13. Vasilisa #2
“That’s the part that’s the same,” he says, and his thumb moves from my jaw to my lips, tracing the lower one, a slow, deliberate drag that makes my breath hitch.
“The part that likes to win. The part that wants the table tilted in your favor. You just don’t like the method.
You want it clean. You want it to be a meritocracy.
You want to believe the best hand wins without a weighted deck. ”
“It should,” I whisper.
“It doesn’t,” he says. “And you know it. You’ve known it since the day you woke up in a hospital, and the man who promised you forever had already packed a bag.”
His words are little knives, each one finding a soft place to land. He knows all my weak spots. He’s been mapping them since the day he met me.
“Your father and fiancé gambled away your future. I’m the one who’s finally betting on you.” He shifts, his body moving over mine, not covering me, just bracketing me, caging me in with his arms and legs, a wall of warm, solid muscle. “And I don’t bet to lose.”
His thumb is still on my lip. I open my mouth, and I bite it. Not hard, just enough, a small, sharp sting that makes him hiss, a soft intake of breath that is the first real sign of control he’s lost all night.
He pulls his thumb away and looks at the small, white indentation my teeth left in the skin. Then he looks at my mouth, and the look on his face is a new one. It’s hunger. Raw, unvarnished hunger, and it’s for me.
He lowers his head. And he kisses me.
The kiss is a claiming. His lips are hard on mine, demanding, and there’s no finesse to it, no gentle persuasion. This is the language he speaks, the one of power and possession, and he’s using it to translate every unsaid thing between us.
I kiss him back.
I meet his hunger with my own. I arch up against him, my body responding to the sheer, undeniable force of him, my hands coming up to tangle in his hair, holding him to me, my nails scraping against his scalp.
The kiss deepens, turns wet and messy, a clash of tongues and teeth, and it’s not pretty, it’s not romantic, it’s desperate and hungry and real.
His hands move over my body, stroking, kneading, learning the shape of me through the thin fabric of my dress.
One of them moves to my thigh, sliding up the smooth skin, and I can feel the calluses on his palm, a rough, textured friction that is so different from the smooth, careful hands of the therapists who touch me every day.
His other hand moves to the small of my back, to the exact spot where the cage of metal lives inside me, the place where the fusion is, the point of my greatest vulnerability. He presses against it, not hard, just a firm, steady pressure, and I gasp into his mouth.
It’s a violation. An intimacy that is so much more dangerous than the kiss.
He’s touching the source of my brokenness, the thing that has defined my life for two years, and he’s not treating it like it’s fragile.
He’s treating it like it’s a part of me, like it’s a part of the person he’s holding, and the acceptance in that touch is more devastating than any violence could ever be.
He breaks the kiss. We’re both breathing hard, the air in the room thick and charged. He looks at me, and his eyes are dark, the gray swallowed by a blackness that is all pupil.
“You’re not a thing to be won,” he says, and the words are a contradiction to everything he’s done, to the way he’s holding me, to the way he just kissed me. “You’re a thing to be kept.”
And that’s the thing. That’s the absolute heart of the terror and the craving. He doesn’t want to win me and walk away with the prize. He wants to put me in a glass case and guard it. He wants to own me. And a part of me, a deep, dark, ashamed part of me, wants to be owned.
I reach for him. I pull him down for another kiss, and this one is different.
It’s slower, deeper, a drowning kiss. His tongue explores my mouth, a slow, deliberate slide that makes my toes curl.
His hands are still on me, one on my thigh, one on my back, and they’re moving now, a slow, possessive stroking that is both a threat and a promise.
My dress is bunched up around my waist, and I can feel the cool air on my skin, and the heat from his body, and the two sensations are a delicious, torturous contrast. His hand moves from my thigh to the place between my legs, and I’m wet for him, so wet it’s almost embarrassing, but I don’t have the capacity for embarrassment right now, all I have is need.
He finds the sensitive nub of nerves, and he circles it with a finger, a slow, maddening touch that builds a pressure deep inside me.
I arch against him, a silent plea for more, and he gives me more, sliding a finger inside me, then another, a slow, steady rhythm that is both a question and an answer.