My throat tightened around words I didn’t have.
She drew my hand to her mouth and kissed my bruised knuckles, one by one. “No one’s ever trusted me with that much power before.”
“You had it before I trusted you with it.”
Her eyes lifted.
“I only admitted it.”
She reached for my coat, pushing it off my shoulders. I let it fall. Her hands moved to my shirt again, opening buttons with slow, uneven care.
“I want you close,” she said. “I’m too tired for more than that, but I want your skin against mine.”
“Then that’s what you get.”
“All night?”
“All night.”
She smiled, and I kissed it because she gave it to me. I would never stop wanting that.
I removed her boots first. Then her coat. Then the sweater, when she lifted her arms and let me draw it over her head. I kept my eyes on her face as each layer came away. Not because I didn’t want the rest of her. I wanted with a violence that had become part of my breathing.
But tonight, after rooms and witnesses and blood, I wanted her to feel the difference between being stripped for sale and being undressed by a man who would stop at the first change in her breath.
Her trousers came next. Her socks. The underthings Irina had folded into the box.
By the time she lay bare against my sheets, gooseflesh had risen along her skin and her eyes had gone dark.
“Vadim,” she said.
There was no fear in it.
I bent and kissed her knee, then the inside of her thigh, then the soft place low on her stomach. She shivered and reached for my hair.
“Not too much,” she whispered.
I lifted my head. “Tell me what you want.”
“Just you. Close. No proving anything.”
I wanted to put my mouth on her and make her forget every hand that had ever tried to turn her into a price. I wanted to bury myself inside her and keep her full of me until morning.
I gave her what she asked for.
I stripped quickly and came down beside her. She turned into me before I could arrange the covers, pressing her naked body along mine with a sigh that emptied something brutal from my chest.
I pulled the blanket over us and held her.
For a while, that was all.
Rain moved down the windows. The city breathed beneath us. Somewhere beyond the locked doors and guarded elevator, men were carrying news through private rooms that Nadia Yelchin was no longer a debt, a lot, or a loss to be collected.
Here, she was warm against me, with her cheek over my heart and one thigh slid between mine.
I reached for the tea Irina had left and held the cup while Nadia took two small sips. She made a face at the bitterness, so I fed her a piece of buttered bread from the tray and watched her swallow it before I let her settle against me again.
Her body softened against mine.
