He grins. “No.”
Anya rides past us, pretending not to listen. “Alexei can stay.”
“Thank you, Madam Volkova.”
“No,” I say.
She glances back at me, smile widening. “Jealousy suits you less.”
Alexei nearly chokes laughing. I consider killing him again.
Most nights, I return to her with the city still on my skin.
Smoke. Anger. News I don’t share all of. Some days, my men bring me the kind of information that keeps empires alive and marriages impossible. Some days, my father’s name appears too often. Some days, Dmitri’s.
But when I go upstairs, Anya is there.
Reading in my chair. Lying across my bed. Sitting at the window in one of my shirts. Once, asleep with a book open on her chest and Buran’s apple hidden in the pocket of a robe.
I stand in the doorway too long.
I do that now.
Watch. Wait. Let the sight of her teach my body that there’s something inside my walls worth returning to.
When she wakes and sees me, she smiles before she remembers not to.
Those are the moments that undo me.
Not the sex, though the sex is enough to make me stupid. Not the way she rides my cock with her head thrown back, tits flushed, mouth open around my name. Not the way she lets me pin her wrists above her head when she wants to be overwhelmed, then bites my shoulder afterward because she hates that I know it. Not even the mornings when she curls against me, soft and soreand satisfied, and demands coffee like a queen held hostage by a bad mattress.
One night, after I come home late from meeting the last man connected to the warehouse attack, she’s waiting awake.
“Is it done?” she asks.
I remove my cuff links. “Yes.”
She knows what I mean. I haven’t told her every detail, but she knows enough.
“The warehouse?”
“Paid for.”
“By whom?”
“Everyone who touched it.”
She sits against the headboard, quiet for a moment. Then she nods.
No horror. No approval either. Understanding.
I cross the room and sit on the edge of the bed. “Does that bother you?”
She studies me. “Should it?”
“Most people would say yes.”
“I’m learning most people lie about what they need men like you to do.”
