Page 5 of Bred By the Tsar

When it finally eases I stay bent over the desk for a long time, breathing hard, the evidence of what she has done to me cooling on my skin.

The new feeling in my chest is no longer quiet.

Mine, the new thing in my chest says, in a voice I've never heard before and already obey.

I don't argue with it. I've never been one to argue with the truth.

4

Hazel

It takes four days for me to learn that the worst thing about wanting something is finding out you were built to want it all along.

I'm good at not wanting. I've had practice. You learn it young in group homes — you watch the thing another kid gets, the visit, the birthday, the hand reaching down to choose somebody, and you fold the wanting up small and sit on it until it stops kicking. A week ago I'd have told you I was a black belt at it.

Then a man tells you he's hard and isn't ashamed of it, drags his thumb down your jaw, and nineteen years of discipline unravels in about nine seconds.

He keeps finding me. That's the thing nobody warns you about a house this size — there's nowhere in it the owner can't be. He's in the corridor when I take the children down to breakfast. He's at the nursery door in the evening, filling the whole frame of it, watching me read to Misha in a voice that goes rough at the edges. He never touches me. He doesn't have to. He just looks, steady and certain and unhurried, and my whole body lights up like it's been waiting its entire life to be looked at exactly that way, and I have to press my thighs together and hate myself a little, because what kind of person feels this, this fast, this much, from across a room.

A virgin, apparently. A virgin who didn't know what she was sitting on.

That's what frightens me. Not him. Me. The size of it. I lie awake in the narrow east-wing bed with my hand pressed flat to my own stomach like I can hold the need down, and it doesn't help, and at two in the morning on the fourth night I give up and go looking for a book, because that's a normal thing a normal person does, and not at all an excuse to be in the part of the house where he is.

He's in the library.

He's in a chair by the dying fire, no jacket, collar open, a glass of something amber going warm and forgotten on the table beside him, and he watches me freeze in the doorway in my secondhand nightshirt with my heart slamming and he doesn't say what are you doing here. He says, low, like we're already in the middle of it:

"Come here, Hazel."

And God help me, my feet are already moving.

I stop in front of his chair. He looks up at me, and I look down at him, and for once he's the one beneath, and somehow that's worse, somehow that's so much worse.

"You haven't slept," he says.

"Neither have you."

"No." His hand comes up. Settles on the back of my bare knee. Just rests there, warm and heavy, and I feel it everywhere. "Do you know why?"

"...No, sir."

"Liar." But there's no heat in it — or all heat, the good kind. His hand slides up, slow, under the hem of the nightshirt, over the back of my thigh, and I stop breathing. "You're shaking. Are you frightened of me?"

"No." It comes out honest and small. "I'm frightened of — how much I—" I can't finish it.

"Say it."

"I've never wanted anything like this." My face is on fire. "I don't know how to — it's too much, I can't make it stop—"

"Good." He pulls me down, and I go, folding into his lap with my knees on either side of him, and his hands close over my hips like they were measured for them. "You're not supposed to make it stop. You're supposed to give it to me."

Then he kisses me.

I have been kissed before — twice, badly. This is not that. This is a man who has decided something, mouth slow and certain and filthy, one hand fisting up into my hair to tip my head exactly where he wants it, and I make a sound I've never made before, and he swallows it, and I feel him smile.

"There she is," he murmurs against my mouth. His other hand is moving, dragging the nightshirt up. "Look at you. Soaking through your underwear in my lap and apologising for wanting it. We're going to fix that."

His fingers find me through the cotton and I jolt so hard I nearly come off his lap.