“Don’t you dare stop.”
I push inside her in one slow stroke, and we both groan. She’s so warm and tight and wet that my vision nearly whites out. I drop my forehead to her collarbone and force myself to breathe.
And then, I pull back and thrust into her again, and she wraps her arms around my neck and holds on. We find a rhythm that’s nothing like the other times. This is messy and desperate, two people fucking like they’re trying to crawl inside each other’s skin. My left arm screams every time I shift my weight, and I don’t care. She drags her nails down my back hard enough to leave marks, and I pin her hip to the table with my good hand and drive deeper.
“Harder,” she gasps against my neck.
I give her harder. The table groans under us, and I grip the edge with my wounded hand for leverage, ignoring the pain shooting from my wrist to my shoulder. She hooks her ankles behind my back and tilts her hips, and the new angle makes her cry out with every stroke.
I reach between us and find her clit with my thumb. She jerks against me, oversensitive from the first orgasm, but I don’t let up. I circle in time with my thrusts, and her breathing fractures into something unrecognizable.
“Let go,” I tell her. “I want to feel you come on my cock, golubka.”
She comes with her face buried in my neck and her nails dug into my shoulders, and the way she clenches around me drags me over the edge with her. I bury myself deep and groan her name as I finish, and for a long moment we just stay there, tangled together on the kitchen table, panting.
Her fingers find the edge of my bandage, where a thin line of blood seeped through the gauze. She traces it gently, and I feel her trembling ease.
“You’re still bleeding,” she whispers.
“I’ll live.”
“You better.”
I kiss her once more. Slow this time. Then I pull back, find my pants on the floor, and walk to the front door.
Grisha is on the porch, watching the tree line. He glances at my bare chest and bandaged arm but says nothing. Smart man.
I check the door lock. Move to the first window. Check the latch. Second window. Latch. Third. The bedroom window behind the bed, where Daria is watching me from under a wool blanket with something on her face that wasn’t there before tonight.
“What are you doing?” she asks, though I think she already knows.
“Bogdan is still out there.” I test the last window latch and walk back to the bed. “Until he’s not, I check.”
She reaches for my hand and pulls me beside her. I wrap my good arm around her waist and tuck her against my chest, and she fits there like the space was built for her.
I press my mouth against the top of her head. Bogdan is somewhere in those frozen woods, wounded and bleeding, leaving a trail in the snow that any half-decent tracker could follow blindfolded. Eduard is the best tracker Boris has trained. The snow will hold Bogdan’s prints for hours.
But until I hear the words “target down” through my earpiece, I won’t stop checking the windows, locks, and woman breathing softly against my chest.
Because that’s who I am. Bleeding, exhausted, and half-dressed in a hunting lodge two kilometers from a firefight. And still the man who checks.
36
Daria
I’ve counted every knot in the kitchen table twice.
There are fourteen. Some are small, tight, and barely visible beneath the grain. Others are wide and warped, the kind that catch a fingernail if you drag it across the surface. I trace them, because tracing them gives my hands something to do besides shake.
Pyotr sits across from me with a mug of black coffee that he hasn’t touched. His left arm hangs in the sling Boris fashioned before he headed into the woods, and a thin line of dried blood runs along the inside of his wrist, where the bandage doesn’t quite cover.
He hasn’t complained about the pain or about being sidelined while Boris and Eduard track Bogdan through the snow. Instead, he just sits there with his phone on the table and his eyes on me.
“Eat something,” he prompts.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t eaten since we got here.” I shoot him a look, and he holds up his good hand in surrender. “Fine.”
