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“Come here,” he growls. “I need this. I need to be inside you, Meera. Please tell me you’re on birth control. I want to feel you.”

He urges me with the grip in my hair until I’m straddling his thighs. My knees sink into the lush velvet on either side of his hips. His cock presses tightly into my cleft, my panties still, somehow, between us. A barrier Leonid remedies in record-time, ripping at the seam of the waistband and shoving it out of his way.

“I am—” I pant, whining in ways I feel no shame over. “I’m on birth control, thanks to a diligent mafioso—” The words sound mindless, huffed past my lips. I can’t be blamed. I’m so slick, I take him all at once, releasing a low moan that I couldn’t help if I tried. Buried inside me, he stills and sucks down air. His blunt fingernails bite into my thigh, like he needs the grip to anchor him. I take his face in both my hands. My lips catch his in a kiss they have managed to miss already, needing the same.

I roll my hips against him, and he gasps out my name. I’d never have thought someone could pack such an intense amount of feeling into my simple, five-lettered name; Leonid does. I don’t know how someone can mean a name, but he means mine when he buries it in my mouth. And I taste it with shameless greed, turned frantic for him by the harsh, maddening pressure between my hips where he’s impaled me. It’s awful to need to breathe, for it forces me to break our kiss.

He uses the reprieve from my feverish kisses to suck a taut nipple into his starving mouth.

“Please,” I whimper of my own volition now.

It’s all he has to hear to begin to fuck me in earnest. His face buried in my tits, he pounds me full of his cock until I’m choking on it—or at least the cries it incites from the depths of me. Despite the overwhelm, I can’t let up on the friction either.

Every time I rise, the tip of him catches at the perfect sensitive spot inside me. Every time I fall, I take him in so deep my vision is a haze of stars.

His mouth never lets up, devouring me.

He’s consuming me and I let him. I ride him harder, harder, high on the wicked, soaked sounds of our bodies meeting.

“Fucking look at me,” he commands, and it’s the very voice that stuns his soldiers to attention. The voice that held my hands steady through a car chase, while his blood spilled. Even if, now, he employs it while his tongue flicks a cinnamon bud, making me whine and clench around his cock.

No thought precedes my surrender. My eyes lock onto his, and the intimacy of it all—of being this close to him, this exposed, this needed—is thick, sweet chocolate sauce over the sundae of physical sensations we’ve combined.

“I’m so close,” I cry, and I hardly recognize my own voice.

“Come for me again, Meera,” Leonid urges, goads, begs. His hand grabs a handful of my ass, parting my cheeks and heightening pressure that already has my eyes tearing, and wrenches me even closer atop his pelvis. Each rock of my hips sends current sparking up my spine. “Come with me, beautiful—”

I shatter around him, the flutter of my walls graduating to convulsions that aim to milk his release from him. When I fall, I take Leonid with me. His grip is bruising.

I don’t have enough oxygen to cry out; the screams building in my chest come out only as desperate gasps. My head falls back, giving him my breasts to feast on and bury his own groans between, as pure satisfaction floods my body—and his empties himself inside of me.

Thought isn’t necessary when my lips graze his sweat-damp brow. My mind is quiet. It’s my heart that takes longer to quit its galloping.

***

My arm dangles from the side of the couch, fingertips grazing the silky top of a dog’s head. I can’t even lift my head to see whether it’s Div or Mara who’s found their way to me. I’m exhausted, in the most delicious of ways.

“Won’t your brothers be angry with you?”

The question leaves me in the hazy aftermath, once my pulse has slowed enough for conscious thought to trickle back in. Yet even that isn’t enough to peel my head from his lap where it currently rests, while his fingers card through my hair with a gentleness that keeps my eyes shut.

Leonid is quiet, though the rhythm of his touch doesn’t falter at all.

“Leo?” I press, cracking an eye open.

He’s leaned back, too, his nape propped up by the back of the couch and his feet kicked up on the coffee table. His eyes are completely shut. It’s the thoughtful eleven between his brows that gives him away. Like he can feel me watching, he relents, “Angry may not be the right word.”

My eyes, too, slip back shut. Behind my lids, they roll at his dodginess. “Okay. So, give me a better word,” I barter.

The corners of my mouth tug upward when his laughter jostles me. “Fine, they’ll be pissed that I fucked you, but they’ll be total fucking hypocrites for it,” he huffs.

It’s my turn to frown. “We fucked each other,” I correct.

“I don’t think that’ll make it better, beautiful,” he drawls. The stroke of his fingers is too placating this time around. I smack his hand away, though I don’t peel my head off his thighs. Leonid sighs. “Meera.”

“What,” I sigh back, incensed. I scowl at the ceiling, but I can feel his eyes on my face now.

His hand reaches for me again, fingers slipping over the curve of my cheek this time. “This is just how my family is. We fight as hard as we love. That isn’t your problem, it’s mine,” he says.