"Why last night?"
"I don't know." He catches a tear sliding down my cheek, brushes it away with his thumb. "Don't cry,moya koroleva."
"Is it the same piano? The one from when you were a child?"
"Yes." He says it simply, like it's not extraordinary. "I tracked it down years ago. Bought it back. Kept it waiting for... I don't know what. A day I thought would never come."
Pressure builds in my chest. The image of this man, so powerful and controlled, keeping a piano from his childhood like a shrine to the boy he used to be. The boy who loved music before violence stole everything from him.
He rises from the bed, and I see him fully in the morning light. The tattoos covering his skin. The scars. The muscles built from years of fighting to survive.
He's magnificent.
He points to the tattoos on his knees. Stars, intricate and bold against his skin.
"Do you know what these mean?"
I shake my head.
"They mean I kneel for no one." His eyes find mine, blue and intense and burning. "Not anymore. Never again."
He moves toward me. Grabs my thighs and pulls me to the edge of the mattress.
"But for you," he says, dropping to his knees between my legs, "I'll kneel."
Then his mouth is on me, and I stop thinking entirely.
His tongue finds my clit with devastating precision. Circles it slowly, then faster, building pressure with each stroke. His hands hold my thighs apart, keeping me open for him, and the vulnerability makes everything more intense.
He doesn't rush. Doesn't treat this like a race to finish. He worships me with his mouth, with his tongue, with the occasional scrape of teeth that makes me cry out and arch off the bed.
I come apart on his lips, pleasure crashing through me in waves, his name on my lips.
When he lifts his head, his eyes are triumphant. Possessive. Full of adoration that looks terrifyingly like love.
22
MAKSIM
Chicago sprawls beneath me like a kingdom I rule.
I stand at the wall of windows in my office at Nova Star Shipping, watching the city pulse and breathe forty stories below. From this height, the cars look like toys. The people are invisible. The whole world feels small and manageable and under control.
The illusion is a lie.
Nothing feels under control right now. Not the threat closing in from shadows I can't identify. Not the woman who's dismantled every defense I've spent twenty-five years constructing. And certainly not what I'm about to do.
I'm going to betray Victoria's confidence.
The thought sits in my chest like a stone. Heavy. Sharp-edged. Impossible to swallow or spit out.
She told me her darkest secret in the dark of my bedroom, her tears soaking into my skin, her voice barely a whisper. She trusted me with the worst thing that ever happened to her. And now I'm going to share it with my brothers.
Not carelessly. I'll protect the details she gave me in confidence. But the essential truth, the piece of information that changes everything, that connects her past to ours in ways we don’t yet understand, I have to share that.
Because by sharing it, I can protect her.
That's what I tell myself. That's the justification I've been constructing since I left her sleeping in my bed this morning. Protection. Strategy. Necessity.
