“I won’t pretend, Damian,” she whispered. “I won’t smile for the cameras. I won’t love you just because you’ve built a fortress around me. You can own my name, and you can own my time, but you will never own the woman inside.”
Something in me snapped. It wasn’t the cold, calculated snap of a soldier; it was the violent rupture of a man who had spent too long living in the shadows. I reached out, my hands catching her upper arms. I didn’t grab her roughly, but I held her with a desperation that shocked us both. I pulled her close, forcing her to look up at me, forcing her to see the man behind the Ghost.
“You think I want your love?” I asked, my voice raw and honest, the words tearing out of my throat like shards of glass. “I don’t even know what love is, Elena. I grew up in a house where affection was a weakness used to leverage a hit. I don’t want your smiles. I don’t want your pretend happiness.”
I felt her shudder in my grip, her eyes wide as she searched mine.
“Then what do you want?” she breathed.
“I want your survival,” I confessed, the truth feeling like a surrender. “That is the only currency I have. I expect you to breathe. I expect you to keep that brilliant, sharp mind of yours functioning.”
I leaned down, my forehead almost touching hers. “If you survive as my wife, no one can touch you. Then at least your blood won’t be spilled on someone else’s orders.”
The silence that followed was deafening. The anger in her eyes didn’t disappear, but it shifted. The vulnerability was replaced by a terrifying, heavy understanding. She looked at me not as a kidnapper, but as a man who had made a brutal, impossible choice.
“Who asked you to save me?”
“You don’t need to ask me,” I fired back, even though my voice dropped an octave.
She blinked slowly. “It was never meant to come to this. Being your wife? I…”
“Hell if I don’t like the sound of that,” I muttered, interrupting her.
“What are you talking about? We’re talking about a whole marriage, and you’re talking about how a word sounds?”
I answered her by covering her lips with mine. The kiss wasn’t a beginning; it was a collision. It was the sound of two high-speed trains smashing into one another in the dark. There was no tenderness, no soft preamble. It was raw, desperate, and fueled by pent-up hunger and desire.
Elena resisted for a heartbeat, her hands coming up to push against my chest, her teeth grazing my lip hard enough to draw blood. I tasted the copper tang of it and growled into her mouth, my hands tangling in her platinum hair, pulling her head back to expose the elegant line of her throat.
Then, the resistance died. Her hands shifted from pushing to pulling, her fingers clawing at my shoulders, dragging me closer until there wasn’t a molecule of air between us. She kissed me back with a ferocity that matched my own—a frantic, starving need to reclaim some sense of power in a world that had stripped her of everything.
This wasn’t romance. It was a battle. It was the only way two people like us knew how to communicate without the lies of the Bratva or the technicalities of the law.
I lifted her, her legs hooking around my waist, and carried her to the bed. We hit the mattress like a falling star, the air leaving my lungs as she scrambled to pull my shirt over my head. Every touch was a brand. My hands mapped the curves of her body—the soft skin of her thighs, the rigid line of her spine, the frantic pulse at the base of her throat.
Power shifted between us like a physical weight. One moment, I was pinning her wrists above her head, asserting the dominance of the man who had caged her; the next, she was arching her back, her eyes locked on mine with a gaze that told me I was the one who was truly enslaved.
Just as I lined myself at her entrance, I asked, “Do you…?”
“Don’t ask me any fucking question,” she cut me off, her eyes glittering with a need that I was sure mirrored mine.
Her whole body shuddered as I entered her, the feeling of her around my hard length pushing me to a height I shouldn’t go to yet.
“Fuck!” I groaned.
I started to move, and she panted and moaned softly, her hands raking down my back and backside.
“Are you okay?” I breathed.
She nodded frantically, making me want to smile at the realization that she didn’t shut my question down this time.
There was a mutual recognition in the dark. We were both monsters in our own right. She, the girl who would burn an empire to find the truth; me, the ghost who would slaughter an army to keep a secret. We seemed, in that moment, like the only two people in the world who understood the cost of the Lobanov name.
The act itself was driven by a primal need to claim and be claimed. I wanted to mark her, to leave the scent of my skin on her so deeply that she wouldn’t forget it. I wanted to anchor her to this world so she couldn’t slip away into the shadows of the lawsuit. And beneath her rage, I felt her need for the same—the need to be held so tightly that the fear of the executioner’s bullet couldn’t reach her.
No promises were made. No whispers of “forever” or “love” echoed in the dimly lit suite. There was only the heat of our skin, the frantic rhythm of our breathing, and the crushinginevitability of the sunrise. We were two drowning people holding onto each other in the middle of a storm, and for those hours, the war didn’t exist.
I felt her begin to clench around me, and I knew she was close. I powered into her with increased pace, and she came with a moan. I didn’t stop as her body quivered and her breath came out in heavy pants. I came with a low groan, my upper body lowering over hers as I claimed her lips in a slow kiss.
