VII (Seven)

by Lana Sky

  “No.” He rears back, hunched like a predator ready to pounce. “It stopped being sex when you said those fucking words to Nikolaus. It stopped being sex that night in the fucking hotel. From the moment I first touched you, it stopped being sex.” His hand slips between my legs, plunging beneath my thin nightgown.

  I cringe, my cheeks flaming. I should feel disgust. Weak and at his mercy, I should feel helpless.

  Not senseless.

  One touch and I forget. This room. This place. His fucking twisted insanity. One touch and he’s inside me, and he feels so different from Robert…

  “You fucking see?” he hisses, snapping my attention back to him. “This is what you do. You pretend and you trick, and—” He breaks off, his teeth clanging as he shoves a finger inside me. I barely hear him above the moan that rips from me. “And you make me fucking think for a second that I could have you.”

  He sounds crazed. Obsessed. Insane. His voice deepens in ways I’ve never heard, not even at the heights of his rage.

  “You’re praying to go back to him, aren’t you?” he wonders, still stroking me from the inside out. “Not that it fucking matters. I’m inside you, Ellen Winthorp. I’ll always be inside you…”

  There are no words to describe what he does to me. It’s a torturous style of fucking I’ve never been subjected to, not even at Robert’s most sadistic. Fingers, rubbing…everywhere. Igniting me. My hips writhe, desperate to stifle the flame he ignites. Chase. Evade. Anything to feel more. Feel less.

  He’s ruthless, wringing something from me I never thought was possible before him. A high and a fall so mind-blowing that all I can do is wheeze, and pant, and suffer.

  His hand is still between my legs when I come back down, punishing me with slow, deliberate flicks of his thumb.

  “Tell me what your game is,” he murmurs, but there’s no anger in his voice. Just a naked, terrifying plea. “Tell me. Just fucking admit it. Say it. Tell me!”

  His teeth snag my lip—hard. I choke a cry against his tongue, and his lips move harshly, capturing the sound. His tongue does to my mouth what his fingers did to my body. Capture. Control. Claim. But unlike with Robert, he doesn’t want to smother me. Each ruthless, hungry pass strokes something in me, like blowing on a smoking bit of wood. Within seconds, it’s blazing with no end in sight.

  “You want to drive me insane,” he suspects against my quivering lips. “You want to. Like him. But I’ll take you down with me, Elle.” He nips again, drawing blood. I swear he does. At the same time, he smooths over the wound with a laving stroke and all pain dissipates. “I’ll make you crave me just as fucking much. I’ll burn you down to the ground and there won’t be anything left for him to steal back.”

  We’re fused, mouth to mouth. Soul to soul—and it’s so easy to let him swallow me whole. His fingers return between my legs, stroking and teasing, but never hard enough. Fast enough. He’s always an echo of what I know he can be.

  “Not tonight,” he whispers, finally drawing back. “Not tomorrow. Not the day after, but soon. When I’ve decided to put you out of your fucking misery. When I’ve had enough of playing your game—because don’t you forget for a second: I’ve always been playing your game.”

  He stands, but he doesn’t leave. Not right away. He stalks to the other side of the room instead. I see him there, a shadow flung against the wall, slinking and blending into the darkness. He moves into a corner and takes up a post there, watching me well into the night.

  Chapter 17

  I shouldn’t have been able to sleep. Nonetheless, I come to on my side, blinking in the harsh light of dawn. At first glance, I assume Mischa’s gone: I don’t see him nearby.

  Then I feel it. Warm breath on the nape of my neck. At the same moment, I sense the slight pressure over my waist, just enough to avoid jostling my injured ribs.

  He isn’t awake. I realize that the second I flinch and he doesn’t issue a mocking taunt. He groans instead and the mattress shifts as he withdraws his arm—only to fully turn toward me, releasing a heavy sigh.

  He smells strange like this. There’s no vodka. No musk of hate. Just the heady scent of his breath tainting the air. Watching him, I subconsciously tally up all the differences between him and the figure I know him as most often, stricken with rage. The lines of his face are softer now. He looks younger.

  He looks…tired. Like someone who’s lived a long, hard life and deserves every ounce of sleep to be found. But the second I let myself think as much, his eyes fly open and he’s transformed. So much of his appearance hinges on his mouth. Flattened in the peacefulness of sleep, he’s almost beautiful. Hardened and cautious, he’s an enigma, impossible to decipher.

  Especially in silence.

  Without a word, he stands and redresses in the clothes he left on the floor overnight. Then he turns to me and rips the sheets from my body. I’m in his arms with no warning, forced to cling to him during the trek into the bathroom.

  After he sets me on the bench, I watch him run the water and gather his supplies with a clinical precision. His focus makes it harder to reconcile the harsher, violent pieces with a man capable of unfurling a roll of bandages and lining up a row of soft rags to clean me with.

  Perhaps talking to him is the only way to shatter the awkward thoughts going to war in my head. “The little girl Nicolai gave you…” I cringe at my own word choice, though I’m not sure how else to phrase it. “Does she have a name?”

  Mischa stiffens, still crouched, his head bowed. “Why the fuck would I know or give a shit about something like that?”

  I swallow hard at the grit in his tone. He’s not bluffing—or so I would believe if I hadn’t seen for myself the different side of him. A man who can braid a child’s hair and teach her how to hold a knife. In some alternate universe, I assume the act would be equivalent to showing someone how to ride a bike. Parental.

  “Because I saw you with her,” I admit.

  Predictably, he stiffens, his gaze shooting up to mine. His eyes narrow and I can see the word aching to leave his tongue: snake.

  “You were good with her. Do you have children?”

  Given his lack of protection with me—the wife of his sworn enemy—I have no doubt that a child must have come into play at some point. His quick smile, however, is too feral. Only now do I realize that I’ve opened myself up to his new favorite line of attack.

  “Do you?”

  I turn away, blinking rapidly. “Why you and not Vanya?” I ask, changing the subject to one even more lethal. He simply can’t resist the bait: the mentioning of another man. “Why did you care for me?”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Little Rose?” His hand captures my chin, forcing me to face him. He observes me closely, nodding as if finding the answer to a puzzling question in my expression. “You would. You’re a tough woman to crack, I will give you that.” His fingers curl, stroking along my jaw, raising goosebumps. “But you are easy to read too. Too easy. I just have to know where to look. And it’s this…” His finger creeps down to my collar, brushing my throat with a teasing swipe. “I’ve decided that this is how I’ll break you.”

  “How?” I rasp as air sticks to the inside of my lungs. A complication from my injuries? No. It’s him, poisoning every breath I take, invading my bloodstream in place of oxygen.

  “With warmth. With that gentleness you fucking crave so much.” He stands and cinches the hem of my nightgown in his fist. Then he raises it, forcing me to lift my arms or get caught in the motion.

  My cheeks flame as I watch the fabric hit the floor. His scrutiny is a razor, slicing through my thin resistance.

  Maybe he’s right. I don’t know how to protect against him when he’s like this. But I’m quickly learning how exactly to fight back.

  “How many women have you had?” I wonder, my voice rasping. Licking my lips, I try again, willing my tone to be stronger. “A wife? A mistress? Someone like you…” I trail off pointedly, surprised by just how wild my imagina
tion runs. I can see them all. Tall women. Thin women. Empty, moldable, breakable women. “I’m sure you have a harem somewhere.”

  “A harem.” He seems to taste the word and then grunts, dissatisfied. “Weak men surround themselves with scores of easy whores,” he says. “Just as weaker men surround themselves with one—”

  “So a wife, then,” I assume, curious despite myself. A wife, with a mistress or two on the side. “Where is she?”

  “Who says I have one?”

  He sounds so smug. Damn it. I’ve misread him again. Going off his voice alone is too risky—I have no choice but to chance observing him directly. He’s standing before the tub, his expression confident. But something in his eyes draws my attention. A hostile, defensive gleam.

  “You don’t have a wife,” I say. “You don’t keep a woman at all.”

  It’s a strange way to put it, downright misogynistic. A man keeping a woman—but that’s how Robert saw it. In a way, maybe that’s all love really is. Beautiful, polished ownership.

  But it’s a role Mischa hasn’t undertaken. Why?

  Women flock to him, I’m sure of it. Women like the desperate maids of Winthorp Manor who hunted Robert’s men—or, in some cases, my husband himself. They liked the thrill of playing with dangerous, damaged men. Some of them entertained fantasies of fixing them.

  Most quickly learned the folly of that hope.

  “You don’t share your bed with anyone,” I add, furthering my suspicions. Yet he has no qualms with doing so—he’s certainty haunted mine. Could he simply be a lonely man, unable to attract the opposite sex? No. There’s more to it. Hell, it might be the most obvious explanation of all. “You don’t trust anyone. Not to say you trust me,” I add in a rush, “but I’m under your control. I can’t leave. There is no real risk in using me.”

  “If only that were the case,” he says quietly. “But there is more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there, Ellen?”

  “Maybe there is.” The words are out before I can take them back. Perhaps there is no point in resisting him. He frowns at my change in tactic, wary. “I give up. You’re right. Everything I do is a ploy to seduce you.”

  Even admitting as much, apparently.

  He cocks his head to the side, suspicious. “Do you really think you can?”

  I remember that I’m naked as his gaze rakes over me. Suddenly, he stoops to lift a rag from the floor. Then he switches the water on, making it hot enough that steam forms as it pours into the tub. In silence, we wait as the water level rises. From the corner of my eye, I catch the moment he finally comes for me, rag in hand.

  He lifts me sideways, sliding one arm around behind my waist and the other beneath my legs. My arms automatically go around his shoulders, tightening as he steps down into the tub, still fully clothed. He sets me on the floor and wraps my cast in plastic. Then he turns me to face him, muscling into the space between my legs.

  “You’re shivering, Little Rose,” he scolds as he wets the rag with one hand and glides it along my shoulders. “One might think you’re afraid.”

  “I’m not.” I sound so tired. So…bored. A man who’s tormented me for weeks is bathing my limbs with all the care of a nursemaid and I don’t care. But I do. There’s something unsettling about him when he’s up this close—in a way more than just fear.

  I think I can see it now, what Vanya does. Mischa isn’t evil. He just smothers whatever strives to do good inside him. It’s obvious in how his fingers twitch as he washes my arms and then my torso. It takes effort on his part to resist the urge and gingerly cleanse my every bruise and scrape without rousing pain. He wants to rub and scrape and hurt—I can see that.

  Humanity is a battle for him, one he has to fight tooth and nail.

  I’m not sure how much time passes before he finishes. Hours? Minutes? When he finally lets the water drain out, he dresses me in a plain nightgown and returns me to the wheelchair.

  “I want to know something,” I blurt as I watch him pick up his supplies. “You said you’re the leader of your mafiya—”

  “The mafiya,” he corrects.

  “How?”

  He isn’t terribly young, but he’s definitely not the oldest of the men I saw at his last gathering, either. Vanya alone possesses his own quiet strength and wisdom that would make him a suitable leader in his own right. And Sergei. For whatever reason, the other man stood aside for Mischa.

  Why?

  “You certainly ask a lot of questions.”

  “You promised to enlighten me,” I point out. “I want to know.”

  More than that. I want to know why a man like him can amass seemingly so much power and yet have so little. Robert pined and scraped in the shadow of his father for years, but one might think he ruled the whole world because his arrogance was so unmatched.

  “Should I tell you a story, Little Rose?” he wonders as he tosses the soiled rags into a hamper. “About how a stupid, young prick worked his ass off to earn the right to be a fucking king? In your world, power is handed to those who are born with it stamped on their asses by virtue of whose dick they sprang from. But in mine…” He runs a hand over his arm, drawing back a sleeve to reveal a hint of the patchwork of tattoos adorning it. “In mine, it is paid for in blood and politics. I am where I am because I bled for it and clawed for every piece of it.”

  “So tell me how,” I hear myself rasp. I sound genuinely curious despite myself. Maybe a little desperate as well. I could keep comparing him to Robert—but there’s no point. Every tool of survival I honed until now is rendered useless in this realm and against this monster. I have to relinquish all of my old, pathetic habits. I need to study this man from the ground up.

  Starting with anything he’ll give me.

  “I… I’m listening.”

  He frowns, cocking his head. “Are you now?”

  I stiffen as he advances, only to watch on in confusion when he brushes past me and enters the hall. He lingers near the doorway, a silent command for me to follow. My heart races as I trail him down the hall and toward his infamous study. Once we’re both inside it, he closes the door and I hear him lock it.

  Purely to intimidate.

  “Come here.” He approaches his desk and snatches something from an open drawer. A notebook, the one he wrote my recollection of Robert’s accounts in. Beside it, he places a pen, and then he looks up, finding me still near the door. “I suggest you take notes.”

  He leans back with his hips braced against the desk and addresses me from over his shoulder. “Where should I start? Oh, I know. You women are so drawn to sentimental bullshit. My father was Sergei Vasilev’s right-hand man, and from the moment I was born, he informed me that I would never succeed him. I was too weak, you see. And, like a fool, I thought that was a good thing.”

  My fingers graze the wheels of my chair, inching me closer despite the tension in my gut warning me to flee.

  “I thought he was ruthless. Brutal. That he would rather fight than fucking listen. I used to think that made him weak. But now I know…” His eyes flicker toward me, meeting my gaze. “He knew what it takes to survive, Little Rose. Your husband’s father killed him personally. Put a bullet right between his eyes.” He taps his temple. “But even then, I could ignore their petty war. What is that saying? You live by the sword, you die by the sword. But my mother? My sister? No. They lived by flowers, and ponies and goddamn sunshine. They didn’t deserve to die like animals, but it didn’t make a difference in the end, did it? Life isn’t fair, Little Rose. Men like your husband get to die peacefully in their beds, surrounded by their fucking spawn, while those they torment and terrorize suffer. So why shouldn’t they also suffer?” Suddenly, he tilts his head back, facing me again. “I thought I told you to take notes.”

  I reach for the pen, forcing the nib against the notebook’s page.

  “There are ten families,” Mischa explains. “Though each member isn’t necessarily related by blood. They designate loyalties. Each leader is respons
ible for running a different aspect of the syndicate. We are not like your husband’s family, who uses virtual slave labor and money to sway politics to their favor. We put in the hard work to run our empire.”

  “Your father was one of the leaders?” I ask.

  “One. He managed the business aspect but wasn’t strong enough to lead. He deferred to Sergei.”

  Again, his voice holds the same mixture of fear and respect that taints it whenever he refers to the former leader.

  “Sergei led the mafiya from the time he was twenty,” he continues. “He was fearless and branched out into new territory. He was the one who stood against the Winthorps when they became too bold. He used their own ruthless tactics against them—”

  “And,” I add, my voice shaking, “he took my mother.”

  Mischa nods. “That was just the beginning.”

  “So why did he step down?”

  Misha shrugs again. “I don’t know.” He sounds annoyed by that fact. “One day, he just did. The only way someone can be named the Pakhan is with a majority vote by the other leaders. When I bid for the right, Sergei put his weight behind me.”

  “But you don’t trust him?”

  “I trust Ivan,” he says. “His support is all I need. But should I lose it…” He turns, bracing his hands flat over the desk. Hunched forward, he looks like a wolf readying to pounce on its chosen prey. “He’s drawn to you,” he admits. “I’d be damned if I knew why. But know this: I won’t let you poison him against me.”

  He’s not joking. He really believes I could. Is his paranoia that great? Or is he that worried about what he’s become? Or not. Maybe he simply knows that, at some point, Vanya simply won’t follow him anymore.

  He starts to say something else, but a knock on the door draws his attention. “What is it?” he demands.

  One of his men enters the room—I guess the door wasn’t locked after all.

  “Sir, you wanted me to tell you when Sergei responded?”

  Mischa nods. “And?”