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Maksim drops his eyes to the floor.

“Breaking his nose was letting the little bastard off gently,” Lev adds.

Larisa’s eyes go wide with outrage, and Vanessa is instantly at her elbow, murmuring and soothing. Her fawning doesn’t surprise me in the slightest anymore.

Those two words, my woman, send my whole heart and everything lower lurching. If this room wasn’t packed with the most powerful people in the city, I think I might actually scream.

“She’s your assistant,” Maksim protests thickly through the blood. “That’s all she is to you.”

“Remember her new position,” Lev says. “And remember this as well. Anyone who lays a single finger on her will end up in far worse shape than he’s in right now.” His gaze moves over Maksim, then over Vanessa, then over Larisa herself. “Every one of you.”

The silence stretches out long. Then, one by one, they turn and go.

I finally find my voice again. “Thank you. But why would you say that? About me being yours.”

He had a hundred cleaner ways to warn them off tonight. He chose this one instead. I cannot stop myself from turning it over and over, from reading things into it that I have no right to read.

“Because you are mine,” he says. He says it the way he says everything, as though it’s the plainest fucking fact in the whole world and I’m a little slow for needing it spelled out.

And my heart does something it’s never done before, something that has nothing at all to do with fear or debt or how badly my body wants him, and everything in the world to do with him.

11

LEV

The wrong kind of voices start rising in the days after that dinner.

Fyodor is in the ground, and still the men who thought the way he did will not lie down. His remnants whisper in back rooms about dragging the family back into the old bloodletting, about tearing me out of my chair and shoving some bloodthirsty butcher into it.

I will not allow it. Not while I still draw breath.

So, I do what the work requires of me. I give each of them the same choice I once gave Fyodor, to bend the fucking knee or to disappear, and the ones who choose wrong simply stop being a problem for anyone.

I don’t enjoy it. My father would’ve enjoyed it, would’ve made a lesson of every one of them in a warehouse full of witnesses. I do it clean, quiet, and without an audience. I sleep afterward, and that alone is proof of how far I’ve dragged this family from the men who miss the blood. Over a handful of days, the city goes quiet again under my hand.

But the quiet doesn’t reach me.

One thing keeps snagging, over and over, and it’s not the killing. It’s that I stood in a ballroom full of the most dangerous people I know and called Delaney my woman out loud like a lovesick fool. Fuck, I handed the whole room a lever that night, and worse, I handed one to my own enemies. I lost my grip on my own restraint in front of everyone, and I don’t lose my grip.

I sit in my study and try to work the discomfort loose. I yank my collar open and lean back in the chair, and not one bit of it helps.

I close my eyes, and there she is at once, as though she’s been waiting behind them the whole time. The apricot dress. The soft curve of her hip under my palm. Lemon soap and champagne on her warm skin. My whole body pulls tight and my cock aches.

I curse and pour two fingers of whiskey and drink it straight down. Fuck, none of this is working, and I know exactly why.

I’m forty-four years old, and I’m sitting here with my cock as hard as a boy who has never once touched a woman. I have not laid eyes on her in days, and my body pays no attention whatsoever to reason.

My hand drifts down to my belt without asking me first. I picture her spread open and wet for me, that soft body waiting, and I fist my cock and let my breathing go deep and rough.

She pulls me in no matter how hard I plant my heels against it. I want distance from whatever this is turning into, but my body wants her hands, her mouth, the tight wet heat of her, and it wants all of them now.

I tighten my fist. And then I stop, because this is absurd. She’s mine. She’s fifteen minutes away, awake in her little apartment, and I’m sitting here alone with my own hand like a fool. I have spent a lifetime taking exactly what I want the moment I want it, and somehow this one woman has me jerking off alone like a green boy rationing his own appetite. The realization irritates me more than the wanting itself does, but still, I don’t stop moving toward the door.

I get up, and I drive.

Her street is dead quiet at this hour. Only her curtains glow, warm and gold against the dark, and knowing she is awake and alone behind them puts a hard pull in my blood. I take the stairs two at a time.

I knock, light, twice, and wait in the cold with my pulse loud in my ears.