I press deeper. Harder. I find the angle that made her gasp before and her back arches off the bed. She says my name again, louder this time, no longer quiet or controlled but fractured open in a way that reaches somewhere inside me and grips tight.
She breaks. Her whole body locks and then releases and I follow her over the edge with a groan. I hold her hips to mine while I fill her completely, letting the wave of it take us both. For a long, suspended moment there is nothing in the world except the heat of her body and the sound of her breathing and the absolute certainty that I will never let this woman go.
Stefania
I don't know how long we lie there before either of us speaks.
His arm is around me. My back is against his chest, his hand is spread flat across my stomach and his breathing is slow and steady behind me. I wonder for a moment why I don’t feel trapped or exposed. A man I've known for less than a day has his body wrapped around mine and he knows the most dangerous thing about me and every rule I've built for survival is screaming at me to get out of his bed.
I don't move.
"Tell me about you," I say.
His hand stills on my stomach. A beat of silence. Then his thumb resumes its slow, absent stroke across my skin.
"What do you want to know?"
"Everything. You know things about me that no one else knows. I want something back."
He exhales against my hair.
"You met my family today," he says. "What’s left of them at least. Before Artem took over, Lev was the one we all looked to. He was loud. Reckless, sometimes. The kind of man who walked into a room and made everyone in it feel like the volume had been turned up. He loved music and art and being creative. It used to drive our father bonkers when we were kids."
"What happened?"
"Elena happened." There's no bitterness in his voice. Just fact. "Lev and Elena were best friends. It was never romantic. Lev was so free spirited and she was a balance to that. More serious and quiet. He snuck out to see her one night, was upset after a fight about going to music school. Her brother didn't approve when he found them talking in the garden in the middle of the night, she was only in her night dress. I guess it looked suspicious. He thought Lev was taking advantage. They got into a fight and Elena's brother knocked Lev down."
He stops. I feel his jaw tighten against the top of my head.
"He landed wrong. Hit his head. And that was it."
The simplicity of it is the worst part. A misunderstanding, a shove, a bad angle. A man's life ending because he fell the wrong way.
"Elena's brother?"
"Destroyed by it. He wasn't a bad man. He was a protective brother who threw one punch and killed someone. Artem wanted revenge. He was going to take it too, took Elena and planned to kill her."
"But he didn't."
"No. Because it was an accident. And because Artem is the kind of man who can tell the difference between a murder and a tragedy." He pauses. "He and Elena found each other after. In the grief. She was carrying guilt for her brother's actions, and Artem was carrying a family that had just lost its North star. They learned from each other and vengeance turned into something else."
"The baby," I say. "They named him Lev."
"Yes."
I think about the round-cheeked boy at the reception. The way Yevgeny held him. The way his face changed.
"You've killed men," I say. It's not a question.
"Yes." His fingers are tracing swirling lines over my skin in a way that’s calming and arousing all at once.
"For business?" I probe.
"For business. For revenge. For survival. I'm not a good man, Stefania. I'm a man who does what's required and doesn't lose sleep over it."
"Do you regret any of it?" I ask, knowing he could ask me the very same question.
"Some of it. The ones that needed doing, no. The ones where I had a choice and chose violence anyway..." He shifts behind me. "I won't lie to you about what I am. I've never pretended to be anything other than what I am. The difference between us is that I do it for the family and you do it for strangers."
