ANYA — Volkovskaya Mansion, 1834
Roman is naked from the waist up when I walk out of the bathroom, and fuck, he looks good. I hate that that’s my first thought instead of something about the forty thousand people my chemistry is going to kill.
He’s standing at the dresser selecting cufflinks like he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing, like the lamplight isn’t hitting every muscle in his back at the perfect angle.
“You’re flexing,” I accuse, crossing to the wardrobe to put distance between us. “It’s not going to make me forget what you did.”
“I’m not trying to make you forget.” He turns around, shirt in his hand. “I’m trying to remind you who keeps you safe.”
“I don’t need your protection.”
“You need it more than you need oxygen.” He closes the distance in two strides, backing me against the wardrobe before I can grab a dress. “And you hate that, don’t you?”
“You can put your shirt on any time now.”
He turns around with his shirt still in his hand, the absolute bastard, and his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to smile.
“You’re staring.”
“I’m thinking about how many ways I could kill you with what’s in this room.” I yank open the wardrobe harder than necessary. “Letter opener. Drape cord. That ugly decanter.”
“It’s a Fabergé original.”
“I don’t care if it’s the Holy Grail, I could still bash your skull in with it.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He finally—finally—shrugs into his shirt, the white cotton settling across his shoulders, and try to pretend I’m not disappointed. “Too messy.”
“That’s just one idea out of many.”
He starts walking toward me, and I hold my ground because I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much he affects me.
“The fact that you haven’t yet,” he says, “means something.”
“It means Mishka needs me alive.”
“It means you need me alive. For Mishka. For the lab. For this thing between us, you keep pretending it’s a survival strategy.”
“It is a survival strategy.”
“Then why haven’t you stopped staring at my chest?”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
“Get dressed.” I shove past him toward the vanity because I don’t want to not be looking at him right now. “We’ll be late.”
“We’ll be late when I say we’re late.”
He catches my arm and turns me around, and suddenly his hand is on my jaw, and he’s tilting my face up, and his eyes are burning into mine with that intensity that makes my stupid, traitorous body go hot and liquid.
“I’m not trying to make you forget,” he says, voice dropping low. “I’m not trying to make you forgive me. I’m trying to keep you alive long enough to hate me tomorrow.”
“Very noble of you.”
“Anya.” His thumb traces my cheekbone, and I hate how my body leans into it. “You or forty thousand strangers. I pick you. Every time. I don’t even have to think about it.”
“That’s monstrous.”
“Yeah.” His forehead drops to mine. “It is. And you’re scared because when I touch you, you stop caring about being a good person too.”
I shove him back before I do something stupid like kiss him.
“Put your fucking shirt on.” My voice shakes, and I don’t care. “I need to get dressed.”
I don’t wait for him to respond. I just let the robe fall.
The silk puddles at my feet, and cool air hits my bare skin, and his breathing catches behind me, and good. Good. He doesn’t get to be the only one who affects people, doesn’t get to be the only one with power in this fucked up thing we’re calling a marriage.
I take my time stepping into the emerald silk, pulling it up slowly over my hips. I settle the bodice against my breasts while his eyes burn into my back.
“Zip me.”
He crosses the room and his hands find the zipper at the base of my spine, and when his knuckles drag up my back one vertebra at a time, I have to lock my knees to keep from shivering.
When he reaches the top, his hands don’t leave my shoulders.
“Not yet.”
He reaches into his pocket, and my stomach drops.
“No.” I turn around, seeing what he’s holding in his hand. “Absolutely not. Not tonight.”
“Anya—”
“We’re walking into a room full of people who want us dead, and you want this? No. Find another way to mark your territory.”
“This isn’t about territory.” His voice is calm, patient, and infuriating. “This is about keeping you alive. Vadim’s going to be watching you all night. If you’re flushed and distracted, he’ll think it’s because you’re overwhelmed by the crowd, not because I fucking told you the truth.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
“It’s a strategy.”
“It’s you wanting to control me in public because it gets you off.”
“Both things can be true.”
“God, you’re an asshole.” But I’m not walking away, and we both know what that means. “Fine. But I’m saying yellow the second it’s too much, and if you push past that, I will actually poison you.”
“Understood.” He pulls out the case and opens it, and the rose gold device catches the lamplight. “Bend forward. Hands on the dresser.”
Oh well. I turn around and press my palms flat against the mahogany, because apparently I’ve lost my goddamn mind.
His hand slides up the back of my thigh, pushing the silk higher, bunching it at my hips until I’m bare from the waist down, and cool air hits skin that’s already way too sensitive.
“No underwear.” His voice drops an octave, rough with approval. “Good girl.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why? Because it’s true?”
His fingers brush between my thighs, and I jerk, a gasp tearing out of my throat. I’m soaked. Slick, hot, and humiliatingly ready for him.
“Look at you,” he murmurs, his thumb parting me. “Furious with me, plotting my murder, and you’re dripping down your thighs. Your body doesn’t have any pride, solnyshko.”
“Shut up.”
“Make me.” He smiles, remembering when he said the same words, and I kissed him.
He positions the device—cold metal against hot, wet flesh—and slides it in. It stretches me, fills me, and the sensation is so intense my knees buckle. He catches me, his arm like an iron band around my waist, holding me up while I adjust to the intrusion.
“Color?”
“Green,” I gasp. “Christ. Green.”
He adjusts the angle, then presses the remote control, and pleasure sparks through me so sharp I nearly collapse.
“That’s one.” His thumb circles my clit once—feather-light, devastating. “Now you’ll feel me all night. Every step. Every breath.”
He pulls my dress down and smooths the silk over my hips, and when he tells me to turn around, my legs are shaking so badly I have to grab the dresser for support.
The collar comes next—platinum and filigree, beautiful enough to be jewelry, heavy enough to be a reminder.
“What? No!” I say.
His hands are still on the clasp.
“My mother wore something similar. It’s bulletproof.”
“It didn’t save her.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks, his voice is rough.
“No. It didn’t.”
He finishes with the clasp and steps back, and I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything at all.
* * *
Roman’s palm rests on my thigh in the Audi, and the device hums inside me with every bump in the road. Low and relentless and absolutely maddening.
Through tinted windows, Moscow slides past, and the Bolshoi rises ahead of us.
“I can’t do this.”
“You walked into a Bratva wedding knowing they’d kill your brother if you ran.” Roman’s hand tightens on my thigh. “You can do this.”
He kisses me—hard and claiming—and then the door opens and we’re stepping into flashbulbs and shouted questions. Roman is guiding me through the crowd of journalists, like a dutiful husband.
The lobby is champagne and crystal and power, and Vadim appears from the crowd with his snake smile and his Savile Row suit.
“Anyuta.” His eyes rake down my body and linger on my throat. “Marriage suits you. If the sounds we’re hearing from Roman’s study are correct, we will soon welcome a cub.”
The intimate diminutive from his mouth makes my skin crawl.
His hand rises toward my collar.
Roman catches his wrist.
“Don’t you fucking dare, uncle.”
Heads turn.
Vadim’s smile doesn’t waver. “Protective.” His voice carries. “Your mother had one just like it. Right up until they scraped her off the crypt’s floors.”
Roman’s grip on my waist becomes crushing—five points of bruising pressure grinding into my hip—and he’s shaking with the effort of not killing his uncle right here.
“Roman.” I keep my voice barely above a whisper. “You’re hurting me.”
His grip loosens. A fraction. Then he activates the device.
The pulse hits sustained and relentless, and my knees actually buckle, and only his arm around my waist keeps me upright.
“Our box awaits.” His voice is ice. “Enjoy the performance, dyadya.”
Our private box is red velvet in the shadows.
The moment the door closes, Roman deactivates the device, and the relief is so sudden I have to grab the chair to keep from falling.
“That was cruel.”
“That was necessary.” He guides me into the seat. “Vadim saw a woman too distracted to notice anything. You’re welcome.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
The lights dim. The curtain rises.
Roman activates the device again.
The vibration matches the bass notes—low, throbbing—and I feel it everywhere, in my chest, in my cunt, in the base of my spine.
Roman’s fingers slide under my dress.
“Eyes forward.” His breath is hot against my ear. “Watch the opera.”
His touch is feather-light, barely there, just enough to part me, to find where I’m swollen and slick, to circle my clit in lazy patterns that make me want to scream.
“Roman—” I can barely get his name out. “Someone will—”
“No one’s looking at us.” His fingers push inside me alongside the device, and oh god oh god oh god. “You’re so wet I can hear it. Think anyone else can?”
“I hate you.”
“You said that already.” He continues rubbing my clit while he increases the power, and my vision whites out at the edges. “Come for me, Anya.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. You will.” He presses his thumb down, hard, pinning my clit against the vibration.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck—
The pleasure spikes, turning sharp and agonizing, and I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything but shatter.
I bite my knuckles to stifle the scream building in my throat. My vision goes white out. I am falling apart in a box at the Bolshoi, unraveling completely under the hands of the monster I married, and the worst part—the absolute worst part—is that I have never felt more alive.
The violin reaches an impossible high note.
Then explodes.
Wrong sound—wood shattering, strings snapping—and my brain catches up with what my ears are telling me.
A bullet.
The soloist falls. Blood on his shoulder. Screaming from below.
A second shot hits the plaster by Roman’s head.
He’s already moving—body covering mine, gun in his hand, dragging me down behind the railing.
“Stay down.”
The door crashes open. It’s Luka, weapon drawn.
Another shot splinters the railing.
“Out. Now.”
Roman hauls me up, and we’re running through service corridors— red lights, the stale smell of industrial cleaner—and my legs aren’t working right, but I make them work anyway because I’m not going to let him carry me out of here, I’m not going to be that woman.
A service exit. Blast of cold air. A second car.
He tries to lift me into the backseat.
“I can walk.” I shove his hands away and climb in on my own, even though my legs are shaking and the device is still pulsing and I can barely see straight. “I can fucking walk.”
We’re moving before the door closes.
The device is still going. Still vibrating. Still driving me toward an edge I cannot fall over right now.
My stomach lurches.
“Stop the car. Stop the fucking car!”
We’re barely at the curb before I’m out, collapsing against a brick building, vomiting everything into a Moscow gutter.
Roman is there immediately, his hands gathering my hair back, holding it while I heave.
“The device.” I’m gasping. “Get it out. Please. I can’t—”
He doesn’t hesitate.
Right there in the alley—Luka’s men everywhere, sirens in the distance—his hand slides under my dress and pulls the device out in one swift motion. I’m soaked—from arousal, from everything—and I feel the wetness on his fingers, sliding down my thigh.
The relief is so intense I sag against the brick.
“Are you hurt?” His hands are on my face now, still wet with me, and his eyes are wild in a way I’ve never seen. “Anya. Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Roman—”
He pulls me against his chest and his whole body is shaking.
“If that bullet had been three inches to the left—” His voice cracks. Actually cracks. “If I’d lost you—”
“You didn’t.”
“I’m going to find whoever did this.” He pulls back, his hands framing my face, smearing my own fluids on my cheeks. His eyes are burning with a violence that should terrify me. “And I’m going to take them apart. Slowly. I will burn this city to ash before I let them touch you.”
I look at the madness in his eyes, and the truth hits me like a bullet to the chest.
It’s not a warm feeling. It’s not butterflies. It’s a terrifying, hollow thud in the center of my chest that feels exactly like a death sentence.
I’m in love with him.
I am in love with the monster.