Page 32 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

“Tonight,” he says, “was about power. It always is. They needed to see that my power is absolute. And they needed to see that you are the absolute center of it.”

“I’m not a center,” I whisper. “I’m a person.”

“You’re the person in the center,” he corrects me, and he reaches out and traces the line of my jaw with a thumb, a touch so light it’s barely there, but it sets my skin on fire. “Do you know what they’re saying right now? In every house along this coast? They’re saying Malenko laid a hand on the last Filatov and Lev Etush took it off him. They’re not saying he insulted you. They’re saying he touched you. And they’re understanding the difference. Do you?”

And I do. I understand it with a clarity that is terrifying. He didn’t just defend my honor. He established a perimeter. A no-fly zone. A buffer of blood and bone around me that no one will dare cross without a cost they can’t afford.

It’s the most terrifying thing anyone has ever done for me.

And it’s the most aroused I have ever been in my entire life.

I’m not supposed to want this. I’m not supposed to want the man who bathes in blood and calls it bookkeeping. I’m not supposed to want the man who looked at my life, my grandfather’s name, my broken body, and saw a winning hand. I’m supposed to want a teacher with calluses on his fingers from chalk dust, a man who smells like books and coffee and kindness, a man who doesn’t know what a real knife feels like in his hand.

But the man with the calluses from chalk dust can’t hold me like this. He can’t look at me with this terrifying mix of possession and awe. He can’t understand the part of me that found something beautiful in the violence tonight, the part of me that is sick to death of being underestimated, the part of me that is tired of being the one who has to be strong all the time.

The man with the knife can.

I close my eyes. Because if I keep looking at him, I’ll do something I can’t take back.

He lets me have the darkness for a long minute. Then he speaks, and his voice is right there, next to my ear, a low rumble that I feel in my bones.

“Look at me, Vasilisa.”

I open my eyes.

“You’re afraid,” he says. It’s not a question. “You’re afraid of wanting me. You’re afraid of what it means about you. That a part of you liked what I did tonight.”

I don’t answer. I don’t have to.

“That’s the part that’s the same,” he says, and his thumb moves from my jaw to my lips, tracing the lower one, a slow, deliberate drag that makes my breath hitch. “The part that likes to win. The part that wants the table tilted in your favor. You just don’t like the method. You want it clean. You want it to be a meritocracy. You want to believe the best hand wins without a weighted deck.”

“It should,” I whisper.

“It doesn’t,” he says. “And you know it. You’ve known it since the day you woke up in a hospital, and the man who promised you forever had already packed a bag.”

His words are little knives, each one finding a soft place to land. He knows all my weak spots. He’s been mapping them since the day he met me.

“Your father and fiancé gambled away your future. I’m the one who’s finally betting on you.” He shifts, his body moving over mine, not covering me, just bracketing me, caging me in with his arms and legs, a wall of warm, solid muscle. “And I don’t bet to lose.”

His thumb is still on my lip. I open my mouth, and I bite it. Not hard, just enough, a small, sharp sting that makes him hiss, a soft intake of breath that is the first real sign of control he’s lost all night.

He pulls his thumb away and looks at the small, white indentation my teeth left in the skin. Then he looks at my mouth, and the look on his face is a new one. It’s hunger. Raw, unvarnished hunger, and it’s for me.

He lowers his head. And he kisses me.

The kiss is a claiming. His lips are hard on mine, demanding, and there’s no finesse to it, no gentle persuasion. This is the language he speaks, the one of power and possession, and he’s using it to translate every unsaid thing between us.

I kiss him back.

I meet his hunger with my own. I arch up against him, my body responding to the sheer, undeniable force of him, my hands coming up to tangle in his hair, holding him to me, my nails scraping against his scalp. The kiss deepens, turns wet and messy, a clash of tongues and teeth, and it’s not pretty, it’s not romantic, it’s desperate and hungry and real.

His hands move over my body, stroking, kneading, learning the shape of me through the thin fabric of my dress. One of them moves to my thigh, sliding up the smooth skin, and I can feel the calluses on his palm, a rough, textured friction that is so different from the smooth, careful hands of the therapists who touch me every day.

His other hand moves to the small of my back, to the exact spot where the cage of metal lives inside me, the place where the fusion is, the point of my greatest vulnerability. He presses against it, not hard, just a firm, steady pressure, and I gasp into his mouth.

It’s a violation. An intimacy that is so much more dangerous than the kiss. He’s touching the source of my brokenness, the thing that has defined my life for two years, and he’s not treating it like it’s fragile. He’s treating it like it’s a part of me, like it’s a part of the person he’s holding, and the acceptance in that touch is more devastating than any violence could ever be.

He breaks the kiss. We’re both breathing hard, the air in the room thick and charged. He looks at me, and his eyes are dark, the gray swallowed by a blackness that is all pupil.