Page 36 of Bratva Sacrifice

My blood pounds in my ears as I cross the room. “Put your arms up,” I tell her, gathering my discarded shirt in my hands.

The order snaps her out of her shocked daze. Her cheeks flush with a dawning fury. Her chin firms and lifts. “Go f—”

“Put your fucking arms up, Katka,” I interject in a growl, before she can disrespect me before my men and make herself the subject of gossip any more than already she has.

As much as she wants to refuse me again, I think she wants my shirt more. Scowling, she lifts her arms over her head and allows me to wrench it over her arms. It does not cover nearly enough to calm the murderous thunder of my heart.

Katya shrieks as I throw her over my shoulder. Her small fists slam against my back. “Get the fuck out,” I tell my men as I stalk from the room.

The walk is long back to my bedroom, but each hard step vents my anger a little more. Probably she crossed paths with a half a dozen people. I will have to scour the security tapes later. Find out who, if anyone, was stupid enough to look at her. And the consequences of that, too, will be a balm to my anger.

I kick the bedroom door closed. “For fuck’s sake, Katya,” I tell her as I set her back on her feet. “I do not want to lock you in!”

“Then give me back my fucking clothes!” she screams, and her voice breaks on the words. Her little fingers clench in the hem of my shirt, and I know she will fight me to keep it. Lash out with her claws, snap her sharp teeth at me. She is balanced on the balls of her feet, poised again to flee.

For a moment I can only marvel at the race of my blood through my veins, the heat that burns behind my ribs and sears my skin. I live a life of excess, of luxury and indulgence. If I want a woman, this is no problem. There are dozens who wait only upon so little as a text.

I want this one. I want this one, who bares her teeth at me in her fury. Who is brave enough to challenge me before my men, when she must know there can be no benefit to her. Unlike her foolish fucking brother and her spineless papa, she will go down fighting.

I hold her life in the palm of my hand and still she fights. Not because her life is worth nothing to her, but because her principles—her freedom—are worth everything.

I take a step toward her, and Katya leaps away. She has light feet and the benefit of a slight frame. She is dexterous, agile—but not agile enough to escape the sweep of my hand, the clench of my fingers in my shirt, which hangs on her.

Once caught, she is no match at all for my strength. And again she shrieks—though she knows no one will come to her aid—as she ends up with her belly pressed to the side of the bed, bent over it with the weight of my body. She shrieks only because she can, because that fury claws at her heart.

Her fingers rake across the bare mattress, scrabbling for purchase. One palm between her shoulder blades keeps her largely immobile. Her plush little ass cradles the bulge of my cock, already hard behind the fly of my jeans.

She makes gasping sounds as she wriggles in a desperate attempt to free herself. Half of them are lost into the mattress pillowing her cheek. I like these little struggles; so determined even though she must know she has already lost. I grip her waist over the fabric of my shirt that she wears, slide my hand up her body. Her soft breast fills my hand. Lush and full. Her nipple peaks beneath the stimulation of my palm, a hard little bead of unwilling arousal.

Furious Katya hisses, “Fuck you, Alexei.”

I want to fuck her so badly, my balls ache. She would even enjoy it. She likes the way I touch her, likes my tongue on her sweet pussy. I could make her submit so easily, make her come on my cock until she screams my name in ecstasy instead of rage. Until she is weak and satisfied and exhausted. Until she no longer remembers why she is so angry.

But when she remembers, she will hate herself. And me, for making her forget.

She jerks beneath me in another futile bid for freedom, jerks away from my thumb rubbing her nipple. Pants through the grit of her sharp teeth, in a voice rendered hoarse from her shrieks, “Get the fuck off of me, you fucking asshole.”

I am reminded of her desperate screams the night I took her and how they shredded her voice. And I think of when she woke at last in the car, weak and confused. How, when she knew only that something was wrong, she trusted me to care for her. Because she could not recall that I had already betrayed that trust.

This is, I think, something like an epiphany. It is the nature of a trapped creature to attempt escape. Katya has not inherited her father’s stupidity. She knows what I am capable of, but it is not in her nature to passively accept circumstances which are detestable to her. Her courage is stronger than her fear.

She burned down her comfortable life only to retain her freedom, and I stole it from her again. I cannot punish her for these traits of her which I admire, for the nature which makes her so interesting to me. I do not want to break her spirit which burns so brightly.

I cannot have her trust while earning only her enmity. The one precludes the other. When she submits, it will be her choice alone. Sweeter because it is given.

I bury my face at the nape of her neck, where she smells like my soap because she has none of her own. The scent of her anxiety is sour beneath it.

For the first time in many, many years, I bend to another. “Okay, koshechka,” I tell her, and she shivers at the feeling of my breath on the back of her neck. “Okay. Be good, and you can have your clothes.”

Chapter Eighteen

Catalina

Within hours, all the linens are back. The towels return. Even the curtains have been replaced with new, since I tore the ones that lined the windows when I pulled them down.

My suitcase is placed at the end of the freshly-made bed, the clothes within recently washed and folded.

Alexei makes himself scarce. Nobody stops me as I wander around the vast expanse of the house. The staff gives me a wide berth, as if they’ve been instructed not to interfere with my exploration. Even the handful of men I encounter who have the same hardened, brutish looks as Papa’s men don’t meet my eyes. Not as if I am beneath their notice—as if they are beneath mine.