Page 69 of Arranged for the Russian Pakhan

I nod, my mouth left open, and slide almost all of the way out before I slam back into her. Her nails bite into my arms on either side of her head, clutching at me like she needs to hold onto something as she drops her head back and sees stars.

“Oh, God,” Darya cries, and I drop onto my forearms to lick at the sweat in the hollow of her throat. I keep fucking into her, setting a pace that isn’t fast, but hard and deep, every thrust lifting her hips off the seat and pulling whines from her throat.

Our bodies slot together like we were made for each other.

I move in steady, intense propulsions, driving into her, pounding our slick flesh together, and eventually shift the angle just slightly. “Anton, fuck, oh my God,” she gasps, clenching around me, and I go double-time, hitting that angle every time.

A barrage of cries, moans, whimpers and gasps of breath that fissure before she’s all the way through pour out of her swollen mouth. Amidst it all, “You’re mine,” Darya says, her voice breaking a little, and I drop my forehead against hers. I am, I am, I fucking belong to her, and I will never take that goddamn privilege for granted again.

“I’m close,” I pant out against her mouth, my eyes rolled back in my head.

She whimpers into the kiss, and her walls flutter around my cock in a way that starts a buzzing in my spine as I rock into her.

“Cum in me,” Darya begs.

“I need—with me, malyshka, I’m so fucking close, and I need to make you—” I can’t even finish the words, my chest heaving and my universe the twin pools of blue I look down into. “I love you,” I say, mouthing at the corner of her mouth. I’m amazed I still have to say it. I feel like it’s blazing from my eyes, like it’s seeping from my skin, like astronauts and satellites should be able to see it from space.

Eyes squeezing closed, Darya lets out a fragile sound, her hand searching for mine to lace her fingers through. “Say it again,” she pleads weakly.

“I love you,” I tell her again, and I don’t think I’m crying, but there’s a lump in my throat.

That’s all it fucking takes. She cries out and begins to shake against me, her sweet cunt milking my cock until I am shuddering and groaning one last time, coming hot and pulsing inside of her, and the realization that hearing the words I love you from my mouth just made Darya come undone. My arms slide around her waist to hold her as close as I can, and all I can do is bury a shout in her shoulder and wait out the aftershocks.

As they fade, I realize I’m still talking, mumbling, “I love you, I love you, you’re mine too and I fucking love you,” into her sweaty skin, “I love you, and I’m never going to let you go again, I love you,” desperate to put my hands everywhere and fucking prove it to her, to my wife, my lover, my very best friend.

“Anton,” Darya gasps, her body seizing up again in my arms.

“You’ve got me, you have me,” I vow, nuzzling up under her chin and smoothing my hand through damp, black curls.

“I’m so terribly in love with you,” she says in a ruined voice, and I’ve never believed someone so much in my life.

The sky lighting up around us, in preparation for a new dawn, can’t hold a candle to her beauty in this moment.

I need this forever.

Chapter 25 - Darya

One Year Later

“I’m going to check in on the boys before I go,” I say, dropping a kiss on Galina’s soft, powdery cheek.

She catches my hand before I can pull away, squeezing it once with those elegant, skeletal fingers. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. That’s something I’ve learned about Galina Zakharov over the past year—that her silences are as articulate as most people’s sentences, and that a squeeze of the hand from her means something in the vicinity of you are doing well, and I see it, and I won’t embarrass either of us by making a production of it.

I’ve come to love her for it, among other things.

I leave her to her breakfast and her book, and I make my way through the manor.

This is my home now, too. That’s still the first thing I think, every morning, moving through these rooms. Not because it surprises me anymore—I know every inch of what this place has become, because I have made it so—but because I can still see beneath it, the way I can see beneath overpainting on a damaged canvas. I can still see the hotel it used to be. The sealed, preserved, uninhabited quality of it. The place Anton had been keeping himself in, like a piece in storage, protected from the light.

That place is gone.

What’s here instead is a home, which is a different thing entirely. The walls of the drawing room are the deep, saturated green I’d fought Galina on for two weeks before she’d conceded it was the right choice and pretended she’d agreed from the beginning. The library has new floor-to-ceiling shelving to accommodate the combined mass of our respective collections, which turned out to be the primary logistical challenge of merging our lives.

I pass the door to what used to be a spare room and is now our son’s nursery, though Rurik has not once in four months of life actually slept there for a full night. I push it open anyway, out of habit, and look at the room I designed for a person I hadn’t met yet; its walls the color of a twilight sky, the mobile above the crib that Nadya sent from New York, a chaotic assemblage of tiny moons and stars and one inexplicable silver fox that she’d included with a note reading So he grows up knowing there’s a world out here for him to rule.

The crib is empty and impeccably made because our son has opinions about where he sleeps, and a crib is not among his preferred options.

He prefers to be on or immediately adjacent to his father.