One round inside her before I began my morning.
Chapter 14
Iskra
Heat. That was the first thing.
Heavier than usual, pressing down from above rather than rising from the covers. I tried to kick free and my leg met resistance—weight, warmth, something that wasn’t the duvet.
Wet lips moved along my jaw.
One hard thrust pried me open.
The shock of it dragged me upward through the layers of sleep before I had any say in the matter—that lurching, disorienting climb from dark to fractured awareness where nothing was quite real yet and nothing could be trusted.
Vadim.
My eyes flew open.
He loomed above me in the half-dark, the dawn light catching the edges of him—shoulders, jaw, the movement of his body above mine. The shadows in the room seemed to shift with him or perhaps it was sleep still moving at the corners of my vision. I blinked hard, trying to anchor myself. Ceiling. Chandelier. Red walls. His room. My room.
Real.
This was real.
His hand gripped my thigh, hauling it higher as he drove deeper. No warmup, no pretence of one—just the immediate, relentless driving of a man who had been planning this since before I was awake to have any opinion about it.
I hadn’t been ready.
I had to be dreaming.
“Damn. Look at those tits move,” he growled, pulling back only to surge forward again, slamming his pelvis against mine with a force that knocked the last of the sleep out of me entirely.
Fucking asshole.
Not a dream.
“Da. Show me that fire,” he hissed, and slapped my breast.
“Mother—” The curse died as his fingers curled around my throat and closed.
“What did you say?” he growled, his grip crushing my windpipe.
I slapped him.
Open palm, full force, directly across his face. The crack split the quiet of the room like a gunshot.
I froze.
The silence lasted one second. Two.
I was going to die in this bed.
Then the smile came. Slow. Wrong. The smile of a man who has just been handed exactly what he wanted without you meaning to give it.
He pulled out.
One motion—rolled me onto my belly, fingers already yanking my hips into the air before I had processed the movement.
