A man like him never truly sleeps.
“Teach me what, Lena?” his voice comes out low, roughened by the night.
“To fight. To defend myself. To kill if I have to.”
He turns slowly, propping himself up on one elbow. His eyes are unreadable in the dark. “You have guards. You have me. You have the walls of this compound.”
“I have nothing,” I snap, my voice low but vibrating with intensity. “Guards can be bought. You can be killed. These walls can be breached. I saw Borodin tonight, Razvan. I saw the way he looked at me. I won’t be a victim in your world. Not again.”
“No,” he says. It’s a flat, final sound.
“Why?” I push, leaning forward, my hair falling over my shoulders. “Because you like me helpless? Because it’s easier to control a woman who can’t hit back?”
“Because you are not a soldier,” he says, his voice rising just a fraction. “You are the mother of my son. You are the Pakhan’s wife. Your job is to be protected, not to roll in the dirt with killers.”
“My job is to survive!” I’m practically hissing now. “If something happens to you, who protects Theo? You think an enemy will spare a five-year-old because his mother is ‘protected’? I deserve to know how to keep us alive.”
Razvan sits up fully, the moonlight catching the hard line of his jaw. He looks at me for a long time, and for a second I see a flash of something like respect in his eyes. Then, it vanishes, replaced by the iron-cold mask of the Pakhan.
“The answer is no, Lena. I will not turn you into a weapon. I will not have my wife smelling of blood and cordite. You stay in the light. I’ll handle the dark.”
He lies back down, turning his back to me again. The conversation is over. He’s the Pakhan; his word is law.
I stare at his broad shoulders, a cold, hard knot forming in my chest. He thinks he can lock me in this gilded cage and tell me when to breathe. He thinks because he owns my body, he owns my future.
I lie back down and stare at the ceiling.
He won’t teach me. Fine.
But I’m going to learn. And I know exactly who will be bored enough, or rebellious enough, to show me.
I close my eyes, and for the first time in months, I don’t feel like I’m running. I feel like I’m hunting.