Page 23 of Claimed By River

When I come, it’s blinding. It goes through me like something breaking open, leaving me shaking, wrung out, and somehow still hungry for more.

I collapse against her back, breathing hard, pressing kisses to her shoulder, her neck. “Good girl,” I whisper. “Such a good girl for me.”

She turns her head, seeking my mouth. I kiss her slowly and deeply, tasting her satisfaction.

“Mine,” I say again, because it bears repeating. “Whatever happens, Nadia. You’re mine,” I say as I slowly slide out of her.

She doesn’t argue. Just settles back against me and lets me hold her.

Later, we end up in bed with the lights off and her head on my chest.

“The flower stall,” she says finally.

Yeah?”

Her fingertip traces a line of ink along my forearm. “My mother kept sunflowers in her room. Not the whole apartment. Just her room, on the windowsill, where he wouldn’t see them.” A pause. “He thought they were common. Peasant flowers. He filled the rest of the place with white orchids because a decorator told him they photographed well.”

“So she kept the ones he hated.”

“She kept the only thing in that apartment that was hers.” Her voice goes very quiet. “I used to sit on her floor and do my homework while she read. That was the safest room in a nine-thousand square penthouse. Because it was the one he didn’t want to be in.”

I don’t say anything. I want to. Every instinct I’ve got is screaming at me to fix it, to find a thing to break on her behalf. For once, I make myself lie still and just listen.

“He made every decision for me—clothes, friends, my future.”

She laughs, but there’s nothing in it.

“I didn’t have a phone that wasn’t monitored until I was nineteen years old, River. I bought it with cash in a gas station in Oklahoma, and I sat in the parking lot and cried, because I owned something.”

Her hand goes flat against my sternum.

“You gave me a key to this apartment on the first night. You didn’t even think about it.”

“It’s your apartment too.”

“That’s what I mean.” She lifts her head, and even in the dark I can see her looking at me. “You didn’t think about it.”

I don’t have an answer for that. So I pull her back down against my chest and hold on to her. I lie awake for a long time after her breathing evens out, doing arithmetic I don’t like the end of.

Nineteen days.

The next morning, on my way in, I stop at a flower shop and buy every sunflower they have.

***

The following weeks settle into an easy rhythm that neither of us acknowledges aloud. Our arguments never disappear. We debate whose turn it is to cook, whether pineapple belongs on pizza, how towels should be folded, and whether my handwriting qualifies as a public safety hazard.

Most of them end with me fucking Nadia on whatever surface is closest. I’m starting to realize our arguments are always foreplay. We’re flirting, but neither of us is brave enough to admit it.

The realization changes everything.

Years of being alone left her starved for affection, and the woman behind the mask has finally come out from behind it. She’s still feisty, still antagonizing, but softer now. More open. I love hearing her call me Daddy when I’m inside her, and now, I’ve encouraged her to keep calling me that anywhere inside these walls. It makes me want to slay her demons and put her on a fucking pedestal where no harm can reach her. She’s irrevocably mine now.

Without thinking, I begin reaching for her more often, resting a hand against the small of her back whenever we walk through crowded places or pulling her gently behind me whenever someone gets too close.

She slips her hand into mine without hesitation, leans against my shoulder whenever we’re watching television, and unconsciously searches for me whenever something startles her. I’ve become her protector, and it’s a role I take seriously.

Where I’m brash and blunt, she brings a calm to my distorted view of the world. My perfect angel. I might have deluded myself into thinking I could let her go once we sort out her enemies. But I’m fucked without her. I need her like air.