And there—subtle, devastating—the faint hollow where life had once been.
No.
The memory surged up, violent and undeniable.
It hadn’t been a dream.
The night came back to me with brutal clarity—the one I’d dismissed as a drunken fantasy, a distortion born of too much whiskey and too many months of denying the pull she had on me.
She had stumbled into my study after one of her solitary nights at the club. Her cheeks had been flushed, eyes glassy but sharp, anger lending her a reckless courage. Instead of retreating upstairs like she always did, she’d come straight toward me.
“You,” she’d said, pointing an unsteady finger at my chest. “You’re a monster, Ruslan.”
I’d been drunk too. Too far gone to hide behind discipline. And the sight of her—disheveled, furious, hair loose around her shoulders—had ignited something I’d spent months suffocating. Desire had always been there, simmering beneath the hatred, tangled with it, feeding off it.
She had stepped closer.
I had risen from my chair like a man pulled by a rope around his throat
The hunger for her had built up over days, unbearable, a fire I could no longer contain. Every part of me ached to claim her, to consume her completely, to pull her into me right there and then.
I felt like a wild beast, reckless and raw, even under the haze of drink.
I remembered asking—slurring, barely coherent—if she wanted this.
Even through the haze of alcohol and anger, something stubborn and human had clawed its way to the surface.
A final instinct of decency. Consent mattered. It always had.
Even when we were both drowning, even when rage and desire tangled so tightly I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
She didn’t answer with words.
Instead, she closed the distance between us in a single reckless movement, gripping the front of my shirt and yanking me down hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.
Her mouth crashed against mine—not gentle, not tentative, but furious, desperate, as if she were trying to pour every unspoken accusation into that single act.
Her hands fumbled, clumsy and urgent, tugging at fabric, nails scraping skin.
I remember the way she shook—not with fear, but with something closer to defiance. Like she was daring me to stop her. Daring me to admit what we both already knew.
“You hate me so much,” she whispered against my mouth, the words breaking apart, half sob, half challenge.
“You hate me so much, Ruslan.”
And yet she didn’t pull away.
That was the moment restraint finally shattered.
Whatever careful distance I had maintained until then dissolved, burned away by months of denial and nights spent pretending indifference.
I kissed her back with everything I had buried—rage, need, obsession—pouring it into her like fire.
There was nothing soft about it. Nothing romantic. It was two broken people colliding, feeding off the same volatile mix of anger and longing.
She didn’t retreat.
She met me with the same reckless intensity, fearless in her intoxication, fearless in her pain. As though she wanted to burn us both alive rather than endure another second of emptiness.
