I do not respond well to manipulation, subtle or otherwise, and Sergei knows that. Which means he’s either growing careless or impatient.
Neither is ideal for our future together as business associates.
I take the stairs two at a time, heading up to Ivy’s room. I’m still not entirely surewhatI’m hoping to achieve when I get there, but it doesn’t slow me in the slightest. Maybe Yulia is the key. That girl could soften stone with a smile, and Ivy clearly cares about her. It’s one of the only things I know about her for certain.
She wouldn’t have thrown herself over Yulia, using her own body as a human shield, if she didn’t.
That’s something I can work with, a leverage point I didn’t even have to engineer in order to use in my favor. I don’t like using the girl as a tool, but if it gets Ivy to start talking again—to start engaging with me, softening up those steel walls she wrapped herself up in after coming with me today, I’ll consider it necessary.
I don’t knock when I reach her door, a habit I’ve never once deviated from because I never knock in my own home. It’s a habit born of control, of ownership. There’s no one under this roof whose privacy supersedes mine. No one whose space I don’t already own, physically or otherwise.
Which makes what I walk in on all the more surprising.
I push the door open, fully expecting silence or her to give me the cold shoulder like she has been since we got in the car and came back here.
But instead, what I find is the complete opposite.
It has me stopping dead in my tracks.
She’s sprawled in the middle of the bed, eyes half-closed, legs parted just enough to give me a view I’ve never imagined before this but is now carved into my mind until the end of time. One hand clutches the sheets by her side in a white-knuckled grip, the other is buried between her thighs, fingers shoved deep inside her cunt.
Her fingers are slick, glistening with her own arousal as she works herself in slow, uneven strokes. Her back arches slightly off the mattress, chest rising and falling with the kind of desperation that only comes when you’ve nearly tipped over the edge and then dragged yourself back from it again and again. She’s close.
And she looks absolutely beautiful on display like this.
For a moment, I simply watch her.
Her lips are parted in a silent gasp, eyes half-lidded, too caught in the haze of pleasure to realize she’s no longer alone. Her hipsjerk in tiny, unconscious movements against her hand, and her breaths come fast, sharp.
I feel heat coil low in my stomach, a slow, smoldering hunger I don’t even try to hide as my hand tightens around her door handle.
But then she freezes when she realizes she’s not alone.
She yanks her hand from between her legs like she’s been burned, the movement frantic and clumsy. Her slick fingers smear against her inner thigh before she reaches blindly for the covers, trying to cover herself, trying to disappear, trying to pretend I didn’t just see exactly what she’s been doing.
Exactly howwetshe is under those sheets.
How needy.
Howdesperate.
I shut the door behind me, letting the soft click of the lock settle into the air between us as I turn it.
Her eyes widen at the sound. “What are you?—”
I don’t let her finish. I take a step forward. Then another. Like a man walking toward something he’s already claimed. Something that belongs to him, whether she’s willing to admit it or not.
She shifts back instinctively, curling the covers around her body to try and disappear into them, but there’s nowhere for her to go. “It’s… it’s not what it looked like.”
Her thighs press tightly together under the sheets, like she’s trying to trap the heat between them and lock it away where I can’t reach.
“Ivy,” I say, my voice low, almost a whisper. “You can lie to yourself if you want. But don’t lie to me. We both know what I just walked into.”
She opens her mouth, probably to deny it, to spin some deflection laced with that sharp tongue she always uses when she’s cornered. But nothing comes out because she knows I’m right.
It’s written across her skin in shades of red and pink. Still shimmering on the slick coating her fingers that she didn’t have time to lick clean. It’s in the dazed, glassy look in her eyes that hasn’t quite cleared yet.
“I didn’t…” she tries, voice hoarse, eyes darting to the side. “I wasn’t?—”
