Page 33 of Kazimir

I felt him at my back then—unmistakable, heavy and thick, pressing through his trousers against my spine. It sent another pulse of slick heat through me to know I did that to him. He didn’t rut against me, didn’t use me as leverage. He held, contained inside clothes like a secret I had to earn. I wanted to earn it badly enough that my teeth hurt.

“I want you inside me,” I told him, and shock burned across my face because I didn’t say things like that. I said it anyway. “Please.”

He made a sound that might have been a curse or a prayer in a language I didn’t know. His fingers didn’t slow. “Not here.” He bit the word, not like it tasted bitter. “Not like this. I will not take you for the first time in my club.”

“You’re not taking.” I pushed into his hand, shameless now, because shame had nowhere to go with him looking at me like that. “I’m giving.”

“Then give me this,” he said, voice satin wrapped around iron. “Give me your sounds. Your surrender. Everything else waits.”

The refusal should have stung. It didn’t. It landed like a promise. I nodded, not trusting my mouth, and he rewarded me by changing his angle, fingers crooking just so. I came apart in increments, dissolving and reassembling around him with each stroke until I could no longer tell what was him and what was me. My lungs forgot their work. The only thing that stayed consistent was the friction at my clit, his patience in circling me there, dragging me higher and higher and refusing to let me fall too soon.

“Good,” he said when I keened. “Again.” And when I shook my head helplessly, “Yes, you can.” He pressed his mouth to my jaw, then the corner of my mouth, without taking the kiss. “I am here. I have you.”

The heat broke with a violence I didn’t expect. Pleasure hit like a summer storm across hot stone—the crack before the rain, then everything let go. My vision whited out around the edges. The muscles low in my belly seized and released in waves I couldn’t ride, only drown in. The lights above us flickered—once, twice—like the club itself lost focus with me. I felt a humming under my skin, the same shimmer that sometimes rose when my emotions got strange, and I knew in the marrow of my bones that whatever ran through me now didn’t belong to any human nervous system.

“Kazimir—” It was the first time I’d said his name like that, broken on a breath, and I wasn’t sure if I was calling to him or confessing something unsayable. He growled, a sound that lived in the floorboards and my tongue at once.

“Beautiful,” he told me, relentless praise as I shook, “mine, that’s it, take what you need, let it happen.” His hand never left me. He eased me down only when the aftershocks started to hurt.

When I opened my eyes, he turned my face with steady fingers and kissed me like he were certain I’d bolt if he moved too quickly. The first press was reverent and slow, lips coaxing mine open. Then his tongue stroked in, claiming space with the same patient authority he used everywhere else. I made another small, helpless sound and slid a hand up into his hair. It was softer than it looked, heavy silk that tangled around my fingers when I gripped it. He let me hold hard enough to hurt, and something in his chest rumbled approval that I felt against my spine.

He licked into me, and I arched, the angle sending the aftershocks into new ripples. He swallowed those, swallowed me, and when the kiss softened, I chased it like a starving thing. He ended it before I could beg, pulling back just far enough to breathe the same air.

I rested there, boneless and shaky, heat still licking at the edges of my body. The room glowed steady again, no more betrayal from the lights, but I could’ve sworn the air still vibrated faintly with what I’d done. Maybe what we’d done to me. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything besides the weight of his palm on my thigh and the slick warmth between my legs and the clean scent at his throat when I tucked my face there and tried to remember how to be a creature who functioned.

“I’ve never felt anything like that,” I admitted into his collar, voice raw. The words made me feel small. Not stupid-small. Human-small. “If I… if I embarrassed you—”

He cut me off with a soft, shocked sound that could only be called a laugh if laughter had edges. “You could never embarrass me.” He cupped my jaw to make me meet his eyes. They were pale and intent, all that cold iron melted into something dangerously gentle. “You were the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

I didn’t have a place in my head for that sentence. It landed somewhere lower, in the dark where there weren’t any words at all, and unfurled. I swallowed hard and nodded because nodding was the only thing I trusted myself to do without breaking.

He pressed his forehead to mine for a heartbeat, then slid his hand out of my panties with a care that made me shiver again. He kissed my cheek, then the place below my ear he’d been worrying earlier.

“Remember this,” he murmured against my skin.

“I don’t think I could forget,” I said, and the truth of that terrified and steadied me in equal measure.

We stayed like that a while, his arms around me while the club remembered how to hum instead of strain, and my body decided to accept gravity again. The edges of me stitched back together around his shape. It occurred to me, dimly, that I was letting myself fit around him. It should have alarmed me. It didn’t.

“Come,” he said at last, voice a gentle command. He fixed my zipper with the same care he’d unmade it, slid the button home, threaded the belt through its loops and buckled me back into something like decency. He tugged my clothes into place as if dressing me were a privilege. When he was done, he smoothed his palms over my hips. He had the right to be smug. He wasn’t. The restraint made my chest ache.

I sat up reluctantly. He steadied me with a hand at the small of my back even though I would have crawled for him if he’d asked. I didn’t tell him that. He didn’t need to hear all the ruin in me at once.

He kissed my temple one more time, stood, and only then did I realize my legs were still draped over him. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, set me on my feet with ridiculous care, and when my knees wobbled, he pretended not to notice—he only moved closer until I could borrow his balance.

“Water,” he said, and it sounded like a holy word. He vanished for half a second into the quiet behind the bar—I heard a cap crack, the faintest clink of glass—and returned with a bottle. It felt indecent to wrap my mouth around the opening after what his fingers had done to me. I drank anyway, grateful, and the water tasted clean enough to hurt.

He watched me drink with an attention that verged on reverence. When I lowered the bottle, he took it and tipped it to my lips again, as if the act belonged to him. I let it.

“We’ll go upstairs,” he said after a moment, voice smoothing back into command. “I want you to sit somewhere soft until your breath is steady.”

“Bossy,” I muttered, and rolled my eyes because it felt safe to do that now.

“Yes,” he agreed without apology, and held out his hand. I took it, because the only thing worse than obeying him would have been not to.

His office felt like a cathedral to control—books that smelled like rain on old stone, leather that remembered hands older than me, and a glass wall that let him watch his kingdom without ever being watched. He steered me to the couch with the same purposeful care he’d used a few minutes ago to unmake me, and the strangest part was how safe I felt among all that sharp history.

He set me down and didn’t crowd. The liquor cabinet winked from across the room with crystal and deep amber, but he brought me more water instead. The ice rattled against the glass before settling. He offered it wordlessly, and I drank without thinking, the cool working its way down between nerves that still trembled in little aftershocks.