Page 31 of Mafia King's Ruthless Obsession

A crouch. A push. A single pivot. My muscles stretch into remembered rhythms, breath syncing with the motion. It’s not performance. It’s escape. A language my body still speaks fluently, even if my heart’s forgotten how to believe in it.

I kick off my heels. Let my bare feet touch the stage like it’s sacred. Spin again. Stretch. Reach. With every movement, I loosen another thread holding me together too tight. No eyes. No expectations. For a breathless moment, I’m free.

“Slower,lisichka.”

His voice cuts through the quiet, deep and rough, curling around my name like smoke.

I freeze mid-spin, hands gripping the pole tighter than I should, breath catching sharp in my throat. My body knows him before my mind registers the sound. Knows the weight of his stare. The way he carves up silence with nothing but presence.

He stands in the doorway like he owns the air itself. Vasiliy Volkov, wrapped in shadows and hunger. The afternoon light catches the steel in his gaze, but it’s the heat there that undoes me. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak again. Just watches.

Watches the bare soles of my feet. The rise of my dress. The way my fingers cling to the pole like I’m holding on to something more than metal.

My heart slams against my ribs as I meet his eyes.

And still, I don’t move.

Because I want him to see me.

All of me.

The girl who once danced in secret. The woman who’s trying not to fall apart. The enemy he thinks he can break.

Let him watch.

Let him burn.

“I thought I was alone,” I manage, my voice thinner than I want it to be. The tremor betrays me. Not because I’m afraid of him, but because I’m afraid of what I’ll let him do to me if he asks.

He’s already done too much.

His smile is slow. The kind that says he’s not just watching me; he’s imagining a dozen different ways to devour me.

“Don’t stop on my account,” he says. “Show me what Boris Olenko’s daughter really knows about running a gentleman’s club.”

His words strike a nerve. Not because they’re cruel. Because they’re bait.

And I take it.

I turn back to the pole, rage and want knotting in my chest. If he wants a show, I’ll give him one he won’t forget. I move not like a girl performing for a man, but like a woman daring him to lose control.

The pole becomes my weapon. My escape. My defiance.

I spin, twist, and stretch, each motion cutting sharper. My body remembers what I was raised around, what I saw from the shadows of this stage, behind velvet curtains and locked doors. My body was made to move like this, and it does, fluid and precise, unbothered by the man in the dark.

But I feel his gaze like a brand.

He’s watching me with that predatory stillness—silent, but wound tight. My dress rides higher with each arc, each flip of hair. My skin flushes under his attention, but I don’t stop. I control this moment. My body. My performance.

And yet, when I land on the stage and his voice slides through the thick silence, I feel it down to my bones.

“Fascinating,” he murmurs.

He takes a seat like it’s a throne, commanding the room with nothing more than a glance and a breath. His presence curls around me like smoke.

“Don’t stop now.”

My lips lift into a smirk, and I walk toward the edge of the stage. “I’ll keep going,” I say, my voice smooth as silk and twice as dangerous. “But I want something in return.”

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