She still doesn’t know.
That moves through me quietly.
She still believes the tattoo on my wrist is her father’s blood on my hands and I look at her across the cell and say nothing about it.
I grab her throat again.
This time my grip doesn’t crush.
My hand wraps around her and stays there and my thumb finds her pulse and rests against it, feeling the frantic tripping beat of her heart under that thin skin.
I lean in close and I let her feel the difference between this and the last time.
She goes very still.
Her hands come up but they don’t claw this time, they rest against my wrist with a confused, frightened pressure that is not quite pushing me away.
“I’ll ask one more time,” I say. Low. “And I want you to think carefully before you answer.”
She swallows against my hand. I feel it move under my palm. “And if my answer is still the same?”
“Then we’re going to have a problem.”
“We already have a problem.” Her voice has dropped without her meaning it to, gone low and unsteady. “You have your hand around my throat and I still want to kill you.”
“That mouth of yours,” I say, and I watch her, “would be better used for something other than death threats.”
She bares her teeth at me. “Well, fuck me if I care.”
I smile, my thumb caressing her lower lip and catching her small gasp. “Ah…Zayka,I’d fuck your pretty mouth first, let’s see if you can talk smart then.”
The words land in the cell and neither of us move.
Her breath stops. Not fear, or not only fear, because her eyes have gone dark and her lips have parted and the color climbing her face has nothing to do with crying.
She’s thinking about it.
She’s sitting in this cell with my hand around her throat thinking about exactly what I said and I can see it happening and I’m thinking about it too, her pretty mouth, open, wet and taking me so well, unable to form words around the large thickness of my cock between her lips, what I’d make her moan with those pretty lips instead of threats and curses, and we are both completely aware of what is happening and neither of us is moving or speaking or doing anything except existing in the same charged and deeply insane air.
Her eyes drop to my mouth.
“Ch?rt voz’mi.” The curse tears out of me and I yank my hand back and step away from her hard, putting the wall of the cell to my back, and drag a breath in through my nose.
I’ve had men beg at my feet. I’ve had men offer me money, loyalty, names, territory, everything a person can put on a table. None of it reached me. Not once. I am not a man who gets reached.
This woman, who has nothing, who is sitting in a chair in my compound with nothing to offer and nothing to bargain with and still looks at me like she’ll find a way to make good on every promise she’s screamed at me, is doing something that has no name I’m willing to give it.
I still intend to kill her.
I tell myself this on the way out of the cell.
I tell myself this walking up the stairs and down the corridor and standing in my office staring out the window at the dark grounds while day three bleeds into the edges of the compound.
I intend to kill her.
The drive will open eventually and she will have served her purpose and that will be the end of Lena Sokolova.
I tell myself this through all of it, steady and deliberate, the way you tell yourself something you need to keep being true.
