“I’m coming!” I cried out.
“Come for me,” he growled. “Bleed me dry.”
My climax hit me like a physical blow. My hips bucked off the mattress, my body convulsing around his cock, squeezing him in milking spasms. I screamed his name, lost in the white-hot wash of sensation.
Feeling my release triggered his own. He tensed above me, his jaw clenched, veins standing out in his neck. He shouted something in Russian as his grip on my hips tightened painfully.
He drove into me three more times before bottoming out deep inside. I felt him throb, pulsing wildly as he poured hot jets of semen into me, filling me, marking me. He held himself there, grinding against my cervix, groaning as he emptied himself completely.
The intensity of it pushed me over the edge I’d been teetering on, and I floated in the aftershocks, his name on my lips like a lifeline, feeling the warmth of him spill out of me as we both collapsed, wrecked and ruined, into the sheets.
Everything went white. Pleasure crashed over me in waves that left me gasping, shaking, clinging to him like he was the only solid thing in a world that had suddenly lost all its anchors.
Then, slowly, reality crept back in.
His weight settling over me. His face buried in my neck, breath hot and ragged against my skin. The thundering of two hearts trying to remember how to beat normally.
The crushing realization of what we’d just done.
Again.
“We can’t keep doing this,” I whispered into the darkness.
“I know.” But he didn’t move. Didn’t pull away. Just held me tighter, like he could somehow keep the world at bay through sheer force of will.
My eyes felt heavy. Too heavy. The adrenaline was wearing off, leaving exhaustion in its wake. The kind of bone-deep tiredness that came from carrying too many secrets for too long.
“Kirill?”
“Yeah?”
I wanted to tell him everything. Wanted to explain about Sebastian, about the video, about the prison I’d been living in for five years. Wanted to beg him to help me, to save me, to be the hero I desperately needed.
But the words wouldn’t come. They stayed locked behind my teeth, trapped by shame and the absolute certainty that the moment he knew the truth, he’d look at me with the same disgust I saw in my own reflection.
So instead, I just held on tighter.
And let the darkness pull me under.
Chapter 10 – Kirill
The scotch burned going down, but not enough to erase the memory of her face.
I’d left Barbara’s bedroom three hours ago, slipped out while she was still sleeping, her hair spread across the pillow like silk and her breathing soft and even. I’d stood there for longer than I should have, watching the rise and fall of her chest, the way moonlight painted her skin in shades of silver.
Then I’d walked out before I could do something stupid. Like stay or hold her. Like promise things I had no business promising.
Now I sat on a barstool in one of Chicago’s upscale lounges, nursing my second—third?—glass of scotch and trying to convince myself that what had happened between us meant nothing. That it was just anger and chemistry combusting into something physical. That I could walk away from Barbara Davis and never look back.
The lie tasted worse than the alcohol.
Drew sat to my left, his steel-gray eyes watching me with concern. Damir occupied the stool to my right, though his attention was focused entirely on Hailey behind the bar. They’d been inseparable all night, talking and laughing like they’d known each other for years instead of weeks.
The lounge hummed with low music, something jazz-adjacent that blended into the background murmur of conversation. Expensive cologne mixed with cigar smoke and the sharp citrus scent of cocktails being mixed. Red light from the bar’s neon sign reflected off my glass, painting everything in shades of crimson that felt too appropriate given where my thoughts kept circling.
Blood. Violence. Revenge.
The things I was good at. The things I understood, not this mess of emotions that Barbara had stirred up inside me.
