The question detonates in my brain.
Heat floods through me. Immediate, visceral, undeniable. Before I can stop myself, before I can think, I'm moving. Stepping into her space, backing her against the door, caging her with my body without quite touching.
"Why?" I ask, voice rough. "Kotyonok.You into that?"
Her pupils dilate. Black swallowing brown until her eyes look almost feral. I watch her pulse jump in her throat, see her chest rise and fall faster.
"Because I'm not opposed," I add, leaning close enough to feel the heat radiating off her skin. "If that's what you want."
The air between us crackles. Electric. Dangerous. One move and we'd be touching. One breath and everything would change.
She doesn't pull away.
Doesn't push me back.
Just stares up at me with those dark eyes, lips parted, breathing shallow.
I force myself to step back. Put space between us before I do something we'll both regret. Or worse, something we won't regret at all.
"I'll leave you to explore," I say, and the word comes out loaded with meaning I don't bother hiding. "The house. Your new home. All of it."
I turn and walk away before she can respond, before I can see whatever expression is on her face, before I can change my mind and press her against that door and find out if she tastes as good as she smells.
But I feel her watching me.
Feel the weight of her gaze tracking my retreat, burning into my shoulders, my back, following me down the hallway like a physical touch.
My phone vibrates against my hip. CGM alert. Glucose dropping slightly. Adrenaline burn from the interaction, from the control it took to walk away.
I pull a glucose tab from my pocket, pop it in my mouth. The sweetness dissolves on my tongue, familiar and automatic. Management. Routine. The price of staying alive.
And I wonder, not for the first time this morning, what I've gotten myself into.
Victoria isn't just beautiful. Isn't just smart or strategic or dangerous in the ways we expected.
She's dangerous in ways we didn't anticipate.
The kind of dangerous that makes you forget why you built walls in the first place.
8
MAKSIM
I'm going to survive this year even if it kills me.
The thought arrives with dark irony as I sit in my office, pen motionless in my hand, staring at a contract I've read three times without absorbing a single word. The room is silent. The kind of silence I've cultivated deliberately. Disciplined. Precise. Absolute.
Every sound amplified: the whisper of my pen when I finally force it to move, the faint mechanical hum of the HVAC system, the steady tick of the antique clock on my desk that I keep set five minutes ahead because punctuality is a weapon most people don't know how to use.
Three days.
Victoria has been living under my roof for exactly three days, and my carefully constructed order is disintegrating.
It's not just the chaos she brings, though there's plenty of that.
She's rearranged the living room furniture. Twice. Claims the original layout "blocked the energy flow," whatever the hell that means. She commandeered half the kitchen counter for an elaborate coffee setup that requires four different pieces of equipment and takes twenty minutes to produce a single cup. She leaves books everywhere. Open, face-down, spines cracking, like she's marking territory with abandoned literature.
And the questions. Endless, surgical questions delivered with the bright curiosity of someone determined to shatter every moment of peace.
