Page 63

He kisses me harder, and I bite down on his lower lip, unhesitating, until I taste iron.

He pulls back half an inch. There is a dark maroon smear of blood on his lip, and he doesn’t so much as blink at it. His steel-gray eyes, dark again and locking me in place, hold mine as though I were the one bleeding and not him.

I scrub the back of my hand across my bruised mouth. The kiss does nothing to soften me. If anything, it reminds me how many times he’s decided things for me without ever once asking.

“What’s wrong with you?” I grind out, teeth clenched.

“You talk too much,” he drawls.

“So you shut me up with your mouth every time I say something you don’t want to hear.” I cannot stop myself from scoffing.

“It works, does it not?” he says, unbothered, and the twitch of his eyebrow tells me he is enjoying this.

He really is a bastard, and I know this pattern of his now, the same shit every time. One moment he crushes my dignity flat, and the next my body remembers the heat of him and forgets everything else. There is a thin line between hate and lust, and he keeps shoving me over it. I refuse to let a single kiss wipe the last two weeks clean.

The humiliation and the rage crest together, and with one instinctual snap of my arm I slap him across the face.

My palm burns with it. The crack of it cuts through the room like a gunshot and releases something I have been holding for days, and a red mark spiders across his cheekbone.

Then my breath stops, because I have just struck Lev Volkov. He’s the Pakhan, the man who killed his way to the top of the mob’s ladder, the man that grown and dangerous men lower their eyes around, the man who put his brother on the floor with one punch and didn’t blink. And I hit him across the face in his own impeccably kept office.

Fear crawls up my spine, and I step back until my shoulders hit the door. I swallow hard and brace for whatever’s going to come next.

He turns his face slowly back to me, and his gaze is heavy and dark. He looks elegant and threatening all at once. I’m certain his hand is about to close, merciless and purposeful, around my throat.

Instead, he takes my hand and presses my palm flat against his stinging cheek.

“Hit me again,” he says, his voice all quiet thunder. “Hit me until it is out of you. Slap me again. Do whatever you need to do. Take whatever you want. Just don’t leave.”

The vulnerability in it stiffens my whole spine. I almost don’t recognize the thing I’m looking at, and I stare at him, brows furrowed. I’ve never once seen Lev wear weakness, and it sits so clumsily on him, so wrong, that it could move any woman alive. This is the man who deleted a whole room full of photographs with three words, who broke his brother’s nose without changing his expression, and he is holding my hand to his cheek like it is the only thing keeping him upright.

He keeps my hand pressed against his face and waits, restless and uncertain, a man who has never had to ask for anything standing here asking me.

I remind myself that I cannot fall for this, that he’s like a drug and I know better. I’ve already been a stupid, lovesick loser over him more times than I can count.

“Why can I not leave?” I ask, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I’m not a thing you get to lock away in a drawer and take out when it suits you. I’m the one who decides when I walk away from something, not you. You don’t get to have that too, so you can fuck off with it.”

He struggles with it, lost in thought, his gaze gone glassy. Something seems to catch in his throat and refuse to come loose.

“When I picture you leaving,” he says finally, “taking Milo and going somewhere I cannot follow, my chest closes up. I cannot stand the idea that other people would get to see you every day and I would not.”

I almost believe I imagined the words. He doesn’t do this. He doesn’t open himself up and let anyone look inside, not in daylight, not at night, not in secret.

“I have tried to stop thinking it,” he says, and lifts his chin. “It doesn’t stop. When I imagine you gone, I want to put my fist through every inch of the walls in this building.”

My heart trembles and stumbles all over itself. This is a man who gives orders and buys buildings and has never once bothered to expound on his reasons to anyone, and he is standing here telling me that the thought of my empty desk makes him want to break the walls. It is not a clean confession. It’s the closest thing to one that a man like him can force out of himself, and it lands exactly where he aimed it. The anger I’ve been carrying for two weeks shatters straight down the middle, and tears well out of the corners of my eyes before I can stop it.

Then Lev drops to one knee in front of me, and all hell breaks loose inside me.

The suddenness of it stuns me silent. This is a man who bows to no one, who has half a city afraid to say his name too loud, and he is kneeling on the floor at my feet. His silver hair falls across his forehead, and I lift it back up with a finger. Up this close I feast my eyes on him, and the hard, mature lines of his face steal the breath right out of me.

He could’ve used all his power to trap me here. He could’ve made it so that I had no choice at all. He didn’t. He put the whole choice back into my hands and got down on the floor to wait for it.

“Don’t do this,” I say weakly, looking bashfully down, even as the heat is already spreading across my skin and pooling low in my belly, betraying every word out of my mouth.

“Do you really want me to stop?” he asks, his eyes dragging over my body.

I open my mouth, and the word will not come out of it. I press my thighs together against the throbbing building low in my belly.