“Maybe,” he allows. “But then you’d miss me.”
“Arrogant prick.”
His thumb strokes my cheek once. “You love that too.”
I do. God help me, I do.
He smiles properly then, tired and real and so fucking dear to me it feels like a weakness with a pulse.
“I’m not ending this,” he says softly.
I should tell him that it isn’t solely his decision. Instead, I whisper, “Neither am I.”
His eyes close, and the relief that moves through his face is so raw it nearly destroys me. It’s too much. Too honest. Too unguarded for a man like Ruslan, which means I feel it all, like it belongs under my skin.
He kisses me one last time, brief and reverent and nothing like the filthy, reckless thing this started as two years ago, and I understand with brutal, sickening clarity that whatever line we’ve been pretending still exists between body and heart is gone.
It’s gone, and I don’t know how to want that less. Lust doesn’t beg or stand on a terrace after midnight asking to stay. It doesn’t apologize for another woman, knowing her sight cut into me and reached where it had no right.
I know there is no honest way left to call this only physical. Not when he says my name like it matters.
Not when I whisper,“cuore mio,”against his mouth, and he answers,“lyubimiy,”with a reverence that feels more dangerous than any threat his father ever could make.
Not when the fear in me isn’t about being caught, not really, but about what happens when one day one of us has to choose the table over the man standing in front of him.
I know that day is coming. I think he does too.
But tonight I let myself pretend that what lives between us might survive the men waiting downstairs to kill it.
That’s the worst lie of all.
And still, with my head against his shoulder and his hand in my hair, I tell myself one more and let him hold me while I do it.
Just six more months.
Just one more meeting.
Just one more time.
Ruslan
Give – Sleep Token
Ishould’velethimwalkthe moment he offered me the clean way out—thanked him for the mercy, turned on my heel, and left him standing alone with his decency. That would’ve been the noble move, the smart move, the thing a son raised by Mikhail Dragovich is supposed to do when a liability opens the door for you to save yourself.
But I’m not noble, and I’ve never been smart where Salvatore Vieri is concerned. I saw the exit gleaming in front of us, heard it in his voice when he tried to draw a line, felt it in the way his hand shook just enough to prove he meant it.
All I had to do was step back. Instead, I slammed the door in his face and locked it from the inside.
Because I’m weak when it comes to him, because I’m selfish enough to keep what isn’t mine, because somewhere along the way he stopped being a habit and became the only language I speak fluently. I tell myself I’m using him, collecting little details while he’s soft and open beneath me, but that’s just another lieI swallow because the alternative—admitting I’m the one being used—is intolerable.
Salvatore Vieri is the one thing in my life I know I should surrender for his own good, and he’s also the one fucking thing I can’t stop taking. He’s my worst impulse made flesh, and that’s why I can’t quit him.
He’s here tonight in my suite, wearing that brittle poise like he thinks it’ll survive what I’m about to do to him. We’re only ten minutes past the last polite knock on the door, and I’ve already got him braced against the wall, fingers twisted in his hair, tongue in his mouth deep enough that he chokes on his own groan.
When I pull back, I keep hold of him by the roots, just to feel the shiver roll down his spine.
“You’re a fucking mess tonight,malysh,” I tell him.
