Page 44 of Bratva Sacrifice

His grip pulls my head up and to the side, baring my throat. And then his mouth is there, in that place he loves to mark. I feel the scrape of his teeth, the fleeting, stinging pinch of pain I’ve perversely come to associate with pleasure instead.

“Alyosha.” It sounds so weak, so needy. A mewling plea.

“So fucking tight,” he growls against my throat. He’s still driving into me, a little deeper each time, forcing my resisting, swollen flesh to take more of him. I feel stretched, opened—conquered. It’s not comfortable, but it feels…necessary. Like I’m being remade, becoming something entirely new. Burning and melting and sweltering hot as he comes to rest over me, so deep I feel impaled.

My fingers slip in the sweat that mists his back, nails digging into his flesh. At some point I pulled my legs up, bracing my feet flat on the table to lift my hips into the vicious thrust of his. There’s a deep ache inside me, and it pulses with every breath I draw into my starved lungs.

I should be scared of Alexei. I know, now, what kind of man he is. Obsessive, domineering, amoral. A man who has killed without remorse at least once that I know of. A man who has drugged me, kidnapped me, and kept me prisoner. I should be terrified.

I’m not. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go back to being argumentative and scornful and openly contemptuous. But tonight all I can think of is how he let me cry on his shoulder when every hope I had crumbled to ash. How good the scrape of his teeth feels on my neck. How, against all reason, somehow I still feel safe.

“You want to come again, koshechka?” It’s a gritty rumble against my throat.

“Yes.” My knees nip around his hips. “Yes.” I scrape my nails down the length of his back in a silent demand.

Alexei gasps, shuddering. And then he moves. A long, slow glide out, as if he doesn’t want to pull away. Followed by a fast, sharp plunge in, as if he’s coming home again. There’s a rhythm to it, one I can’t quite catch. Maybe one I’m not supposed to catch. Maybe I’m just supposed to endure. Each stroke reaches the deepest part of me, rubbing sensitive tissues, sending electric little shocks of pleasure careening up my spine. “Fuck,” he rasps between hard, desperate plunges, his voice so thick it barely sounds human. “You feel like a fucking fist. It almost hurts to leave you.”

It hurts to be left. I feel empty when he’s not inside me. And when he is, I don’t feel anything but him.

One more slick slide makes it all too much. That tension that has been coiling in my belly abruptly bursts free. Every muscle tightens, and I scream his name as I come, digging my fingernails into his shoulders so deeply I’m sure I’ve left marks of my own.

“Fuck, Katya,” he says again in a visceral hiss, and he pounds into me, fighting the clutch of my body to get deeper still. “I feel you coming on my cock.” An abbreviated grunt as he thrusts deep and holds, his chest heaving. There’s a flood of liquid warmth as he comes inside me. Deliberately. Because he wants to.

And I’m still pinned to the table, helpless to do anything but let him. His heart pounds against my breasts. After several long minutes, at last he stirs himself enough to brace himself on one arm and brush his lips across mine. “If not for your birth control,” he muses, “probably you would be pregnant now.”

I shove at his shoulders, even though his weight is impossible to move. “Don’t even joke about that,” I snap.

And Alexei laughs. “Ah, Katya,” he says on a condescending sigh. “I think we eat zakuski again tomorrow, yes?”

Chapter Twenty One

Alexei

Hm.”

Anatoli makes this sound as he lingers in the doorway of the security room while I review the security footage from the day Katya took her naked stroll through the house. Wisely, he positions himself away from the monitors, and he guards the door from anyone who might enter.

From anyone else, the small sound would be ignorable, beneath my notice. From Anatoli, it’s as good as a shout of surprise. His interest piques mine. “What is it?” I ask him in Russian.

“Russo’s wife is divorcing him.”

“Is she, then?” Interesting. I would never have thought the woman would have it in her. They are devout Catholics, the Italians—death before divorce is their general philosophy on marriage. Still, it satisfies some vengeful part of me to know that I have fucked up Giulio’s life so severely. Probably the stupid motherfucker is panicking right now, knowing full well that the financial support he has always received from his wife’s family will soon no longer be coming.

He has lost his son. His wife. The respect of his own famiglia. Whatever shreds of his fortune might be leftover. And his daughter. I can imagine him sweating bullets, wondering how he is meant to extract himself from his unenviable position.

Possibly he will attempt to prevail upon some of the wealthier of his distant relatives; those from the more prominent branches of the Russo crime family. Possibly he will also consider that I could so easily set off a chain of events that would result in that very family hunting him down like a fucking dog. That maybe it is best to fade into the background and make himself invisible.

I wonder if his brothers think the same. If they fully understand how badly Giulio has fucked them all over, how they will be held every bit as responsible for his actions.

I must have laughed, because Anatoli scowls at me.

“A cornered dog is dangerous,” he says, and he is right. But there is so little that Giulio can do—and he will do nothing at all to me. So long as I have evidence of his worthless dead son’s treachery in my hands, I also have his balls in the clench of my fist. I am untouchable.

“I’m not worried about him,” I say. But I know from the severe expression Anatoli wears that he will continue to investigate this, to keep a digital eye on the Russo family, just in case.

“Maybe he wants Catalina back,” Anatoli says absently as his fingers fly across the screen of his phone. “Since he has nothing else.” He offers a short, careless shrug. “It would be convenient, when you’re finished with her. Maybe you can—”

Anger surges up my spine. “Do pizdy. I don’t give a fuck what he wants. She isn’t going back.”