Grind

by Sybil Bartel

  “What are you doing?” she snapped.

  I ignored her question. “How long have you been here?” I could check the time stamp on the feeds on my phone, but asking was quicker.

  She glanced at the clock on the oven, but she didn’t answer.

  “How long?” I barked.

  She flinched. “A couple hours.”

  “Has he called?”

  “No.”

  I threw her phone and SIM back on the counter. “Don’t turn it on.” Not that it mattered. He already knew where she was. “Have you ever run before?”

  “I am done telling you that he wanted me to leave, not the other way around.” The attitude in her tone started to falter under the weight of her bullshit.

  Every word out of her mouth was lie, and Vega was a fucking idiot. “Three years?”

  “What?” Her hands twisted.

  “You fucked Vega for three years while being married to Viktor Fedorov?” And Vega never questioned who her husband was or why he paid for it?

  She tried to glare at me. “I’m not repeating myself.”

  So she’d said, but I saw right fucking through her. “Did he ever make you come?” She was all show, no substance. I threw the question out to purposely take her off guard.

  She didn’t fall for it. “Let me guess, you’re some kind of sick pervert who gets off on watching other people fuck?”

  “I don’t have to watch to know you never had a real orgasm.” Too much adrenaline for one day, the storm kicking into high gear, I was out of patience. “I’m going to secure the house. You want to lie about why you’re here, fine. But know this, anyone who steps foot on my property, I will fucking shoot.” I holstered my gun and whistled for Hunter. He ran to the door and whined for me to open it. “Patrol.” I issued the command and let him outside.

  Panic finally laced the blonde’s voice. “Wait! Where are you going? I closed the shutters.”

  I didn’t spare her a glance. “I noticed.” I walked out.

  The wind blew bands of rain sideways as I walked across the yard to the barn. Hunter ran the perimeter like I’d trained him to do, then beat me to the barn door. “Good boy.” I let us in then pulled the brace down across the heavy wood door. Not that it would stop an armed man, but it’d stop a spoiled blonde.

  Kicking two pallets aside, I pulled on the trap door to my command center, and pain shot up my side. “Goddamn it,” I grunted.

  Hunter nervously paced.

  “It’s fine, come on. Downstairs.” I bit out the command, and Hunter descended the steps in front of me. I gritted my teeth and shut the hundred-and-fifty pound hatch door with my good arm. Thirty seconds later, all my monitors were on. I scanned the security feeds and checked all the access point warnings. Thankfully nothing new had shown up since I’d checked my mobile security app.

  I typed an encrypted e-mail one-handed, confirming today’s assignment, then I waited two minutes to check the balance on the account number I’d provided. An eight-hundred-thousand dollar deposit appeared, and I diverted the funds to four different accounts.

  I sat back in my chair and rubbed a hand over my face. “What do you think, Hunter?”

  Hunter whined.

  “Agree. She’s fucking trouble.”

  He nudged my side and barked once.

  I looked down. Blood soaked through my wet shirt.

  He was a thousand times scarier than Viktor.

  Huge shoulders, rippling muscles, perfectly cut features as if carved by an artist’s hand, Dane was the most beautiful yet frightening man I’d ever seen. His intense gaze was ruthless. His cold detachment was that of a killer, but it was his commanding presence that had me terrified. He was so authoritative, he made me want to kneel at his feet, and that was a dangerous, slippery slope for someone like me.

  Despite the comment he’d thrown out about fucking, I knew he wasn’t an escort, not like the man my husband had sent me to for three years. Alex Vega lived for the money he made fucking women. But instinct told me Dane couldn’t care less about the money. No, he wasn’t an escort. Just like the bodyguards my husband hired to protect him, Dane had the markings of a killer. I’d stake my life on it. He had blood on his hands as sure as I had lies on my lips, and that threw me into a panic.

  I didn’t want to stay there another second.

  But where was I going to go? Viktor had alienated me from all of my friends five years ago. My mother had more loyalty to Viktor than she did to me, and I didn’t have two cents to my name.

  I stared at the carnage of my phone, and defeat rose like bile in my throat. Before I could change my mind, I grabbed the pieces of my phone and put it back together. Dread crawled up my spine, and I did something I’d sworn I would never do again. I called my husband.

  “You can’t run.” Viktor’s sick laugh filled my head. “I know where you are, pet.”

  “Come get me.” I tried to convince myself it was better to be with the enemy you know.

  He spoke in Russian on purpose.

  “You know I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  His tone bled false patience. “How many times have I told you to learn the language of your heritage?”

  He was in one of his moods. “I am American.”

  He snorted. “Because your mother made the mistake of coming here when she was pregnant does not change the fact you are Russian.”

  I glanced nervously at the door Dane had walked out of. “Come now.”

  He laughed. “What’s the matter? Did your boyfriend throw you out?”

  “Alex is not my boyfriend.” He never was. He’d merely been the weekly appointment Viktor made me keep for three years because he got off on the control of making me fuck another man. And I’d stupidly kept going every week. Then I’d gone to Alex this morning when I’d run from Viktor, because I literally had nowhere else to go. But Alex told me he’d met someone then dumped me at his friend’s house, saying I had three days to figure my life out before his friend came home.

  Except Dane had come home early, there was a hurricane blowing in, and my life had gone from bad to worse.

  “Do not pretend you did not like my gift,” Viktor warned. “You like all my gifts.”

  My skin crawled. “If you don’t want me to come home, then fine, I won’t.” I hung up.

  Three seconds later, my phone rang and I answered without saying a thing because this was the game he expected.

  “Are you trying to make me angry, petal?”

  Hearing the nickname simultaneously made bile rise up my throat and moisture pool between my legs, because I’d been carefully conditioned. I swallowed down my hatred for him and threw out the one insult I knew would make him angrier. “You’re not a man.”

  “Yet you always come back for more.” There was no humor in his voice.

  I ground my teeth. “Give me what you promised.”

  “Come and get it,” he taunted.

  My nostrils flared. “It’s been five years. That was the deal. The clock has run out.” He’d made me a promise when I’d agreed to marry him. It was the only reason I’d agreed to the marriage. We both knew that.

  “I am perfectly aware of what the calendar says, but you haven’t earned your keep.”

  I sucked in a breath and told myself not to fall into the trap. “I have a prenup. I can walk into any lawyer’s office and get my five-hundred-thousand.” I’d made sure I’d had that prenup before I married him. If we divorced before five years, I got nothing, but anything after five years, I got half a million. That was his promise.

  “Then why haven’t you?”

  I hated him. I hated what he’d turned me into. And I hated myself for allowing it to happen. Exhaling, I dropped my voice to barely a whisper. “Please come get me.”

  “Are you on your knees?” he asked casually.

  “No.” Even now, I couldn’t lie to him.

  “On your knees,” he barked. “Ask nicely.”

  I dropped to my knees in sha
me, as if he could see me. “Please, Viktor.”

  “Please what?” he snapped.

  I gripped the phone tighter. “Please, sir.”

  “Please, sir, what?”

  Damn it, damn it, damn it. “Please, sir, will you come get me?”

  “And?”

  Oh God. “And show me who I belong to?” My traitorous nipples pebbled as disgust crawled across my skin.

  “Spread your knees.”

  My bare shins scraped across Dane’s wooden floor, and I did what we both knew I would. “Yes, sir.” Viktor had seen my weakness when he’d met me, and he’d carefully cultivated it for five years, turning me into a woman I no longer recognized.

  “Lift your dress to your waist.”

  I glanced at the door again then took a risk. “Please, sir. Do not make me do this here.” Anything I asked for could backfire horribly, but I was desperate. I wanted out of Dane’s house. He was too handsome, too commanding and too much to think about. I didn’t allow myself to think about other men, let alone a future. And I’d done nothing since I walked into his house except wonder what it’d be like to live there, and I couldn’t do it another second. Especially now that I’d seen its owner. I didn’t want to be there, and I didn’t want Dane to see me like this. I knew nothing about the man, but the thought of him witnessing my weakness made my stomach crawl.

  “Lift the dress above your breasts.”

  I pulled my lips into my mouth and made a choice. Viktor couldn’t see me. He’d never know. “Okay,” I whispered.

  There was a pause, then barely veiled fury filled his voice. “Do you want to pay for that lie now or later?”

  “Please, sir. He could come back at any moment.” I bit my lip.

  “Where is he?” he barked.

  “He went outside. There’s a barn on the property.” The second I said it, I felt like I’d betrayed Dane.

  “He is not watching you?”

  Viktor always liked an audience. “No.”

  “Spread your legs wider.”

  I knew what was coming, yet I didn’t say no. My mind and my body conditioned, I rocked back to my ass and dropped my knees all the way open. “Yes, sir.” I bit my lip.

  “Two fingers, now.”

  I shoved two fingers inside my own cunt and jammed my thumb against my clit. The exhaled moan was involuntary.

  “Three strokes,” Viktor demanded.

  My eyes closed and I tried to drift like I always did. Making my core my sole existence, using my fingers as my only tether, I did exactly what he told me to do. I stroked three times, but I didn’t drift. I didn’t become a need and a relief. It wasn’t a mindless act. My body wasn’t taking over. I wasn’t thinking about nothing except a physical release. I was thinking about a six-foot-four stranger with short dark hair and too many muscles.

  “Petal,” my husband purred.

  In that moment, I wanted the orgasm more than I’d ever wanted anything. I wanted to come thinking about a man so fiercely handsome that all other men paled in comparison. I wanted to come on his kitchen floor, but for the first time in five years, I didn’t want to come of my own accord. I wanted the stoic stranger to make me come. “Oh God.”

  “If you come, I will make you bleed.”

  Fear mixed with shame and crawled across my skin as I pulled my fingers out. “I didn’t, sir.”

  “Wipe those two fingers across your phone. Let me hear it.”

  My cunt constricting at the loss of contact, I rubbed my wet fingers across the speaker part of the phone, because that’s what I had been trained to do. Obey.

  Viktor growled low in his throat. “I am going to smell that phone when I get to you.”

  I wanted to cry. “Yes, sir.” I hadn’t cried in five years.

  “In your mouth, clean yourself,” he ordered. “Let me hear you suck.”

  I shoved my fingers in my mouth and sucked loudly. I swirled my tongue and hated every second of my body’s quivering need.

  “Cover my cunt.”

  I dropped my dress down and started to get up. “Yes, sir.”

  “No,” he barked. “You stay on your knees until I come for you.”

  Chastised worse than any talking-to I’d ever suffered as a child, I nodded because a small part of me felt as if I deserved this. I’d brought my fucked-up life into a stranger’s house, and now I was fantasizing about him on his kitchen floor as I had phone sex with my husband. “Yes, sir.” I wasn’t just a terrible person. I was pathetic.

  The tone in his voice that said he controlled everything about me left and my husband’s cadence returned to mild amusement. “Have you fucked the Marine?”

  “You know I am not at Alex’s.” I dropped the sir.

  “Your Mr. Marek is a marine,” he said too casually.

  “Marek?” That was his last name?

  “Dane Marek,” Viktor said with disgust.

  “He is not mine.” A man like that would never be mine.

  “Alex Vega wasn’t yours either.”

  My chest rose and fell with an exhale. I knew what was coming. “I know,” I carefully answered.

  “Should I kill him?”

  My heart leapt against my ribs because it wasn’t the first time Viktor had threatened this. I didn’t love Alex. I was incapable of love because I carefully shut that part of myself off the second I became Viktor’s. But Alex didn’t deserve anything other than Viktor’s money, so I recited the same speech I always gave Viktor when he got like this. “I am tired of Alex. He doesn’t make me come. He is nothing. He can have his other clients.”

  Viktor chuckled. “That’s right, only I tell you when to come. All right, I will give you your wish and leave Alex Vega alone this time. But if you change your mind….” He trailed off.

  I pressed a hand to my chest and fake pouted. “Why aren’t you coming for me?”

  “There is a hurricane, pet. It was not my choice to have you go out in it.”

  And it wasn’t my choice to have him drag me from bed and force me to crawl downstairs and kneel at his feet while he ate breakfast. “You made me lick your plate.” He hadn’t done that in years. Not since he’d broken me.

  His voice turned to liquid charm. “Do you think I do not know what my wife needs? Did you think I did not see your willfulness? Your disrespect? You needed to be reminded who you belong to. You asked for it.”

  “No, I didn’t,” I whispered, closing my eyes against the memory of the forced orgasms that came after. For five years my life had been brutal punishments followed by vibrator-induced orgasms. Viktor never touched me with his own hands in affection, only punishment. Still on my knees, I fought to keep from closing my legs and rubbing my thighs together because, despite the disgust in my mind, my body had wanted those orgasms. It’d been conditioned to want them.

  “Where are you?” Viktor abruptly changed the subject.

  “At his house?” The answer came out like a question.

  “I know whose house you are in, pet. What room?”

  Oh God. No. “The kitchen?” My voice faltered.

  “Reach between your legs, petal,” he quietly demanded.

  “Please, sir,” I begged. “Not here.” I looked at the utensil canister on the counter by the stove. This time it wouldn’t be a simple fingering.

  He inhaled as if fighting for patience. “Petal.”

  I said nothing. I waited like I’d learned to.

  A string of Russian curses filled my ear, then he exhaled. “Fine, this once, I will come get you.”

  I remembered Dane’s threat. “Mr. Marek said he will shoot anyone who comes on his property.”

  Viktor laughed for real. “Let him try.” He hung up.

  “Going somewhere?”

  I jerked my head around.

  Blood all over his shirt, soaked from head to toe, Dane stood there dripping on his kitchen floor.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d tried. She not only knew what it was like to come, she knew what it
was like to fucking hurt for it.

  I’d misread every single thing about her. “You’re his sub,” I accused.

  Her nipples hard, her thighs shaking, she stared at me guiltily as she rushed to get up. “You’re bleeding.”

  How long had she been on her knees? “How deep?”

  “Wh-what?”

  Goddamn it. “You want out?” I’d heard enough of her side of the conversation. I saw the look on her face. She was so fucking far past desperation, she wanted back in because she couldn’t see a way out.

  She averted her gaze. “My husband is coming to get me. Do not shoot him.”

  “I asked you a question.” Something had happened. She was here for a reason.

  She lifted her head only enough to look at my side. “You are hurt.”

  “Not like you.” My wound was physical.

  She reached for the towel hanging on the oven door. “You are making a mess all over the floor.” She dropped it at my feet. “Stand on that. I will help you before he gets here.” She spun.

  “If you don’t tell me why you ran, he’s not going to make it up the driveway.” I didn’t make idle threats.

  “Men,” she huffed in irritation as she walked down the hallway. Seconds later, a completely different woman than the one who’d been on her knees on my kitchen floor was in front of me. She dropped a larger towel at my feet and held on to another. “Tell your dog to come here and not bite me.”

  “Hunter, come. Sit.” My German shepherd circled her then sat next to my feet. “He won’t bite.”

  She bent and quickly towel dried his fur. Then she stood and eyed me. “Take your shirt off,” she demanded.

  Staring into her ice-blue eyes, I grasped her chin and she went dead still. I searched every inch of her face, but she didn’t even blink. “You like giving orders?” I quietly asked. “Or taking them?”

  She drew in a breath at my second question, but none of the defensiveness or attitude she had earlier returned. “Do you like bleeding all over your floor?”

  I stared at her. I was no longer looking at another man’s submissive on my floor. I was looking at a desperate, broken woman who was holding herself together. She wasn’t just beautiful, she was fucking stunning. The instinct to protect kicked in and I wanted to kill Viktor Fedorov. “Tell me why you ran.”