Sold To The Russian

by Isabella Laase

  As he stopped to assess the damage to the portrait, panic consumed what was left of her reasoning. Her closest weapon was a yellow toy truck lying next to the couch, and she hurled in his direction while he was distracted. Caught off guard, he didn’t react quickly enough, and the metal connected to his forehead, leaving an ugly red scratch.

  He ruefully rubbed his battle wound, taking deep breaths as he slipped his heavy leather belt from his jeans. “Get. The. Fuck. Over. Here,” he said, enunciating each word with such clarity that she struggled to take a full breath.

  With no options, she ran across the broken glass toward the sliding glass door in the kitchen. Her bare feet failed to avoid the sharp fragments, but the cutting pain was worth the extra few seconds she’d gained when he slowed down over the same obstacle. With the door still too far away and Pavel closing on her, she opened drawer next to the stove and grabbed one of his gray serrated steak knives.

  “Put that down,” he thundered, allowing no place for an argument and easily forcing her into a corner. His dark eyes burning in anger, he reached for the knife, but she sliced forward, catching him across the forearm and leaving a long, bloody streak in its wake.

  “Fuck!” he shouted incredulously. “You fucking stabbed me in my own house?”

  The blood pooled across his arm until it dripped onto the floor, and her stomach turned, defeating her temper and her resolve. She stared at him in disbelief as the soft hum of the refrigerator filled their silent standoff. She’d done that. She’d actually stabbed another human being in blind anger.

  He used a brightly colored kitchen towel to apply pressure to his wound. “Put that damned thing down before you hurt yourself.”

  Too soon, the rag turned a bright red, and her churning stomach finally rebelled. As he wrapped a clean kitchen towel to his arm with an abundant twisting of heavy gray industrial tape, she dropped the bloody knife to the floor and lost her meal in the tall kitchen garbage pail, leaving an ugly taste in her mouth and a sheen of sweat on her brow.

  “I’m sorry,” she said miserably as he bit the end of the tape with his teeth. “I—”

  Grabbing her by the forearm with his good hand, he ended their brief ceasefire to reignite the battle. Kicking his calves with her bare feet, she punched his rock-hard shoulders with a frantic twisting and turning, but he didn’t flinch. To save herself, she moved her spare arm to her ribs and closed her eyes to separate from the beating, but he didn’t raise his fists or even push her to the floor.

  He sat in a hard kitchen chair and pulled her over his thighs in a single move, taking her hands to the small of her back and adjusting her bottom upward until her gaze became even with his ankles. She twisted far enough to look at him in a combination of disbelief and confusion, but his hand landed on her jean-clad bottom to send a stinging pain across her sensitive skin. He followed with another and another until she lost track of his count, her need to protect her body from his fists slowly adjusting to the need to protect her ass from the palm of his hand.

  “Ow,” she shouted. “Stop that.”

  The more she fought his hold, the harder he spanked, catching the place where her shorts met the exposed skin on her thighs. Yanking hard on her waistband, he pulled until the snap gave way, and he slid her shorts to her thighs. Her panties quickly followed, leaving her ass fully exposed to his chastisement. In a frantic attempt to tug them back into place, she stopped fighting him but he used the opportunity to settle her between his powerful thighs and locked his legs around hers.

  “Let’s see if we can’t fix that attitude of yours,” he mumbled just before he got down to the business of paddling her naked bottom.

  His first few spanks across her already sensitized bottom caught her breath before she shrieked, but the layering effect soon created a deeper level of searing. He fired his message across her ass, one after the other, delivering a painful consequence that fully defeated her revenge-driven furor.

  With no recourse, she put her efforts into begging. “Please, stop,” she cried while he turned her bottom into a cauldron of fire. His punishment continued, making full sentences harder to formulate. “…won’t do it again… promise.”

  The burning pain simultaneously destroyed the closely guarded barriers to her heart. Exposed to him physically and emotionally, the strength and toughness that she’d embraced since the day she’d fled the wars in South Ossetia abandoned her, leaving her with nothing except the horror of the last five years. Her tears fell with an explosive fury to release the deeply buried loss, betrayal, sadness, and regret while his palm continued to pelt across her ass.

  With a final spank to the center of a most sensitive spot where her cheeks met her thighs, he finally stopped. Lessening his grip, he allowed her to slide off his lap to sit on the floor. She waited for him to break a bone or leave her with a black eye and split lip to further cement his message, but he went to the kitchen sink where he removed his makeshift bandage to wash his wounds.

  But her dismal life reached rock bottom on the floor of that small kitchen. The endless tears continued with the emotions of a small child who’d lost the love of everybody in their life. She cried for her home and for her family. She cried over the months of misery in St. Petersburg and even the challenges she’d faced her in her old, imperfect existence in Georgia. Everything she’d lost and everything she’d never regain, but she also cried for her future, the dark unknown that waited beyond her control.

  She had no idea how long she sat there, but her stomach hurt when he returned to the chair with a first aid kit and his own wound freshly bandaged with gauze and medical tape. He reached for her, but she cried out, sliding on her painful bottom to escape his anger. “Stop,” he mumbled. “I’ve already spanked you, and it’s done. Now come here.”

  He lifted her from the floor to stand between his thighs. Wiping her cheeks with the palm of her hand, she twisted to examine the shiny, bright red skin across her ass as he pulled her panties and shorts over her bottom and took her onto his lap.

  She had nothing left to fight. He pulled her closer to the swirling black ink decorating his chest, and she allowed the comfort at a time when she’d reached the end, a bottomless abyss of grief destined to destroy her. Putting her head on his firm shoulder, she continued to cry while he patted her back, offering quiet words of support until the emptiness was all that was left.

  The emotional rebuilding came slowly, returning her strength as though she’d explored the darkest corners of her life and found nothing to fear. When the sobbing had finally been reduced to a few hiccups, he gave her a handful of paper napkins from the kitchen table. “Wipe your eyes, it’s all over now and it’s time to move on.”

  “That hurt,” she responded, blowing her nose ungracefully and refusing to meet his eye. “A lot.”

  “Good. It was supposed to hurt. You stabbed me, for fuck’s sake, Zoya. I think I showed tremendous restraint.”

  “I don’t know why I did that,” she said as she shifted her still painful bottom across his firm thighs. “I… was scared. I’m really not a horrible person who goes around stabbing people, and I don’t usually cry, either.”

  “Let me see your feet,” he insisted, reaching for the first aid kit that he’d set on the table. “If the amount of blood across my living room rug is any indication, you’ve probably got glass in the bottom in your feet and given that your ass is a brilliant shade of red, I would think that a few tears would be justified about now.”

  “It wasn’t all my fault, though,” she said, sniffling back the final tears. “You didn’t need to be so frightening just to make a point. What did you expect me to do when you look all horrible and snap that finger of yours?”

  “I expected you to take your punishment like a good girl. Hold still, this is going to sting.”

  She probably didn’t deserve his compassion, but he was gentle when he sterilized a pair of tweezers to pull the glass bits from her foot, carefully cleaning her wounds before applying a layer of
bandages and gauze. “There,” he said. “All done, and you were very brave. Do you think we can make some sort of truce? No more throwing things. And I don’t think I even need to mention that you can’t stab me anymore.” He paused, shaking his head. “I can’t believe that I’m even asking a woman to make this part of our relationship.”

  “I didn’t actually stab you.” She tried to find some sense of reason in an unjustifiable act. “I just sort of sliced you a little.”

  “Present description notwithstanding,” he said dryly, “can we agree that you holding a knife will no longer be part of our daily routine? Even I recognize that I can only bring about so much change with my belt across your sorry ass.”

  “I’m sorry. And I… I’m sorry about your mother’s picture. Did I ruin it? But I’m glad you didn’t use your belt. Even wounded, your hands are huge, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s only because I dropped it when you stabbed me, but I assure you that it will be part of any future negotiations. The picture is fine. There is a little mark where you connected that nobody will notice, but the rest of it just needs a new piece of glass. I’ll take care of it this week, but no more throwing things and no more stabbing people, especially me. I’m still waiting for your agreement, Zoya.”

  She nodded unhappily but there were no words to explain her still churning emotions. He was a Petruskenkov. She should be fleeing from his very presence, not nestled into his arms. They were the enemy, representing everything about her life that she hated, and the reason she’d likely never see her family or her home again.

  But as the pain on her bottom lessened, a warm, erotic sensation purred from her pussy to envelop her in pleasure. The exposed skin along her sensitive inner thighs rubbed against his jeans, teasing her clit and swelling her sex to a dull ache. Her nipples begged to be removed from the pretty red top, and she subtly rubbed them against the ink on his chest. With her frustrations rising, she spread her legs, shifting slightly to make it easier for him to consider stroking her labia, perhaps even fingering the swollen nub.

  He set her on the floor, severing the invisible tie to return her to reality. “That’s enough, Zoya. I can’t spend all night comforting you.”

  In the living room, he cleaned up the broken glass, silently reminding her that every power, every ideology, and every social convention that existed in two diametrical countries located on opposite sides of the world would be stacked against a relationship between a whore and a Petruskenkov prince. Her future had never rested with this family and true safety would never exist, even in his protective embrace.

  Up to that point in her life, identifying good versus evil had been a simple child’s game, but everything about the Russian man confused her. He was a Petruskenkov and didn’t deserve her trust, but he wasn’t Damir. Despite his relative kindness and good looks, she needed to end what was clearly a shallow, physical attraction, or she would succumb to a new level of weakness when he abandoned her. She was his possession and nothing would change that fact until he’d turned that responsibility over to her next master.

  Chapter 7

  It had taken her a long time to stop crying, but she’d deserved that punishment. She was lucky to escape with a red ass and not a trip to his private club to receive a more serious reminder on the boundaries of acceptable behaviors. By the time he’d cleaned up the mess in his living room, the blood from his arm had slowed to a persistent oozing, but the jagged edges of the wound didn’t look good. “I need stitches,” he said, rewrapping the arm with clean gauze and medical tape. “It’s not going to heal on its own.”

  “I… stitches?” she stuttered, those blue-gray eyes wide with fear. “Are you sure? I don’t think… I don’t think it’s that bad. Is it? Maybe you need, I don’t know, more of that gray tape or something.”

  Tossing another ruined dishtowel into the sink, he mumbled, “It looks like a massacre happened in here. And yes, it’s deep and jagged. I probably need antibiotics, too, unless you happened to sterilize that knife before you stabbed me.” She continued to stare at him with her mouth open, and he added, “Just grab one of those big bath towels out of the laundry room in case it starts to bleed again, and you’re coming with me. Maybe if you watch them stitch me up, you won’t be tempted to stab me in my sleep.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Pavel,” she said miserably as he nudged her to his car. “I’m really sorry. I… just… It’s just that I get so angry… sometimes I don’t see straight.”

  “No shit,” he muttered. Her fierce temper was far removed from the trained submissive that Sacha Belsky had led him to believe was arriving on his doorstep, but perfectly wrapped into his embrace, she’d appeared to be in full control when she’d wiggled her pussy against his thigh and her round breasts into his chest. When she’d spread her legs to reveal hints of her sex hidden just below the line of her shorts, it had taken a Herculean effort to stop his exploration.

  With a one-handed grip on his steering wheel, he drove them to the nearby hospital. The big city, overcrowded emergency room was filled with shouting strangers, sick children, and frightened adults, all framed by the stark white lights of institutional florescent bulbs. Uniformed police officers and shouting ambulance attendants pushed past them, the noise and chaos exacerbating her wide eyes and trembling hands.

  He identified himself to the triage nurse and sat to wait. He’d be seen quickly once she’d followed his instructions and contacted Frederic Koblentz, the attending physician whose name was written on the white board behind the desk. With the exception of Liam, Pavel had always trusted a Russian-speaking man over one who was born into a life of privilege and luxury in America.

  “Pavel,” boomed the middle-aged Ukrainian physician almost immediately. “You should have called to let me know that you were on your way. I would have been waiting for you.”

  “It’s fine, Frederic,” he said, holding out his bandaged right arm to offer a handshake. “I’m not going to take you away from a man with a heart attack or another serious need, but I believe I could use some stitches.”

  The doctor removed the bandages and whistled dramatically. “That is a dandy, my friend. Come, let me put you back together and get you home where you can sleep.”

  He led them past the waiting crowd to his private office and quickly located the necessary supplies. Injecting the local anesthetic into Pavel’s arm, he said, “This shouldn’t take too long, but you must promise to call me if this happens again. I could have even come to your house and taken care of you.”

  Standing next to him, Zoya had grown pale and a slight sheen appeared on her forehead to closely resemble those few seconds just before she’d vomited into his kitchen garbage pail. “Sit, Zoya,” Pavel insisted. “I don’t need you passing out during this.”

  “You haven’t introduced me to this beautiful woman,” scolded the doctor, retrieving a bottle of vodka from his desk drawer. “Or is she part of the secret world that you guard from all of us?” He poured two shots, but hesitated before pouring a third and pushing it toward Zoya. “Drink. You look like you could use the strength.”

  “This is my wife, Zoya,” said Pavel, nodding for her to take the glass. “Frederic is part-time doctor and part-time social gossip. If meeting Turgenev’s thug on the street wasn’t enough, there will be no keeping you a secret after tonight.”

  Zoya took the tiniest sip from the shot glass and made a face. He chuckled, expecting her to put the glass aside, but taking a deep breath, she downed the alcohol in a single gulp. She slunk down into a leather winged-back chair, wiping her lips with the back of her hand and earning his grudging respect.

  “Ah,” said Frederic with a grin, dropping some bloody gauze in a plastic basin. “The rumors are true. I was told that you’d received a bride from St. Petersburg, but I didn’t believe that the confirmed bachelor had given into matters of the heart.” He looked at Zoya over the tops of his glasses. “How is her English?”

  “Nonexistent,” he said with a shru
g. “But she’s been hanging around Abel Aaronson’s oldest, so I’m assuming she’ll be swearing like an American sailor in no time.”

  Switching to English, Koblentz asked, “And you, my friend. How are you adjusting to this dramatic change in your life? It’s been a long time since your wife died, and you’ve told me many times that you would limit your relationships to temporary liaisons, far from your home. How is it that your brother managed to find you a wife since I last saw you, what, three weeks ago?”

  With a scowl, Pavel silently ended the man’s questions. While much of his business life was tied to the citizens of Brighton Beach, he’d never allowed anybody into his private confidence, not about Zoya and certainly not about his sons’ late mother.

  His closest companion since childhood, Marie had represented a stage of his life when love could be classified as simple. Their relationship was built from that foundation, and he believed that they’d been happy. But as the years went by, they’d struggled to adapt to the complexities of an adult marriage. Pavel’s constant traveling and the daily dangers surrounding his family’s businesses had driven her even further away. A few years into their marriage, she’d tried to move back to her father’s house, but Pavel’s subtle, veiled threats to his father-in-law had privately destroyed her plans.

  He never told Marie what he’d done, and she’d stayed with him, giving birth to their second child a short time later and his beautiful family had been complete, on his terms. But it became apparent on her deathbed that Marie had known of his interference all along. Under a drug-induced fog with the cancer destroying her defeated body, she’d declared her revenge in front of his entire family hours before closing her eyes for the last time, giving Damir the ultimate power over Pavel’s future. He would kill the man who tried to unlock that secret.