He catches my wrists in one brutal hand, squeezing until my pulse flutters beneath his thumb. His grip is unbreakable, the hard line of his jaw shadowed in the half-light. His eyes don’t blink, don’t flicker. He doesn’t shout. The silence radiates from him, heavier than thunder, promising pain, retribution, something worse than rage.
“Stop it,” he says, the words almost soft, almost deadly. “Enough.”
I don’t stop. I twist, spit, try to wrench free, but his body is stone, unyielding, merciless. The rain pelts us both, hair slick to my cheeks, my bare feet slipping against wet marble.
“You’re a coward! You lock me up because you know if I ever got away, I’d ruin you. I’d burn you to the ground—”
He yanks me closer, dragging me flush against him. My breath stutters, hate and terror tangled in my chest. He smells of rain and steel, of violence held on a leash. His silence burns hotter than any blow.
“You’re mine,” he says, voice edged with something that chills and thrills me both. “You want to run? Try.”
I scream again, half sob, half challenge, shoving at him with every bit of fury I have left. “You think I want you? You think this is love?” My nails rake his chest, desperate, hopeless.
Then, as he pins my arms between us, the fight collapses. Our bodies are pressed together, heat rising from his skin, from mine. I feel his heart hammering, hard and furious, matching my own. The storm is not just outside. It’s in us, colliding, consuming.
He drags me back through the corridor, never loosening his grip. I curse him, spit at him, every word a knife that he takes and turns. When he slams the door behind us, trapping me against it, the silence breaks not with more rage, but with the desperate, electric need that has always haunted our war.
His mouth crashes against mine, bruising, wild. I bite him, taste blood and rain, but he only groans, crushing me closer. My fists pummel his shoulders, but with every strike, my body betrays me, heat unfurling, resistance melting into hunger.
He lifts me, carrying me to the bed with a roughness that makes me gasp, that makes my anger twist into something hotter, deeper.
“You hate me?” he snarls against my mouth, his hands wrenching my dress up, his teeth grazing my throat. “Prove it.”
“I do,” I gasp, but the words tremble, lost in the slide of his hands, the sharp, demanding grip of his fingers on my thighs. “I hate you!”
His mouth cuts me off. His hands are everywhere—pinning, possessing, devouring. My own grip turns frantic, clawing him closer, fighting for dominance even as I yield. Eachtouch is a battle, each gasp a surrender. He’s brutal, unrelenting, but I meet him with teeth and nails and desperate kisses.
The world shrinks to the press of his body, the scrape of stubble on my skin, the heat that consumes every inch of space between us. The line between fight and fever blurs. My body arches, demanding more, even as my mind tries to remember why I should run, why I should still want to escape.
He tears the dress from my shoulders, bares me to the storm-lit dark. His hands claim me, his hips drive against mine, rough and unforgiving, taking what’s already his. I hate him—I do—but I want this, want him, want the oblivion of fury and pleasure tangled so tightly I can’t tell one from the other.
Rostya thrusts his cock inside me, and I hate how easily I yield for him. My pussy throbs with need, and already I’m slick, holding back a moan as he presses me into the mattress.
I meet every thrust, every command, with my own demands, my own broken, bitten words. I want to break him as much as he breaks me. The sheets twist beneath us, the air thick with the sound of skin, of gasps, of curses whispered against slick skin.
In the end, I shatter—body trembling, head thrown back, his name torn from my throat. I come hard enough to see stars, gasping and shaking.
He follows, fierce and unyielding, locking me in place as if even now he fears I’ll vanish.
The silence afterward is full and empty all at once. I lie beneath him, spent and shaking, the memory of rage still buzzing under my skin. He doesn’t move, just holds me pinned, his breath rough in my ear.
When it’s over, the room is thick with heat and the faint scent of rain. I lie sprawled beneath him, my skin slick, my chestrising and falling too fast, pulse thrumming in every fragile place he’s touched. The ache in my limbs is matched only by the riot in my mind. I stare at the ceiling, blank and wide-eyed, the storm outside mirrored inside me.
I hate him. I hate him more than ever. The words echo in my skull, desperate, raw. I hate the way he cages me, the way his hands command and consume. I hate how I flinched from freedom and ran into his arms with fists clenched and mouth hungry.
Worse, far worse, is the way my body answered him. The way I shattered beneath him, clinging and gasping and wanting. The betrayal is sharper than his grip on my wrists, deeper than any wound he could leave.
I squeeze my eyes shut, willing the shame away, but it lingers—the memory of his touch, the relentless hunger, the brutal comfort I found in his violence. I roll to my side, gathering the sheets around me like armor, but they offer no shield.
My thoughts whirl back to the secret tucked away in Rostya’s desk. A file on the Volkovs, on Ilya, on all the pieces of this war he thinks he controls. That knowledge burns in my chest, a quiet, persistent ember. It is the one thing that is truly mine, the only thread I can clutch when everything else is his.
I imagine what I could do with it. The possibility of freedom, of leverage, flickers at the edge of my exhaustion. It isn’t much, not against the brute force of his world, but it’s something. I tuck the hope away like a blade, a promise I refuse to let go.
Sleep won’t come. Not after this. I lie in the dark, sweat cooling on my skin, every breath a struggle. Around me, the cycle closes in—rage and surrender, desire and defiance, always twisting back on itself. I don’t know how long I can endure it, or who I’ll be when it finally breaks.
But for now, all I have is this secret, and the stubborn, flickering hope that one day, I’ll find the door out. Until then, I’m trapped in the cage we built together, equal parts prisoner and accomplice, unable to see where one ends and the other begins.
Chapter Twenty - Rostya