Chapter 22
The shower runs scalding, and I scrub until my skin is raw, but I can still smell him—along with winter air and the metallic trace of adrenaline that feels like safety now.
My hands won’t stop shaking, no matter how hard I press them against the heated marble, and I keep replaying the moment the violin exploded, the moment I thought he was dead, the moment my last coherent thought was harder while a sniper lined up a headshot on the man I’m supposed to hate.
I came while someone was trying to kill him.
Fuck. What the actual fuck is wrong with me?
Through the bathroom door, I hear his voice—low Russian, the tone he uses when he’s moving pieces across a board only he can see.
“Naydi podryadchika. Ne ubivay.” Find them all. Don’t kill them.
A pause, then: “Vyvedi lyudey iz kvartala. Segodnya noch’yu.” Pull our people out. Tonight.
The call ends, and I stand there with water beating down on my shoulders, and the sick truth is that I feel safer now than I did ten minutes ago. Roman making a move means I can breathe for another night, and I don’t know when I started finding comfort in violence, but here we are.
I shut off the water and wrap myself in a towel, and open the door before I can talk myself out of it.
He’s sitting on the bed cleaning his gun.
The Makarov gleams under lamplight, and his hands move slowly, and I hate how my body reacts—heat pooling low in my belly, my nipples tightening against the rough terry cloth, my thighs pressing together.
He’s stripped down to his trousers with his chest bare, all that scarred skin on display, and I want to trace every mark with my tongue and ask him who hurt him and then hurt them worse.
His head tilts when I enter, those grey eyes finding me wrapped in nothing but a towel with my hair still dripping, and hunger flickers behind the ice in a way that makes my stomach clench.
“Come here.”
Two words and my legs carry me across cold hardwood until I’m standing between his knees, smelling him like an addict. His hands find my hips through the terry cloth, and the weight of his grip is heavy, an anchor I can’t escape.
“You okay?”
“No.” The honesty scrapes out raw, and I don’t try to pretty it up. “Someone tried to kill you tonight. I came while a sniper was aiming at your head. It wasn’t okay, none of this is okay.”
“But you’re here.” His thumbs trace slow circles through the fabric, pressing into the soft flesh above my hip bones. “You could have locked the bathroom door.”
“I heard you on the phone.” I don’t know why I’m stalling when we both know how this ends. “You’re gathering intelligence. Planning something.”
“Da.” His eyes track over my face, hunting for cracks and lies. “Vadim doesn’t know I know it was him. Which gives me time to prepare.”
“When do you move?”
“Soon.” His hands tighten on my hips, fingers digging in hard. “Which means I need you ready for what comes next.”
“This is war preparation.”
“Everything is war preparation now.” His voice drops. “But that doesn’t make you less mine.”
The word mine lands in my chest and spreads through my bloodstream, liquid fire.
“I need something from you.”
“Tell me.”
“I need you to make me forget. Everything that happened tonight, everything that’s coming tomorrow—I need it gone. Just for a few hours.”
His pupils blow wide and dark, eating up the grey until his eyes are almost black.
“You want me to fuck you until you can’t think.”
“Yes.”
He stands in one fluid motion, and suddenly he’s towering over me, all that controlled violence made flesh, and his hand finds my jaw and tilts my face up.
“You want to forget?” His thumb traces my lower lip, pressing until my mouth parts. “No. You need to remember you chose this.”
“Then do it.”
Something dark and satisfied crosses his face, and he releases me and moves to his jacket draped over a chair. When he turns back, there’s a knife in his hand—a folding blade, matte black handle, small enough to hide in a palm.
My thighs press together involuntarily. Fear. Arousal. They twist together until I can’t tell where the terror ends and the wetness begins.
“You’re afraid.” He watches my face with those predator eyes.
“Yes.” There’s no point lying when he can probably see it on me. “But I’m also—”
“Soaked.” His mouth curves.
Heat floods my cheeks, and I want to deny it, but my body is already betraying me, nipples peaking hard against the towel, pulse pounding between my legs.
He flicks the blade open with his thumb—the sound is small, and it makes my cunt clench. He tests the edge against the pad of his thumb, and blood wells up dark and bright, and then he brings his thumb to his mouth. His tongue flicks out to taste himself while his eyes hold mine.
“Safeword?”
“Glas.”
“Color?”
“Green.”
“Then lose the towel.”
My fingers obey, and the terry cloth drops to the floor. Cool air hits my wet skin and tightens my nipples so fast it hurts. I’m standing naked in front of him, exposed and dripping and shamefully aroused, and he’s still fully clothed from the waist down.
He steps closer, and the floor creaks under his weight.
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m scared.”
“Good.” He circles behind me, and he’s at my back, his body heat radiating against my bare skin, and then the cold flat of the blade finds the side of my throat. “If you can take this, you can take anything I throw at you.”
The cold steel presses against the side of my throat, and my own heartbeat begs against the edge. My knees start to buckle, but his free hand catches me around the waist, pulling me back against his chest.
“Be still, Anya.” His voice is low against my ear, almost tender. “If you twitch, I will cut you. And you will thank me for it.”
“Fuck,” I breathe, because I believe him, and because fresh slick is already coating my inner thighs.
His free hand slides down my stomach, over the trembling muscles of my abdomen. His fingers find the wet heat between my legs, and he groans against my throat.
“Jesus Christ, you’re fucking drenched.”
“I know.” My voice comes out broken. “I know, I can’t—”
He shoves three thick fingers inside me without warning, and the stretch is immediate, obscene, too much, too fast. I cry out before I can stop myself.
The blade bites.
A bright sting across the side of my throat, enough to make my eyes water, and my cunt clenches so hard around his fingers that he grunts behind me.
“Fuck,” I gasp. “Oh fuck—”
“There she is. The little scientist who gets wet when I cut her.”
“Don’t stop.” The words spill out. “Please don’t stop.”
He fucks me with his fingers like he’s punishing me for wanting this.
Every brutal thrust is revenge for something I didn’t do.
The heel of his palm grinds against my clit with every stroke.
I’m sobbing quietly, broken little noises I don’t recognize coming from my own throat, and still I push back onto his hand because I need more, I need the hurt.
“Who does this pussy belong to?” His voice is rough against my ear.
I can’t answer—I’m crying too hard, shaking too hard, my whole body a live wire of pleasure and pain and terror.
His fingers slow, and I whine in protest. “Say it or I stop.”
“You.” The word tears out of me. “Yours. Fuck, please don’t stop—”
“Good girl.”
He pulls his fingers out abruptly, and I actually sob at the loss, my cunt clenching around nothing, desperate and empty and aching.
“Turn around.”
I turn on shaking legs, and he’s shoving his trousers down, and then his cock springs free—thick and flushed and leaking from the tip—and the size of him makes my stomach flip.
He backs me up until my ass hits the edge of the dresser, and then his hands grip my thighs and lift me onto the wood surface like I weigh nothing.
The dresser is cold against my bare ass, and my legs fall open.
He steps between them, the blunt hot head of his cock nudging through my folds, smearing himself in the mess he made.
“Look at me.”
I drag my eyes up to his face, and he’s watching me with an intensity that makes my breath catch.
“I almost lost you tonight.” His voice is raw. “That bullet was six inches from your head.”
“I know.”
“I would have burned this city to the ground.” He positions himself at my entrance and pushes in just enough that I feel the stretch, the promise of what’s coming. “I would have killed every person in that theater with my bare hands.”
“I know.” And god help me, I believe him.
He drives in. One brutal thrust, no mercy, and my body splits open around him, and the sound that rips out of me is animal. He bottoms out with a grunt, balls pressed tight against my ass, and holds there while I shake and gasp and try to remember how to breathe around the invasion.
“Fuck—” I dig my nails into his shoulders, drawing blood. “Oh fuck, you’re so—”
“Take it.” He pulls back and slams in again, and stars burst behind my eyes. “Take all of it.”
He sets a punishing pace, long brutal strokes that punch the air from my lungs, that make my toes curl, and my nails rake down his back, leaving red lines in their wake.
He’s in my spine, in my teeth, in the soles of my feet.
The dresser rocks with every thrust, and something glass falls and shatters, but neither of us stops.
The knife is back against my throat, and I’m reminded exactly who’s in control here.
“Harder,” I beg. “Fuck me harder, I need—”
He growls something in Russian that sounds like a curse and a prayer at once, and his hips snap faster, driving deeper, and my orgasm builds from somewhere deep in my belly, inevitable and terrifying.
“I’m going to—” I can’t finish the sentence.
“Ask permission.”
“Please.” I’m crying again, tears streaming down my face. “Please let me come, I need to come, please, Roman, please—”
“Come.” His thumb finds my clit and presses hard. “Come with my knife on your throat and my cock inside you. Show me who you fucking belong to.”
I shatter.
It’s ugly and wet and violent, my whole body convulsing, my cunt spasming so hard around his cock that it almost hurts.
I scream into his shoulder and bite down, tasting blood—his blood.
He follows a breath later, his hips stuttering, heat flooding my insides as he groans my name against my bleeding throat.
We stay like that for a long moment, him still buried inside me, both of us shaking, the knife finally lowered but still in his hand. His cum is leaking out around his cock where we’re still joined. I can feel the sting of the cut on my throat.
“Color?”
“Green.” I sound wrecked. “I’m okay. I’m good.”
He eases out of me slowly, and I wince at the loss, at the sudden emptiness. He sets the knife down on the dresser, and then his hands are gentle—so gentle it makes my chest ache—as he lifts me and carries me to the bed.
“Stay.”
He disappears into the bathroom, and water is running.
I lie there staring at the ceiling, my whole body trembling with aftershocks, his cum cooling between my thighs.
When he comes back, he has a warm washcloth and a first aid kit, and he sits on the edge of the bed and cleans the blood from my throat with careful strokes.
“Surface cut. It won’t scar.”
“I don’t care if it scars.”
He bandages the cut with butterfly strips and then uses the washcloth to clean between my legs, wiping away the mess of his cum and my arousal. It’s more intimate than the fucking. More terrifying.
When he’s done, he lies down beside me and pulls me against his chest. His heart pounding almost as hard as mine, the tremor in his arms telling me he’s not as composed as he pretends.
He reaches for the knife and presses the handle into my palm.
“Keep it.”
I close my fingers around the matte black handle and tuck it under my pillow, as he pulls me closer, his arm heavy across my waist, his breath warm against the back of my neck.
“Sleep,” he murmurs. “Ya zdes’. Ya nikuda ne deyus’.” I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.
I fall asleep with his arms around me, and for the first time in my life, the monster under the bed is the only reason I can close my eyes.