She doesn't move.
She stands at the edge of the bed with my jacket still around her shoulders and her dark eyes locked on mine, and she doesn't move.
I can see her pulse in her throat. Rapid. Thready. The kind of heartbeat that precedes unconsciousness if it goes on long enough, and I realize with a clarity that cuts through every possessive impulse currently short-circuiting my brain that this girl is about thirty seconds from passing out on my bedroom floor.
She's been starving. She's been terrified. She's been stripped and displayed and sold and driven through the city by a stranger who made her touch herself in his backseat, and now that stranger is standing in a bedroom telling her to lie down, and every synapse in her body is firing the same signal: this is where the bad thing happens.
I watch the calculation happen behind her eyes. The bracing. The quiet gathering of whatever she has left, which isn't much, into a wall she can put between herself and what she thinks is coming next.
And something in me shifts.
A recalibration. A recognition that the girl standing in front of me has been running on fumes and fear for God knows howmany hours, and if I push her any further tonight she won't break in a way that's useful to me. She'll break in a way that makes her disappear behind her own eyes, and I'll be left with a body that breathes and blinks and follows commands but has nobody living inside it.
I've seen that before. The girls Kir sends back after he's finished with them have that look. Vacant. Evacuated. Present in the room but absent from themselves in a way that no amount of time or money can reverse.
I don't want that.
I want her awake. I want her aware. I want every nerve ending in her body firing when I eventually take what I've decided is mine, and I want her to feel all of it, every second, with the same intensity I felt when she walked onto that stage.
"I’m not going to hurt you. Lie down," I say again, and I keep my voice flat, keep it neutral, strip it of everything that might read as threat.
She finally breaks eye contact, her head bowing slightly with resignation, then she removes my jacket, and slowly lowers herself to the bed.
“Show me,” I say, plucking open the top buttons of my shirt.
She knows what I mean because she slides her feet from the heels and lifts her knees. Her feet coming to the edge of the bed, her hands flat on the quilt either side of her hips.
“I won’t have sex with you against your will,” I say it for her comfort and reassurance. “But make no mistake, we will have sex. I can be patient for as long as you need, but there’s a cost.”
Her dark eyes are on me now, her face crumpled with confusion, the dress slipping over her skin revealing more of her to me with every passing second.
“With that said, I will be eating your pretty pussy every night until you’re begging me to put you out of your misery and fuck you.”
Surprise barely has time to register on her face before I’ve dropped onto the bed between her thighs and began devouring her warm cunt like a man starved.
She jumps a little at the contact before her hands come to the top of my head and try to push me away. My mouth follows her as she wriggles up the bed, but she doesn’t tell me to stop. The little sounds she is making aren’t objections, and within minutes she is holding the back of my head and grinding against my face.
The sound of me eating her and sucking at her is obscene, but I don’t care.
Her leg comes around over my shoulder and across my back as her thighs begin to quiver. Those little sounds have turned into long, keening moans, and her body locks tight before releasing with an orgasm that rocks through her with a violent force.
I drive her through it, then still my mouth over her clit, not moving. Her hand is stroking through my hair, massaging my scalp like she wants to keep my face between her legs forever.
I finally remove myself and pepper kisses over her thighs as soft aftershocks tremble through her.
Finally, I stand and look down at her, flushed and wrecked on the bed.
“Goodnight, Wren,” I say, then walk from the room and pull the door closed behind me.
I walk back to the living room and think about what the fuck just happened to me.
Three hours ago I had a plan. A clean, efficient, well-constructed plan that involved putting two hollow points in Kir Belov's chest and one in his face and reclaiming six months'worth of stolen revenue. The kind of plan I've executed dozens of times. The kind that runs on logic and leverage and the complete absence of emotional interference.
Now I'm standing in my penthouse a million dollars lighter with a woman in my guest bedroom, a rival who is still breathing and a best friend who thinks I've lost my mind.
Ilya isn't wrong.
I take out my phone.