Dimitri folds. He looks at me when he does it — specifically, deliberately, making sure I see him see me. There is nothing I can do about that look. I look back at him — steady, composed, holding the expression until he's the one who looks away first, because I've learned by now that whatever game this is, losing ground in it costs more than the discomfort of holding position.
I hold position.
It nearly kills me.
Aleksei adds to the pot.
He works with a patience that is almost clinical — the same patience he applies to everything, to race setups and negotiations and the act of making me say things I don't mean to say. He knows exactly what he's doing. He has always known exactly what he's doing. His fingers find the angle that makes the muscles in my thighs clench and stays there, and his thumb finds my clit, and the combination of inside and outside pressure with the specific additional humiliation of having to sit entirely still and say nothing and look Dimitri Drakos in the face while this is happening —
His free hand slides from my hip to my waist, steadying me, and I understand that even this is calculated — he's holding me still because he knows I'd move otherwise, and moving would give it away.
My breath comes out against my closed mouth in a controlled thread.
One more?—
His thumb circles. His fingers curl forward.
I shudder. A single full-body tremor, impossible to prevent, and he turns my face toward his in the same instant — one handcupping my jaw — and kisses me. Deep, claiming, deliberate. His mouth swallows the sound I make before it reaches the room. His teeth catch my lower lip. His fingers don't stop — not yet, not until I've gone taut against his hand and then loose, the orgasm rolling through me in waves I have no option but to receive because I cannot move, cannot make noise, cannot do anything but hold the table edge and let him take me apart in a room with witnesses.
When the last tremor passes he withdraws his hand.
Cool air returns between us.
He lifts his hand from under my dress and wipes his fingers on my inner thigh — slow, unhurried, deliberate. Not cleaning up. Marking. The gesture of a man who wants me to feel the evidence on my own skin for the rest of the night.
He pushes chips toward the center of the table.
"I believe that's the hand," he says.
His voice is completely level. His expression is completely composed. He looks like a man who has just won a hand of cards, which is also true, and nothing else, which is not.
He lifts me from his lap and stands, the motion smooth and unremarkable, one hand briefly at my waist before dropping entirely. He picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
He leans to my ear.
"You'll remember this when you touch yourself," he says. Quiet. Final. Factual, almost, the way he says everything.
Then he walks out of the High Stakes Room.
I stand at the table while the other men collect their losses and file out after him, and I look at the glass surface, still glowing faintly gold.
Dimitri is the last to go.
He pauses at the door — not looking at me directly, just pausing, the specific deliberateness of someone who wants me to notice the pause. He's taking inventory. I am a variablein something he's building, and tonight I have given him information: that Aleksei uses me. That he's willing to use me as a display piece in a room with an audience. Dimitri will file that underleverageand let it sit.
I keep my face neutral until the door closes.
Then I put my hand over my mouth.
Then I take it away.
I smooth my dress. I check my expression in the reflection of the glass — composed, neutral, unreadable. I have worn this expression so many times since October that it fits like a second skin, which is its own kind of information about what this place is doing to me.
I walk out.
And I stand in the narrow corridor below deck for a moment, my hand against the wall, listening to the party above me — the music, the voices, the performance of ease — and I think about what just happened with the specific clarity of someone who doesn't have the option of being unclear.
He used me. He used me deliberately, strategically, as a weapon against Dimitri's composure and a display of his own certainty. He calculated the effect on every person in that room, including me.
