I shift, groaning at the hypersensitive slide when he slips free and rolls off to his side. We lie there in the midday-gray of dawn turned full morning, cum cooling on our skin, the sheet a wreck under us.
He turns his head and watches me, a lazy, softened wolf. His fingers find my wrist, drag it to his mouth, lips brushing my racing pulse.
“You’re staying in bed today,” he decides.
“We have calls at ten.”
“They can burn.”
“I thought kings didn’t miss executive summaries.”
“Kings who just got fucked stupid can.” He grins, eyes teasing but fond. “Lie still. I’ll bring you coffee this time.”
The idea—the man capable of burning nations bringing me coffee—hits something tender and absurd in me. I grin back, swipe my thumb across the drying bite on his throat, and admire the red print. “Only if you drink it off me.”
His eyes darken again, promise flickering. “Deal. But after a nap, or I’ll kill us both.”
I laugh, flop back, let his arm hook around my waist, let the sun warm the mess on our skin.
The villa is silent except for gulls and the distant churn of sea against rock. For once, there’s no countdown ticking loudly in my head, just the echo of his heart under my cheek.
I press a lazy kiss to the bruise above his heart and let sleep drag me under.
thirty-three
Nikolaj
Beingdownheremakesme miss the simplicity of Isle Lucia.
The room beneath Saint Helena is old stone. There’s a steel table, one drain in the floor, two lights overhead, and enough silence in the walls to make screaming feel like a private hobby.
We keep it cold on purpose. Warmth makes people romantic about survival; cold strips that shit down faster.
The man in the chair is called Piotr Orlov, though he has given me three other names in the last hour, each one more desperate and less believable than the last.
He was stupid enough to pass through Smolensk using a courier route my people flagged weeks ago, and even stupider to think the false papers in his coat lining would matter once Tatiana got bored and started searching beneath the obvious pockets.
He sits slumped now, wrists bound to the chair arms, one eye swelling shut, blood drying in a messy line down his chin and dripping onto the front of his shirt.
He is not important in himself. Men like Piotr rarely are. He is a finger caught in a closing door. The usefulness comes from hearing who screams on the other side when pressure gets applied.
Tatiana is pouting in the corner because I told her she couldn’t cut him. She tries to pretend she isn’t pouting, which makes it worse. She stands against the far wall in black leather pants, a dark sweater, and boots she definitely wore because she thought she might get blood on them.
Her pale hair is twisted up with two pins that could double as weapons because Tatiana Dragovich has never trusted anything in her life that couldn’t also draw blood.
At twenty-one, she has already cultivated the sort of beauty that makes men say stupid things and the sort of stillness that makes them regret surviving long enough to finish. She is my head assassin because she earned it, not because she is my sister, and that distinction matters to both of us.
Right now, she looks personally insulted that I am doing the questioning while she has to stand there and behave.
Maksim is near the door, arms crossed, bored in the way he gets when violence becomes paperwork. Kai stands closer to the table with a tablet in one hand, face unreadable, waiting for Piotr to say something useful enough to justify the air he keeps stealing from the room.
I roll my shoulder once, flex my bloodied knuckles, and look at the man in the chair.
“Let’s try again,” I say in Russian, keeping my voice almost conversational. “Who told you Helena Byrne would pay for a successful hit?”
Piotr makes a wet sound in his throat, then spits blood onto the stone near his own shoe. It is a pathetic attempt at defiance. I admire it for half a second, then step close enough that he flinches before I touch him.
Tatiana makes a small, impatient sound from the corner, but I don’t look at her. “Use your words, Piotr.”
