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I pull out slowly, as slow as I can make myself go, feeling every inch of it, and even when I’m out I stay right there between her thighs with my hand on her hip because I’m not ready to move yet. I watch what drips out of her onto the sheets, thick and slow. I feel something satisfied and animal about it. That’s mine. All of it. In her and on the sheets and dripping down her thighs.

I lay her back. She goes without a word.

She’s wrecked. Hair everywhere, thighs still trembling, a wet patch under her that’s half her and half me. Her face is turned away, her arm over it. Whatever composure she walked in with isn’t coming back tonight.

I lie back beside her. Neither of us talks.

After a while she rolls onto her side, facing away. I move with her, close the gap between us, and pull her back against my chest. She goes stiff for a second but doesn’t fight it. I get my arm around her waist and hold her there. My cock is still half hard against her ass, and she can feel it; I know she can, but I don’t move, don’t push. Just stay there with her back against my chest and my face in her hair.

She doesn’t say anything. I don’t either.

She’s Berezin’s daughter. I killed her father. She married me anyway, and I pulled her into my bed, and she’s lying here breathing slow against my arm, and I don’t know what the fuck to do with any of that, so I don’t do anything. I stay still. I keep my arm around her, and I stay still.

After a while her breathing evens out. I stay awake a long time after that, my arm around my wife in the dark. I don’t sleep for a long time. When I finally do, I don’t dream about Lavro. That’s either progress or something worse, and I’m not deciding which tonight.

9

Evelina

Two weeks into this marriage and he hasn’t touched me since the wedding night.

He said he’d fill a hole every night. He said it like he was reading from a schedule, warning me about something I should brace for. But he hasn’t laid a hand on me since. He sleeps in the same bed, pulls me back against him every night without asking, presses that half-hard cock against me in the dark like a reminder he has absolutely no intention of following through on, and then in the morning he gets up and goes to work as if none of it happened.

I’m not annoyed. That would be inaccurate.

I’m not annoyed. Annoyed would imply I wanted something I didn’t get, which isn’t the case. I don’t want a repeat. The wedding night was a physical reaction to circumstances, nothing more, and the fact that my body clearly hasn’t received that memo is its problem, not mine. He told me he’d fuck me every night, and he hasn’t, and I refuse to spend a single second thinking about why, except that I have been, which is its own infuriating thing that I’m done examining.

I get up, get dressed, and go downstairs to breakfast where he’s already at the table. I sit with my back to the wall.

He glances up. “Sleep well?”

“Fine,” I say.

“You were grinding on me in your sleep,” he says, back to his paper. “Just so you know.”

I pour my own coffee before he can do it for me. “I was not.”

“You were.” He turns a page. “Twice.”

I drink my coffee and say nothing because responding to that is a trap with no exit.

Two weeks in, from the outside I look exactly like what I’m supposed to be. A new wife finding her footing, attending meetings she’s been graciously invited to, asking questions that sound like curiosity but are in fact an inventory of everything within reach. I’ve charmed three Bratva wives over dinner, sat with them for two hours over good wine and better food, and walked away knowing more about this household than any of them realized they were telling me. I’ve memorized the staff roster, the security rotation, every face that passes through this estate with any regularity. I smile at the right moments and say the right things, but behind all of it I’m taking everything apart piece by piece, and nobody has noticed yet.

The meetings are their own problem.

Volkov has a habit of pulling me into his lap at every meeting he invites me to. I’m not sure when it became a habit because the first time I assumed it was a one-off, some display of ownership for the room, and then it happened again the next meeting and the one after that. He sits me across his thighs, one hand on my hip, and conducts Bratva business like this is completely unremarkable while I sit there feeling exactly how interested he is through his pants.

The first time I tried to move off him, his arm locked around my waist without him looking up.

“Stay,” he said.

So I stay. Making a scene in front of his men would get me in more trouble than it’s worth, and I’m not stupid enough to spend capital on a fight I don’t need to win. But I’ve started fighting it quietly. I shift in his lap at intervals, small adjustments that read as nothing, leaning forward to reach the table, recrossing my legs, the occasional slow grind that I execute with the focused innocence of a woman simply trying to get comfortable. I feel him get harder every time. His hand tightens on my hip. He says nothing, and neither do I, and we sit there in front of six of his men running a negotiation that has nothing to do with Bratva business.

The third meeting, I push it too far.

I lean forward to reach a document, and I drag it out a long grind from front to back. I feel him go fully hard beneath me and I sit back with the document, keeping my face on the right side of neutral.

His hand leaves my hip.