A slow smile crossed her face before she looked to the side.
My hands cupping her face and bringing her to look at me, I told her, “I have some things to deal with. I’ll join you in the room later.” “Okay,” she answered softly just before I dropped a kiss to her lips.
“You’re beautiful,” I told her, my forehead touching hers. “So beautiful.”
Her smile widened.
**********
The rest of the day passed in a strange, suspended tension.
I returned to my office, to the calls and careful orchestration of power that kept my world spinning. But my mind kept drifting back to the garden. To the way Mila had looked at me with fear and desire tangled together—and had chosen the desire anyway.
I’d never wanted to keep something the way I wanted to keep her.
By the time night fell and the estate settled into its nighttime rhythms, I felt like I’d been wound too tight—a spring compressed past its breaking point. I finished my last call, poured myself another drink, and tried to remember the last time I’d felt this off-balance.
I couldn’t.
When I finally made my way upstairs, the hallway was quiet except for the soft sound of my footsteps on the carpet. I paused outside our bedroom door—because it was ours now, wasn’t it? Not just mine. Not anymore.
I opened the door.
Mila was standing by the window, backlit by the lights of the city beyond. She had changed into something simple—a champagne silk robe that skimmed her curves and made her skin look like honey in the low light.
When she turned to face me, there was no hesitation in her eyes. Only certainty.
“I thought you got stuck with work,” she said softly.
“I promised.”
I closed the door behind me, the click of the lock sounding impossibly loud in the quiet room. I moved towards her slowly, giving her time to change her mind. To say she didn’t want it.
She didn’t.
Instead, when I reached for her, she came willingly. Eagerly. Her hands slid up my chest to loop around my neck, and I let myself sink into the warmth of her, into the impossible gift of being wanted by someone who knew exactly what kind of monster I was.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said in the garden,” Mila whispered against my mouth. “Is that crazy?”
“If it is, then I’m just as insane.” My hands found her waist, then slid lower, pulling her flush against me so she could feel exactly what she did to me. “Because I couldn’t stop thinking about you either.”
This time, when I kissed her, it was slower. Deeper. A claiming and a surrender all at once. I walked her backward toward the bed, her fingers already working the buttons of my shirt. There was a desperation to her movements that matched mine—like we were both trying to crawl inside each other’s skin, to get close enough that nothing could come between us.
When the backs of her knees hit the mattress, Mila fell back with a soft gasp, and I followed her down. The robe fell open, revealing smooth skin and soft curves. I took my time mapping every inch of her with my hands and mouth. Learning what made her sigh, what made her arch, what made her say my name like a prayer.
“Alexei,” she breathed, her nails digging into my shoulders. “Please—”
“I know.” I kissed the hollow of her throat, the swell of her breast, the soft skin of her stomach. “I know,milaya.”
I took her harder than last night. Slower, too—savoring every gasp and tremor, every moment she came undone beneath me, every moment I came apart over her beautiful body. There was no distance now. No pretense that this was anything other than what it was: the kind of consuming connection that rewrote the architecture of a man’s soul.
When Mila finally shattered, my name breaking from her lips like something sacred, I followed her over the edge with a rawness I hadn’t felt in years. Maybe ever.
Afterward, we lay tangled together in the darkness, sweat cooling on skin and heartbeats gradually slowing. Mila’s head was on my chest again, her fingers tracing idle patterns over my ribs—over the tattoos she couldn’t see but must be able to feel.
“What does this one mean?” she asked drowsily, her fingertip following what I knew was the outline of a crowned wolf on my left side.
“Loyalty,” I rasped. “To family. To the brotherhood.”
