Page 21 of A Secretary for the Bratva Boss
"It's sad to see the holiday end," I say quietly.
"Who says it's over," he murmurs, kissing my shoulder. "There's another holiday in a week."
I turn to him. The insecurity, the "temp" in me, floods back. The sated, brave lover is gone. "New Year's. Right. I... I guess you'll be busy. With your family."
"I will be."
My stomach drops. Of course. It's over. "Of course. Well..." I force a smile, bracing for the inevitable. "Will you... Do you think you'll want me to... come over?"
The question costs me everything.
I watch his face. He's looking at me, this magnificent, strong, terrifying man... who still thinks I'm temporary. Who still thinks I have to be invited. Wait, I'm the one who thinks that. I don't know what the hell he's thinking.
He smiles. It's slow, and predatory, and it makes my heart stop.
"No, Talia. I won't want you to come over."
My. World. Ends.
The hurt is a blade in my gut, so sharp I almost gasp. I was right. I'm disposable. I'm the snowstorm girl. A cold dread coils in my gut, but I keep my chin up. I will not cry. I will not. Another rejection, I should be used to them. How many times did I wait in a room, or a court, or an office, waiting to be chosen? Only to have someone younger, or prettier, or nicer, selected for a found family.
He pulls me to him, his hand sliding to the back of my head, fisting my hair, lifting my face to his. "You won't need to 'come over,'" he says, his voice a low, absolute growl. "Because you'renot going anywhere. You're not going back to your apartment. You're not going back to the temp agency. You're staying here."
"Anton..."
"What will it take to make you understand? Should I tattoo it on you? You. Are. Mine."
6
Anton
The Monday after Christmas. The city snaps back to its grinding, relentless rhythm, and I’m supposed to snap back with it. I’ve been in my office since five, the skyline still pitch-black when I walked in, yet I haven’t accomplished a damn thing. Every spreadsheet I opened blurred into static. Every email I tried to answer ended up half-written, abandoned. My brain stayed in the wrong place—in my bedroom, on my sheets, where I left her tangled like she belonged there.
She’d been curled on her side, her dark curls unraveled across my pillow like a storm refusing to be tamed. Her skin still warm from sleep and from everything I took from her the night before. The morning sun caught across her shoulders, turning every inch of her into something I didn’t have the power to walk away from. I stood there far longer than I should have, ten full minutes burned on watching the slow rise and fall of her breath. Ten minutes I didn’t regret. Ten minutes I needed like oxygen.
Whatever this is—this pressure behind my ribs, this wrongness in my habits—it’s a fault line running straight through me. A glitch I can’t override. I’ve already rescheduled two meetings, snapped at Dimitri over nothing, and thrown a quarterly report against the wall hard enough the binding cracked. I don’t lose control. I don’t drift. I don’t wait. All of this is foreign and unwelcome and unavoidable.
By 9:03 a.m., I’m done pretending to focus. I’m done pacing the same ten feet. I grab my coat, already halfway out the door to a meeting I no longer remember caring about, when the wrong elevator dings.
Not the private one. The public one.
The doors slide open. She steps out.
My first thought: Dammit.
She’s still in the clothes she wore on Friday. The gray pencil skirt, the white silk blouse. They’re rumpled with the evidence of three days spent in my bed. A walk of shame through the center of my operation. Something ugly twists in my gut at the sight—not at her, but at the fact I let it happen.
I forgot. Fucking forgot.
The man who manages logistics for an international empire, who anticipates everything, didn’t even think to have clothing waiting for her. Too consumed with her warm body in my bed. Too focused on the fact that she stayed. Too wrapped up in having her to plan beyond it. It’s an amateur mistake, and I feel the heat of it crawl up the back of my neck.
She looks tired, but still so goddamn gorgeous it makes something tighten in my spine. Her curls are pulled back, but several coils have escaped, softening the severity she tries to put up between us. Even flustered, she’s impossible to look away from. She sees me standing there, a mountain in her path, and her eyes widen with that startled, guilty flicker—like she wishes she could disappear back into the elevator’s steel walls.
Not happening.
I’m in the dead center of the floor, a blockade she can’t slip past unless I let her. Daniil stands to one side, arms crossed, watching everything with that bland, deadly calm of his. A clerk from accounting is dropping off files at Elena’s desk, glancing between us far too often. One of my junior associates is hovering near the exit, portfolio clutched to his chest, trying to pretend he’s not witnessing the most interesting thing that’s happened on this floor all quarter.
Talia ducks her head, curls falling forward like a flimsy shield, and tries to skirt past me. As she slips by, she mutters it—soft, polite, fucking formal. “Good morning, Mr. Ismailov.”
