“You’re already soaked,” he growls, curling his fingers until sparks explode behind my eyes.
He pushes me until I break, pleasure ripping through me so violently I bite his shoulder to keep from screaming. My body shakes, clenching around his fingers as he drives me through it, relentless until I’m trembling beneath him.
Before I can catch my breath, he’s looming over me, cock pressed against my inner thigh. My eyes widen when I see him—thick, heavy, the head flushed dark. My body clenches in anticipation. He fists himself once, twice, before pressing against me, the blunt head sliding through my slick folds.
I grab his shoulders, nails biting into his skin. “Do it,” I hiss, my voice raw. “Don’t you fucking wait.”
He doesn’t.
He thrusts into me hard enough to knock the air from my lungs, burying himself to the hilt. My cry echoes off the walls, part pain, part desperate relief. He’s so big it feels like I might tear apart, stretched wide around him, but I don’t want him to stop. I want him deeper, harder.
He sets a brutal pace, every thrust driving me into the mattress, the sound of our bodies slamming together filling the room. His hand locks around my throat, squeezing just enough to steal some of my breath. My eyes roll back, my body clenching tighter around him, and he groans, the sound guttural.
“You feel like fucking fire,” he grits out, slamming into me again, again, until I’m keening beneath him. “Mine. Every inch of you.”
“Yes,” I gasp, my voice breaking. “Yours.”
The word tastes like surrender, but it doesn’t scare me. It thrills me.
He flips me onto my stomach, hauling my hips up, and drives into me from behind. The angle is deeper, merciless. My scream muffles against the sheets, my hands clutching the mattress as he pounds into me, relentless. His grip bruises my hips, holding me still as he fucks me like he means to break me.
I meet every thrust, my body wild, desperate, lost in him. Pleasure claws at me again, sharper this time, spiraling fast. Myclit throbs, my body clenching so tight around him he curses, his rhythm faltering.
“Come for me,” he growls, yanking me up against his chest, his hand sliding between my legs to rub my clit in ruthless circles. “Now.”
The command shatters me. My climax rips through me, violent and overwhelming, my scream muffled against his shoulder. I convulse around him, my entire body trembling as he keeps pounding into me, fucking me through every wave.
He follows moments later, slamming deep one last time as he groans my name, spilling hot inside me. His body jerks against mine, every muscle straining as he empties himself, holding me tight to his chest like he’ll never let me go.
We collapse onto the bed in a tangle of sweat and twisted sheets, our breaths ragged, the room thick with the scent of sex. My body aches, marked everywhere by him—bruises, bites, scratches, but I don’t care.
Chapter Twenty-Four - Alexei
The journey back to Russia is a blur of false passports, coded calls, and dead drops that change hands too fast to trace. We move like shadows, slipping through airports and border checkpoints under names that are not ours.
Every mile closer to Moscow feels like a step back into a grave I thought I’d left sealed, but Vivienne doesn’t falter. She sits beside me on trains and in the backs of black cars with her spine straight, her eyes sharp, as if the cold air feeding in through the cracks doesn’t touch her at all.
By the time we reach the safehouse, the sun is gone and the forest swallows everything in black. The place is small, a squat two-story structure built of gray stone, half hidden by birch trees that creak in the wind.
There are no neighbors, no lights for miles, only the weight of silence pressing against the windows. It smells of dust, gun oil, and the faint tang of old smoke, the scent of too many men who’ve hidden here before.
I unlock the door, check each room, and only when I’m satisfied do I let her step inside. She pulls off her coat and sets it on the hook by the door like she’s done this a hundred times. I catch myself watching her, the way she claims a space with so little effort, as though she’s not walking into the shadows of my past but building her own place in them.
The fire takes a long time to catch. I crouch in front of the stove, feeding it wood until sparks flare into flame, and the safehouse begins to warm. She doesn’t speak while I work. Instead, she sorts through the satchel of files we carried across borders, laying them out on the table as if this place has always been hers.
The crackle of the fire fills the silence. I pour vodka into two chipped glasses, carry one to her, and take the seat opposite. She accepts it without a word. The glass clinks against her ring as she lifts it, the sound sharp in the stillness.
“Tomorrow,” I say finally.
Her eyes meet mine, steady. “Igor.”
I nod once. The name sits like poison on my tongue. My father’s Pakhan. The man who gave the order that shattered her family. The man who turned my father into an executioner. He’ll be there, sitting among the other elders like a relic of an empire that refuses to die.
“They’ll try to test us,” I tell her. “Push, probe, look for cracks.”
“Then we don’t give them any,” she replies. There’s no hesitation, no tremor. Only steel.
I study her across the table. In the dim light, shadows carve her face into something fierce, unyielding. She doesn’t look like the girl who swore to hate me. She looks like someone who’s already stepped fully into the fire, who’s accepted that she’ll either walk out with blood on her hands or not at all.
