by Lana Sky
Maybe this is his way of apologizing.
When he finally does thrust, it’s a slow-burning chain reaction of friction and force. I’m on fire with every inch of me he claims, and I can’t even tell how deep he really is when he slows and groans against my ear.
“You’re shaking, kotyonok.” Suspicion thickens his already guttural tone and snippets of fear mingle with pleasure.
He finds enough leverage to fist a chunk of my hair again, trapping me right where he wants me: back bowed, ass presented to him. When he pulls out, it’s a sharp jerk of his hips that leaves me empty without warning. Not for long. I don’t even have the chance to blink before the bed lurches and I’m full to bursting. I see white—he forces himself that deep. The feral grunt rumbling from his throat betrays his satisfaction. Control may get him off, but so does this: raw, primal fucking with a hint of restraint.
“Tell me why.”
An answer I can’t bite back springs to my lips. Lying is impossible when he’s this close—dominating me. “A… Afraid.”
“Why?” Confusion makes his voice shake. Makes me shake.
Another thrust, painfully slow. His free hand claws at my hip as if that much control is a struggle for him to achieve in this moment. He’s straining at the seams again.
I wail as he lunges, sinking in so deep that I can’t breathe. Pain. It paints the world black. It makes me desperate; I’m an addict itching for the only drug that gets her high. When he wrenches his grip, raising fire over my scalp, I’m thrown onto the dangerous precipice between sanity and clarity.
Can’t think.
“Why?” he demands again.
The answer leaves me in a rush. “Because I shouldn’t want you.”
And I do. My body is a glove, gripping him so tight that I can feel every pulse of his cock. His chest heaves against my back as his mouth nudges my jaw. Within seconds, ravenous lips find mine. Crush them, battering me into submission. His tongue swipes. Invades. Subdues. It’s not a kiss. It’s a sampling. He’ll devour me later, but like any predator, he toys with me first.
“Say it,” he growls before nipping my bottom lip, eliciting a moan I can’t smother. “What is it you want?”
Drugged on him, I can’t lie.
“…to keep me,” I gasp as my cheeks heat with shame. But there’s more. I want you to smother me. Capture me. Collar me. Break, break, breakbreakbreakbreakme.
“Why?” he wonders, biting me harder when I don’t answer.
Copper trickles between us and his tongue hungrily chases every last drop. I can’t even feel disgusted. My body is on fire, aching on the devious edge of pain and fear. Horror and need. I feel like that fucking French queen, about to be beheaded, only I’m eager for the blade to come down. I need to feel it slicing me to pieces.
“Why?” Maxim questions for a second time, his voice colder. He’s stopped moving, leaving me unbearably full, right on the edge of real insanity.
My brain stalls. “I…”
He shoves me down when I can’t choke an answer out, flipping me onto my back. Cold silk rasps over my skin, alerting me to the fact that my dress is bunched around my waist. Only vaguely do I remember where we are. His bed.
And he doesn’t seem to give a damn.
He takes my wrists in his hands, forming painful manacles out of his fists. Using his weight as a prison, he pins me down, grinding his pelvis just where I need him the most.
“I’m done toying with you, kotyonok,” he hisses. At the same time, he thrusts, ramming his erection between my legs, aided by the teasing friction of cotton and silk.
It’s torturous.
Desire curves my spine as my thoughts meld into one overriding sentiment: Holy fuck. My limbs liquefy. My breath catches. Just as the pleasure scrapes me raw, his nails gouge my inner wrists and the pain bites deeper, keeping me tethered to my body. To him.
“You want to be kept,” he reiterates, still crouched above me. “Why?”
“I…” Another brutal assault centered near my clit stimulates my nerves into painful awareness. My lips part, spitting out words at his command before I can properly compose them. “Because…feel…with you.”
“Again,” Maxim snarls against my throat. Shock doesn’t color his tone. Just impatience. God, it’s like he’s in my head, seeing what I can’t, ripping me apart to seek out the secrets I thought I was so good at keeping. “Say it.” Pinching teeth startle me into obedience.
“Feel,” I breathe. “You make me feel.”
The Frankie Marconi I know and hate would never utter those words. She’d never whimper them while twisting her hips for another hint of agonizing ecstasy. She’d never fucking mean them.
And Maxim would never push her like this. Punish like this.
“How?” He thrusts his hips again, taking another moan from me.
He’s different with this woman who’s so eager to be his doll. He’s reckless with her.
Bruised and battered, she’ll never fucking forget who she belongs to. He’ll handle her roughly and glue her broken parts together.
The worst part? She’ll be grateful for every new crack.
My thoughts form the words more quickly than my tongue can push them out. “Something. Anything…”
Maxim laughs, swallowing my words with a bruising pass of his lips, and I have no doubt that he will make me regret every word.
He’ll make me regret every twisted minute I continue to play his game.
And I’ll never feel more fucking alive.
Bound to him, I won’t have a damn choice…
And maybe the promise of that oblivion is what I really wanted all along.
I let myself sink into the brutality of his kiss and the violence promised within every harsh brush of his lips. His fingers bite into my ass, yanking me closer with our mouths still fused.
Rather than slow, he rocks his hips, slamming into me. Again. And again. And again… Heat builds, even though I don’t want to acknowledge it. Sore flesh melts beneath his assault. Nerves spark. Catch fire. The air in my chest becomes liquid. My thoughts are smoke.
He’s an inferno.
Gritting his teeth, he holds nothing back. Two thick fingers sink between my legs and find my clit, grinding the bundle of nerves into fucking oblivion. Stars. Tension. Fuck!
It isn’t an orgasm that rips through my body—it’s an entirely new reality. Sweat and skin become my universe. Everything else ceases to matter.
Breathless and spent, I watch him finish seconds after I do. His hands grip the headboard on either side of me, his head rearing back. Guttural, broken noise rips from his chest: a demon’s growl. It reverberates through marble and chilled air. Seconds later, his release floods me, dripping down my thigh as he abruptly pulls out.
He’s still hard somehow. Like a battering ram, he nudges my inner thigh, painting me in streaks of cum and sweat.
I wake up with three fingers inside me. Twisting, curling, maddening fingers. They swirl along my inner walls, drawing a cry from my throat. It’s promptly swallowed by the warm surface that nudges my mouth open. Lips? I don’t have any time to be sure before I’m consumed. Deep, hungry pulses of a tongue push me further to the edge. Off of it.
I’m clenching, swipe by swipe like a windup toy. Before my thoughts can reassemble, they’re scattering apart toward different sides of the room.
“Look at me.”
My eyes fly open on command and I find the devil hovering above. His black eyes trace my own, which watch on in satisfaction as they glaze over and then roll into the back of my head. Shit. My back bows, and my lips stretch around a moan.
The physical pleasure is maddening. But when his free hand latches onto my hip, his nails sinking deep…
Explosions. He rips me to pieces, melds them all back together, and calls it a “climax.”
My body protests as he eases his fingers from me. Already, he’s reaching for his cock, stroking his hand along the rigid shaft. He runs the crown along the length
of me. The first thrust stretches me wide. The next, he’s in to the hilt.
His name rips from my throat, hoarse and broken. It’s the only coherent word I can manage, and for the moment at least, it seems to be enough. He growls in satisfaction at the sound, rolling his hips as he fucks into me. Thrust after thrust after thrust…
I’m mindless. My thoughts consist of an endless loop of only one word: Shit…shitshitshit!
It feels like an eternity before he finally comes, lunging against me—into me. Seconds later, he’s rolling away, leaving my body naked on his bed.
His bed. It feels important to drill that point home. These sheets reek of him; the mattress has conformed to his body’s imprint. But I’m the only woman to ever lie on it—I know that terrible truth without even having to ask. The walls inhale our combined scent, tossing it back at me like a flashing neon sign.
You’re the only bitch who’s been fucked here.
I’m the only bitch dumb enough to stay. I have to dwell on that fact as my blurred vision focuses on the ceiling. I blink twice to clear it, enough to make out his shadow pacing in the center of the room.
He frowns, looking me over. His jaw is clenched, those eyes like midnight. Anger is a familiar expression on him, but even that doesn’t come close to describing this one. It’s an unknown characteristic to his features, more terrifying than rage.
“I called you kotyonok because from the second you came to me you were on your guard, ready to pounce. Ready to bite.” Still pacing, he frowns, raking his hand through his hair as if rearranging his thoughts. He’s been thinking about this, I realize. “The other women were hardened. Most of them. Even Gemma knew what to expect. But you? So eager for your reward, you didn’t even read the rules.” He chuckles at that, grating the sound off his teeth. “Few lasted a night. Fewer an entire day. As I have told you before, you are the only one to stay. Contract or otherwise…you are the only one to stay.”
He lets it sink in. Before, he was vaguer in his generalizations. He never came right out and told me that I was the only one. Or maybe he did. Maybe it was easier to ignore him then, in the cold, lifeless cage of the suite—before he showed me parts of himself that had been previously off-limits. Before he waltzed right into my home and made a mark on my family.
Maybe, in his own way, Maxim even tried to warn me.
“I told you,” he says as if reading my mind again, consuming my thoughts the same way he has everything else. “Coming back to me was your first mistake.”
“And the s-second?” My heart plays a pathetic pitter-patter pattern against the inside of my chest. I don’t want to hear the answer, but my ears won’t shut. My hands don’t move to cover them, either. I’m at his mercy.
Where you belong, a part of me taunts. Where you want to be…
Maxim sighs as his footsteps slow. “You came,” he admits. “Around me. For me.” The raspy note in his voice makes the tiny hairs along my arms stand on end. “I told you that no one ever has. I told you.” I know what he really means: I warned you. “But even that was a forgivable offense. Do you want to know what the final nail in your coffin was, kotyonok?”
“What?” I whisper, fighting for air as my heart swells, squeezing the breath from my lungs.
He sighs. “I don’t think you’d understand, even if I told you.”
He advances on the bed, climbing onto the mattress before I can blink. His hand cinches my waist, dragging me toward him.
“Sleep,” he commands near my ear. “Tomorrow… Tomorrow we will talk.”
Chapter Thirteen
“He’s baiting me. No. I’ll let him play his game.” Nearby whispers meld into a deafening hum as snatches of reality gnaw away at my psyche.
And then it hits me. I’m in his suite. In his bed. His bite marks are on my neck.
And his words are in my head: I don’t think you’d understand, even if I told you.
No. I shake my head to banish the thought, but the motion only betrays me.
“I’ll handle it later.” The murmured voices trail off and footsteps advance in my direction. Finally, a man commands, “Get up.”
I peel my eyes open and witness his face in the dim glow of a nearby lamp. God, he truly resembles the devil. His eyes gleam red, his expression fierce, his lips glistening. There is something clenched in his fist.
Without warning, he throws it at me: soft, silky fabric that rasps over my naked skin. “Put it on. Then meet me out front.” Then he’s gone before my eyes even fully adjust and dread sets in.
Talk, he said—but my brain comes up with another word for it: regress. We’ll meet in another secluded diner. He’ll take back all the things he said.
And I’ll be tossed in the trash again.
For a second—just one—I toy with the idea of running. Leaving him there and letting the master with all the cards know what it’s like to be left holding a shitty hand.
Then logic takes over. Groaning, I pull myself upright and creep down the deserted hallway, entering “my” room for the first time in what feels like an eternity. I wash up quickly and stagger to the closet before I remember that I’ve already been given my costume.
The dress is black, I realize once I return to his room and fish it from the twisted sheets on the bed. It’s low cut but relatively modest. After grabbing a pair of heels from my closet, I leave the suite and take the stairs down to the first floor. His car is idling out front, but this time, the driver is occupying the front seat and Maxim is dominating the back.
Upon spotting me, he wrenches the door open from the inside and beckons me with a wave of his hand. It’s earlier than I thought. The sky is a coal-colored shade of gray and darkness floods the car’s interior as I climb inside and close the door behind me.
My eyes dart toward him, but his face reveals nothing. He stares forward as the driver navigates toward a destination he and the driver must have already discussed between them.
Minutes later, we arrive before the elegant mansion I recognize as his club.
“Come.”
Darkness still spreads across the sky as he unfurls himself from the car, rising like a goddamn giant. He’s wearing a suit, black and crisp. It accentuates his muscles as he starts past me, advancing toward the entrance to the club.
I follow, partly unnerved, partly enthralled.
It’s unfair how beautiful he can seem like this. With his hair wild and slicked back, his posture blazing confidence.
I’m not the only one entranced by him, either. A hush falls over the club as we enter. It’s packed to the brim with its usual blend of scantily clad women, powerful-looking men, and pulsing music. Maybe he’ll do it here?
Cut me loose and then choose another woman from this harem.
I tense as he slows his pace. Just when I start to suspect the worst, he turns in a different direction, ignoring the main club entirely. I’m not sure where he’s heading, just that we pass through swatches of people before all other sounds finally dies down.
We’re in a hallway. He travels down to the very end and disappears through a doorway. When I finally gather up the strength to follow him, the air leaves my lungs.
It’s a bedroom, I think. At the same time, it’s so much more. His room back at the suite, if it could even be called that, is a crypt—detached of all semblance that it could have ever been inhabited by a human being. This room though…
It’s bigger, for one, but it seems more cramped somehow. Lived in. The walls are that iconic shade of black, the floors marble. A minibar dominates one end of the room, and stone dust streaks the floor, leading to a section of the wall where a row of finished statues gleam in the glow of a silver light fixture. Most of them are abstract figures, with a few recognizable shapes sprinkled throughout: a wolf’s head, a doe’s, a woman’s. One woman. Her face appears a few times, her features similar: a plain face with a simple nose and empty eyes without pupils. She’s always naked. Always contorted into some unnatural position: her arms reaching toward
something that isn’t there.
If I squint, she almost looks familiar…
Turning away, I focus my attention on anything else.
At the center of the room is the strangest sight of all: a massive bed, the blankets rumpled, the pillows disorderly. My nostrils instinctively flare, but I only sense one scent. Musk and sweat. Maxim. No one else comes into this room, I suspect.
Not even to clean. Never to fuck.
It’s his.
My heart pounds as he crosses the threshold and nudges the door closed. That quiet thud shoots through me like a gunshot. I feel like I’m breaching the sanctity of this place. An intruder.
Apparently, the suite is just a temporary rest stop. This is where he lives.
It’s like he realizes it too, once he sees me here, occupying a space I don’t think he’s let anyone else invade. Which is funny, given that more people probably run in and out of this club than I care to imagine. The fact that he can commandeer something so private speaks to the power he carries over this place. Over people.
A hint of it lurks in his muscles as he draws back and observes me. “We are going to play a game.”
He gestures to a small table I didn’t notice before, tucked into a corner of the room. It’s black, and on it is a pack of cards with glossy, ebony backings.
“A game,” I echo, creeping as close as I dare. The more I twist the prospect around in my brain, the more horrifying it seems. I don’t think he plans on playing Go Fish. “A card game?”
A rare smile quirks his lower lip, gone in a second. “It’s something one of my associates dreamt up. A bit childish, but for now, it will serve my purpose.”
What purpose, exactly? I wait, my heart in my throat, but he doesn’t say. Instead, his eyes flick over me, narrowing as they take me in.
“Sit.”
I obey in a mass of trembling limbs. My muscles throb. Everything aches. My thoughts are way too clear. I’m aware of everything.
