Page 40 of The Pakhan’s Hidden Heiress

She’s right. I have been pitying her, and it’s the one thing she can’t stand. I kiss her again, and this time it’s harder, more demanding, and I can feel her respond, her hands in my hair, her body arching up to meet mine, and I know I’m not winning, because there’s no winning this, there’s only the losing, and I’m losing so good I can’t even remember what winning was supposed to feel like.

Her hand slides down to my trousers, and she fondles my cock through the fabric, squeezing hard. I groan, and my hips buck.

“I hate you,” she breathes.

“I know,” I respond, my voice hoarse. “I hate me, too.”

She unfastens my trousers and shoves them down. My cock springs out, thick and hard. She grabs it again, her thumb sliding over the head, smearing pre-come. She moves to my balls, squeezing and twisting hard. It’s her payback. Pain and pleasure. I’ll take it. All of it.

“Get the fuck on top of me,” she commands. She shoves me, and I stumble back onto the bed. She struggles with her own clothes, her fingers fumbling. I help her, yanking her shirt over her head, unhooking her bra, tossing it aside. Her breasts are perfect, tipped with hard, rosy nipples. I lean in to take one in my mouth, but she pushes me away.

“No. Get in me. Now.”

I rip off her trousers and panties, revealing her to me. Her cunt is bare, glistening with wetness. I don’t wait. I position myself between her legs, and I thrust into her in one hard stroke.

She cries out, her back arching off the bed. “Yes,” she hisses.

I’m still for a moment, buried deep inside her, just feeling her. She’s tight, hot, and wet. She’s everything. I start to move, slowly at first, then faster, harder. Her hips rise to meet my every thrust, her legs wrapping around my waist, her nails digging into my back.

I’m so close, but I don’t want this to end. I don’t want to leave this place, this feeling. I slow down, pulling out almost all the way before sliding back in, deep and hard. She moans, her head thrashing on the pillow. I feel her body tighten, her legs clenching around me, and she pulls on my hair hard enough to bring tears to my eyes.

I move faster, my control snapping, and with a final, brutal thrust, I come, emptying myself into her with a strangled cry. I collapse on top of her, my body shaking, my heart pounding. I’m ruined. I’m done for.

We lie there for a long time, our bodies slick with sweat, the only sound our ragged breathing. The city lights paint patterns on the ceiling. The silence is heavy. Unspoken.

I roll off her, my arm draped across her stomach. She doesn’t push me away. She lies there, staring at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling.

When her breathing calms down, she moves to the edge of the bed and returns to her chair. She doesn’t bother collecting her clothes before leaving. She just goes. And the not staying is the message that hits harder than any physical pain could.

She wheels out of my room without looking back once, leaving me lying in the wreckage of my own bed.

I’ve watched men die with less going on in my chest than there is right now. I’ve stood over bodies and felt the temperature of a room and thought about dinner. And I’m lying here, staring at a ceiling I own, in a building I own, in a city I own a door into everywhere, and I understand with a clarity that arrives like the shot you don’t hear that I am not in control of anything.

I hunted her for four months. I rigged a table. I bought her debt and her recovery and her rooms and her wedding, and I told myself the whole way down that the plan was the thing and the girl was the crate. And she just took me apart in my own bed with my own wanting, made me hand her every ounce of the control I’ve spent nineteen years making sure no one on earth could take, and then she left without looking back.

I’ve spent my whole life believing love was the one form of power a man could never seize, only be handed, and I built my entire climb around the seizing because the handing was for men like my father, loyal men, men who gave everything and got a watch in a paper bag. And I’m lying in the dark understanding that I’ve fallen into the exact trap I spent nineteen years learning to avoid. I want the one thing I can’t take. She’s shown me I can’t take it. And the wanting doesn’t care.

I don’t move for a long time. There’s no next move. For the second time since I was fifteen, there’s no next move, and both times it’s been because of her.

Down the hall, her light goes off. I can’t see it, and I don’t need to; I know the rhythm of her nights now, the way I know the count of freckles on her shoulder, the way I know she leads left, the way I know she counts seconds like coins and hates that I saw it.

She’s the last living blood of the man who murdered my father, and I was supposed to wear her like a crown to his grave, and instead she’s the only thing I’ve ever been afraid to lose, and I still can’t say it, not even to an empty room, because the word my father never taught me is the one word that would cost me everything I have left.

I get up. I find the shirt on the floor. And I go down three stories to the office, to the picture face-down on the desk, because there’s one thing I can still do while I can’t do the other, and it’s the thing I do when there’s nothing else, which is work out how to keep her alive whether she ever forgives me or not.

19

Vasilisa

Danil started craft corner as cover, but it stopped being that somewhere around the week he fixed the laminator.

Now he stays after the bell on Thursdays with a pair of blunt safety scissors and firm opinions about which felt takes glue. The children have started leaving him the good glitter, which in this room is a marriage proposal.

It is ten past four. The heat ticks inside the pipes, the smell of paste has settled into everything, and I have completed three slow laps of my own carpet while working my way toward the question I have carried since my father stood in the parking lot on Tuesday and cried at me about money.

“Before you say no, I want you to sit with the fact that I have four hundred laminated name tags in a drawer with your fingerprints on every one of them.”

Danil does not look up from the craft table. He has the blunt scissors pinched between two fingers that could fold a grown man’s windpipe shut, and he cuts three more felt hearts for a bulletin board nobody in this building will look at twice before answering.