Page 34 of Enforcer Daddy
"Eva—"
"Don't," she said, echoing my earlier word. "Just . . . don't. We can pretend this didn't happen. Vodka makes people do stupid things."
"This wasn't the vodka."
She froze in the hallway entrance, not turning around. "Then what was it?"
I didn't answer because the truth was too dangerous. That I'd wanted to kiss her since she'd bitten me. That watching her rebuild herself in my apartment had become more fascinating than any job I'd ever done.
That I wanted her to be my Little.
That I wanted to hear her call me Daddy.
"Goodnight, Dmitry," she said when I didn't answer.
"Goodnight, Eva."
She fled to her room, Bear tucked against her chest, leaving me alone with my vodka and the taste of her and the knowledge that every rule I'd made for this situation was officially broken.
I'd told myself she was just a problem to solve, a witness to protect until I figured out what to do with the USB. I'd told myself the structure and discipline were for her own good, teaching her consequences that didn't involve violence. I'd told myself a lot of things that were crumbling like wet paper in the face of what just happened.
The truth was simpler and infinitely more complicated: I wanted her. Wanted her in my bed, in my life, in whatever capacity she'd allow. Wanted to keep her not because of the Morozovs or the USB or any logical reason, but because the thought of her leaving made something in my chest constrict painfully.
I was fucked.
The Beast of the Volkov bratva, brought down by a hundred-pound girl with mismatched eyes who'd kissed me like drowning and salvation all at once.
My grandmother would be cackling about this.
Chapter 7
Eva
Thedoorwasalreadyopening when I started screaming. Not the real door—the one in my head, the one that opened every night when Mr. Henderson decided to check on his foster daughter. My body knew the sound of those particular hinges, had memorized the exact weight of his footsteps on carpet, the way the hallway light would slice across my bed like a wound.
"Don't touch me!" The words tore from my throat, raw and desperate. I was tangled in something—sheets, but my brain said restraints. The steel-grey duvet wrapped around me like a straightjacket, and the city light leaking around blackout shades became the bathroom nightlight Mrs. Henderson insisted stay on so her husband could "check on the troubled girl."
Hands reached for me through the darkness. Large hands, male hands, hands that had no business being near a fourteen-year-old girl in the middle of the night.
I came up swinging.
“I said don’t touch me!”
My fist connected with something solid—a jaw, maybe—and I heard a grunt of surprise. Good. Let him hurt. Let him know what it felt like to be touched when you didn't want it, to have your body become a thing that didn't belong to you anymore.
"Eva." A voice, but not Mr. Henderson's. Deeper, accented, familiar in a way that made my brain stutter between past and present. "Eva, you're safe."
But I wasn't safe. I was never safe. Safety was a lie adults told to make you drop your guard, to make you stop fighting, to make you easier to hurt. I swung again, wild, my knuckles scraping against something that might have been stubble or might have been memory.
Then the hands withdrew. The presence near my bed shifted, lowered, and suddenly there was space to breathe. Through the panic, through the roar of blood in my ears, I heard movement—controlled, deliberate, unthreatening.
"You're safe, little one." Dmitry's voice, I realized. Dmitry, not Mr. Henderson. Present, not past. "No one touches you here."
He'd lowered himself to the floor beside the bed. I could make out his shape in the dim light—hands visible, palms up, making himself smaller than me for once. He sat with his back against the nightstand, close enough that I could hear him breathing but far enough that I didn't feel trapped.
My body was still in fight mode, every muscle coiled, ready to run or attack or both. My hands shook as I pushed the duvet away, needing to not feel confined, needing to see the exits. The bedroom door was cracked open—he'd left it that way, I realized. Left me an escape route even though we both knew the apartment door was still locked.
"Just a dream," I managed, though my voice came out cracked and wrong. My breaths were short, clipped, and it felt like I wasout of breath. My heart was pounding, faster and faster, so fast it felt like it would beat out of my chest and burst.
