The distance between us reduced until I could feel the shift in the air. It was thick. Electric.
My breath faltered in my chest.
“Tell me the truth,” he whispered.
I backed up on instinct. My back struck the wall with a soft thud, but he didn’t stop inching closer.
His eyes did not flicker. Those dark, piercing pools were pinned on me. He was calm. Too calm.
Predator calm.
My mouth opened to say something, but nothing came out.
His hand came up slowly, purposefully. And then his thumb stroked along my jaw, feather-light, leaving warmth in its wake.
I winced, not out of fear, but at how much I felt it.
“Did you put it on because it was soft?” He inhaled, his voice a rough whisper down my spine. “Or because it had my scent on it?”
I gritted my teeth and scoffed. “Your scent? You’re not that special.”
His mouth curved. Barely. “Why, then, are your thighs so tightly closed?”
I breathed deeply, ashamed at the reality of the truth in question—the tension between my thighs, the warmth that had not disappeared since the day he kissed me for the first time.
Matvey leaned over; his one hand was flat against the wall near my head. His other hand traced the lower hem of his shirt—my shirt—and shoved it up and up until it bared the skin of my thigh.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he whispered.
I didn’t.
Because I couldn’t.
My body was betraying me. Because some twisted, broken, and needy part of me wanted this.
His fingers traveled up the inner part of my leg, not where I needed him to touch, yet close enough so that my breath trembled.
“Are you ashamed,kotyonok?” he breathed, his lips brushing the edge of my ear. “Because this”—his hand shaped the back of my neck, fingers tangling in my hair—“this is the real you.”
I despised how right it felt, how right he was. I despised how my hands gripped his shirt as if I were in need of oxygen.
And when he kissed me hard, passionately, and ravenously, I didn’t fight it.
I opened my mouth to him. To let him experience the war within me. I was willing to let him have whatever fragment of pride I had left.
His hands explored my body, his touch possessive as it claimed every inch of my skin. Every move was a quiet reminder that I was his.
I should have broken it off. Should have pushed him away, yelled something mean, said this wasn’t right.
Yet when he lifted me up against the wall, my legs instinctively wrapping around him, I did not say a word.
I just held on.
My mind fogged, but the ache between my legs only sharpened. His mouth was on mine—hot, desperate, demanding—and I kissed him back like I’d forgotten how to say no.
I should’ve pushed him away.
He was a Yezhov, one of the people who knew about my sister’s death. He forced me into a marriage I didn’t want and claimed I was his without my permission. I shouldn’t have wanted him; I should have hated him instead.
