I checked my watch.Seven o’clock.Time for our evening routine.Time to prove that nothing had changed, that her understanding meant nothing, that I was still the man in control.
I stood, adjusted my cuffs, and went to summon her.
The walk to the library took longer than it should have.I paused at the threshold, one hand on the doorframe, steeling myself like a man preparing for battle.Which was absurd.She was a twenty-year-old virgin bound by a contract.I was a Bratva vor with a billion-dollar empire and a wolf that could tear her apart in seconds.
There was no battle here.There was only the arrangement.
I sent a servant to fetch her and waited by the piano, running my fingers over the polished wood.The surface was cool and smooth beneath my touch.My mother had played.Not this piano, not this instrument that I’d bought to fill a room in a house she’d never seen.But the memory lingered.The way her fingers had danced over the keys.The way she’d hummed along to the melodies, her voice soft and sweet.
The way she’d screamed when my father’s claws had torn through her throat.
Stop, I commanded myself.Stop thinking about her.Stop letting the past control you.
But that was what Lena had done, wasn’t it?She’d dredged up the past and laid it bare, forcing me to look at the bloody foundations of everything I’d built.
The door opened, and her scent hit me before I saw her.
Sweet and soft and unblemished.But there was something different underneath it now, a new note in the familiar symphony.Something that made my wolf sit up and take notice.
She wasn’t afraid.
Lena walked into the library with her chin level and her shoulders back, and she wasn’t afraid of me.Not the way she had been before.The fear was still there, faint and sharp like copper beneath the sweetness, but it wasn’t the dominant note anymore.
Now there was something else.Something that smelled like understanding.Like knowing.
I hated it.
“Sit at the piano,” I said.
She obeyed, settling onto the bench with a grace that spoke of years of practice.The lamplight caught the gold in her hair as she positioned her hands over the keys.She began to play without being told what piece I wanted.
Something soft.Something haunting.A melody I didn’t recognize but that seemed to seep into my bones nonetheless, wrapping around my ribs like a fist.
I circled her the way I always did, predator assessing prey, but the ritual felt hollow tonight.The words I wanted to speak, commands and reminders of her position, threats dressed up as promises, stuck in my throat like ash.
She kept playing.Didn’t look at me.But I could feel her awareness of my presence, could smell the subtle shift in her scent as I drew closer.Wariness, yes.But not the sharp spike of terror I’d grown accustomed to.
The song ended.Her hands stilled on the keys, hovering there for a moment before settling into her lap.
“That was beautiful,” I said, and then immediately wanted to take the words back.I didn’t compliment her.I commanded her, used her, controlled her.Compliments had no place in our arrangement.
She looked up at me, and there it was again.That knowing look.That understanding that cut through every defense I had, saw past the monster to the bleeding thing beneath.
“Thank you.”
Two words.Simple.Polite.And somehow more devastating than any defiance she could have mustered.
“Strip.”
The word came out harder than I intended, an overcorrection.She didn’t flinch.
Slowly, she stood from the piano bench.She unzipped her boots first, then her hands went to the hem of her dress, and she pulled it up and over her head with none of the trembling resistance I’d come to expect.The burgundy fabric pooled at her feet in a whisper of wool.
Beneath it, a simple cotton bra.White.Innocent.The curve of her breasts rising with each breath.She reached back and unhooked it, let it fall.Her nipples pebbled in the cool air.
Matching white underwear followed.She hooked her thumbs in the waistband and slid them down her thighs, stepping out of them with a grace that made my mouth go dry.
She stood before me in the lamplight, completely bare.All pale skin and soft curves, the golden curls between her thighs catching the light.She didn’t try to cover herself.
