He shifted closer. Deliberately. As if testing how far he could go before I broke.
His breath brushed my cheek, warm and familiar, and suddenly five years collapsed into nothing. Hospital lights. Blood on my hands. His mouth on mine the night before everything shattered.
His gaze dropped to my lips.
“Your lips,” he said, voice roughened by something dangerously close to reverence, “are exquisite and ruinous.”
The words struck harder than any touch could have.
The air between us crackled—alive with grief and longing and everything we had never said out loud. I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
My body remembered him far too well, betrayal humming through my veins like heat.
For one suspended heartbeat, the world narrowed to this: the warmth of his skin, the promise of devastation, the gravity that had always pulled us together—inevitable, merciless.
Dmitri Volkov was still the man who could undo me without ever laying a hand on my skin.
Butterflies detonated in my stomach—wild, frantic—but I forced them down, schooling my face into cool indifference. I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing how deeply his words had cut.
“Thank you,” I said, evenly. Calm. Unmoved.
I held his gaze without blinking.
Something darkened in his eyes at my restraint, as though my refusal to react pleased him more than gratitude ever could. That infuriating smirk curved his mouth as he leaned closer, his presence eclipsing the lamplight.
His breath brushed my cheek, warm, intimate.
“Luscious,” he murmured, voice low and ruined. “I want them wrapped around mine.”
The words slid over my skin like a blade.
I didn’t pull away.
God help me, I couldn’t.
Every instinct screamed at me to retreat, to armor myself in distance and silence, but courage deserted me.
His face hovered inches from mine, heat radiating from him, dragging me under with the same merciless gravity that had always existed between us.
My eyes fluttered shut, betraying me.
In Greece, in the quiet anonymity Ruslan had wrapped around me, I had dreamed of this. Of his mouth on mine—hard, relentless, unapologetic. Dreams that left me furious when I woke, sheets twisted tight around my legs, my body aching with a need I despised.
The other dreams were worse.
Dreams where he took me without mercy, where my body bowed beneath his will, where his name tore from my throat again and again as pleasure shattered me from the inside out.I would wake slick with sweat and shame, heart racing, hating myself for wanting a man who had once destroyed me.
Seconds stretched. Time warped.
I waited for him to kiss me.
For the claim. The possession. The thing I both feared and craved.
But nothing came.
Slowly, dread blooming hot and sharp in my chest, I opened my eyes.
He was still there—devastatingly close—watching me with an intensity that bordered on predatory. His gaze searched my face, my mouth, as if committing the moment to memory.
