Page 12 of Lord of the Underworld

My back arches and in a strangled little voice I do, I beg. With no shame because desperation eclipses pride. "Please, Vadim…"

My pussy squeezes him until he growls, tugging hard on my slippery clitoris and brings me over with him.

***

When I open my eyes, I could swear the vile little chipmunk on the ceiling mural has stopped eating whatever thing it was gnawing on and it's smirking at me.

My chest is heaving, I'm covered in a fine sheen of perspiration and my thighs are wet with my come. My entire lower half is throbbing, painfully sensitive.

I raise my hand, flipping off the chipmunk and I roll over, wet thighs pressed together and fall blissfully asleep.

Vadim…

I'm still painfully hard after jerking off twice to the sight of my bride pleasuring herself. Shutting my laptop and ending the camera feed, I glare at my rebellious cock, fingers squeezing it harder. If I don’t stop remembering every second of how Oksana looked, writhing and moaning with her fingers between her legs, my cock might never go down again.

Chapter Seven

In which there are nocturnal visitors, excessive sleep medication and monster fucking.

Vadim…

A week later…

This isn't the first time I've been in my bride-to-be's bedroom. Whatever else I've become as this polished monster, I'm not a liar. I've sat in this chair in the corner of the palatial princess bedroom her father ordered to be designed to showcase his property, which he clearly thinks includes his daughter. It has very little of her in it. There are two framed photos, one of her, with her mother, and another with Anka, next to her bed.

Oksana keeps paperback books with dog-eared pages in the drawer under those photos. Books with tall, dark, rakish men who fuck their women into submission. I've thumbed through them. The one that puzzled me was the hero who shifts into a dragon and can fuck in either form. Her friend Anka scribbled in the margin, "Monster fucking is the best!"

In the moonlight, Oksana is incandescent. Her blonde hair spills out like cornsilk over the pillow. She sleeps on her side, with her long legs drawn up, economical with her space on the broad expanse of the mattress. A pillow clutched between her arms is pressed against her chest, a feather-filled defense against night terrors.

She had them once when I was here. She was shaking, arching her head like she was trying to bring her face out of the water. I knew exactly what she was suffering in her dreams. It took me less than a second to reach her, putting my hand against her cheek.

"It's me. You are safe. They can't hurt you now."

I repeated the words I told her that day when I pulled her from the fountain, and I said it again and again, in small, different ways until her breathing evened out. She fell back into a deeper sleep and that time, she didn't scream.

The Oksana the world sees is careful, and polished, while still constantly thrumming with nervous energy. Especially when her father - that piece of shit - is around. After the wedding, I'm going to kill him. Nikolai can take over. He and Maks keep their distance from me, which is a good survival technique. I will be happy to shore up his position as Pakhan after the tragic and extraordinarily brutal demise of his father.

My bride-to-be throws one arm over her head, rolling on her back. There's a thin scar that runs up the underside of her forearm. Some might think it was from a suicide attempt, but it's too long. The scar runs along the ridge of the bone. When I picture the fountain in Grishchenkov's courtyard, I know it would have come from pounding her arm against the marble, desperately trying to free herself from the water.

Regular people can go to therapy after terrible things happen. A ridiculous concept for our kind.

I had my family. Even as I lapsed into silence, they still persuaded me to talk. They forced me to be with them, they made me see that they would always be part of me.

Oksana, I suspect, has had no one to walk her through what happened. Vasiliev dragged her out of the hospital when she was still in terrible shape, angry at her for "embarrassing the family." I know why he didn't pay the ransom when she was kidnapped, a ten-year-old dragged from her life and tortured by Grishchenkov's son. It will be one more layer of suffering I will inflict on him before I finally let him die.

I'm deep in thought, settled in the armchair, when I hear the rustle of her sheets. When I look up, Oksana's eyes are open, silver in the moonlight. She doesn't try to get away, she just watches me. Finally, in a rusty little croak, she says, "Are you really here, or is this a dream?"

"I'm here." I don't move. Neither does she, clutching her pillow a little bit closer.

"Why?" Her words are half slurred with sleep.

"I wanted to see you," I say.

"Do I know you, Vadim?" She's barely awake, even so, the phrasing is curious.

"We are both of the Six Families." It's a weak evasion and she takes it as such.

"My memory is spotty, sometimes." She sits up against the headboard, bringing her pillow with her. “I have amnesia. Dissociative amnesia, the doctors said.”