Lyosha doesn’t hesitate. He knows the look on his friend’s face. He glances at me once, a silent warning and vanishes through the side door.
The silence that follows is thick with everything we haven’t said since last night. I refuse to look down. I refuse to be the submissive wife he expects. I raise my chin, my hands still curled into fists.
“I told you no,” Razvan says, his voice a low, jagged rasp.
“And I told you I wasn’t asking.”
He moves. It’s not a rush; it’s the slow, inevitable advance of a landslide. He stops inches from me, his presence an overwhelming wall of power. “You think you can learn to survivein an hour with an enforcer? You want to learn how to fight, Lena? You want to know what it feels like when someone truly intends to break you?”
Before I can answer, he pulls me toward the center of the mat. He doesn’t let go. He steps behind me, his chest pressing into my back, his arm sliding around my waist to pull me flush against him. “This is the first lesson,” he growls into my ear. “In my world, nobody stands in front of you and waits for you to hit them. They take. They pin. They hold.”
He hooks his leg behind mine and sweeps. I gasp as I hit the mat, but he doesn’t let me fall away. He follows me down, pinning my wrists above my head with one hand. His weight is crushing, a deliberate reminder of the physical reality between us.
“Get out,” he commands.
I struggle, my body bucking beneath his, my heels digging into the mat. But he’s a mountain. He’s the man who took my freedom. He shifts his weight, his knee pressing into the space between my thighs, his other hand coming up to cup my jaw, forcing me to look at him.
“You’re using strength you don’t have,” he says, his gaze burning into mine. “Use your leverage. Use the fact that I want you.”
The words send a jolt of electricity straight to my core. The air in the room is suddenly too hot, the scent of his expensive soap and raw masculinity filling my senses. This isn’t sparring. This is a continuation of the war we started in the car. I shift my hips, trying to find an opening, but the movement only brings us closer. The friction of my leggings against his suit pants is an agony of awareness. I can see the pulse leaping in his neck, the way his pupils are blown wide.
“You’re not teaching me,” I hiss, my breath coming in short, ragged bursts. “You’re just showing me you can hold me down.”
“I’m showing you that in a fight, there is no fair,” he rasps. He leans down, his lips inches from mine. “There is only who survives. And if you want to survive me, you have to be willing to do things that make you recoil.”
He releases my wrists but stays draped over me. His hand slides down my side, his fingers splaying over my ribs, tracing the line of my waist with a slow, agonizing deliberation. He’s pretending this is a lesson. He’s pretending his touch is purely instructional, but I can feel the heat of his palm through my shirt and I know he’s remembering the way I begged for him last night.
I reach up, my hands finding his shoulders, my fingers digging into the muscle. I should push. I should fight. But my body is melting into the mat, the adrenaline of the sparring session curdling into a heavy, liquid desire that I hate myself for feeling. I want him to finish what he started, even as I want to wrap my fingers around his throat.
“Show me,” I whisper, the defiance in my voice replaced by a raw, desperate need that has me arching my back into his touch.
Razvan’s jaw locks. For a second, I think he’s going to kiss me right there on the gym floor, to claim me in front of the ghosts of his ancestors. His thumb brushes my lower lip, pulling it down, his eyes fixed on my mouth with a hunger that mirrors my own traitorous want. Then, the mask snaps back into place.
He pushes himself off me in one fluid motion, standing up and smoothing his shirt as if nothing had happened. The sudden absence of his heat leaves me shivering on the cold mat.
“Again tomorrow,” he says, his voice cold and professional, though his chest is still heaving. “Five a.m. If you’re a second late, I’ll have Lyosha lock the gym doors.”
He doesn’t help me up. He turns and walks out of the room, his stride long and purposeful. I lie on the mat, staring at the fluorescent lights until they blur. My knuckles ache. My ribs ache. But the emptiness in my chest—the fact that he left me wanting him even after everything he’s done—is the sharpest pain of all.
He thinks he’s won. He thinks he’s brought me back into his orbit by taking over the training. I sit up, wiping a stray tear of frustration from my cheek. I look at the door he just walked through. He will teach me how to fight like a Volkov. He’ll teach me the “precise” way to end a life.
But I still need a weapon he doesn’t see coming. The tension isn’t gone; it’s just shifted, walking out of the room with both of us, leaving the air behind us heavy and unresolved.
19
RAZVAN
The Volkov name has survived three generations of war, treachery, and blood, and tonight it might be undone by a four year old with a bread roll.
Theo has been dismantling the centerpiece for the last four minutes and nobody at this table has said a single word about it because nobody at this table knows what to do about it, and I find, to my own irritation, that I don’t either. He’s pulled out three stems of whatever flower the event coordinator chose, lined them up beside his plate, and is currently eyeing the fourth.
The senior families are watching.
I sit at the head of the mahogany table, the seat of the Pakhan. To my right, Lena is a vision of forced composure in emerald silk, her knuckles still pink and raw from hitting Lyosha’s mitts. Beside her, Theo is currently engaged in his business and the gravity of the men surrounding us means nothing to him compared to the structural integrity of his “project.”
Twenty-three years of Bratva hierarchy sitting around this table, men who built their empires on the ability to read a Pakhan’s weaknesses before he knows he has them, and every set of eyes in this room is doing the same quiet calculation. The new Pakhan’s wife. The new Pakhan’s son. What do they mean? What do they cost him? Where are the pressure points?
I reach over and move the centerpiece six inches further from Theo’s reach without looking at him.
