Page 18 of The Bratva’s Curvy Girl

I fuck her through it. Three more strokes. Then I bury myself all the way and it rips out of me. My knees almost go. I hold her there, crushed against the door, pumping into her, filling her, grinding in deep to make sure none of it goes anywhere.

We stay like that a long time. Her legs around me. Her face in my neck. My lip bleeding.

Then I set her down.

Her legs almost give out. I hold her up by the waist until they don’t. She’s staring at the middle of my chest, breathing hard, holding the halves of her ruined shirt together with both fists.

She doesn’t look at me.

“Misha’s outside with your clothes,” I tell her. “Change. He’ll drive you to class.”

“I’m applying to Yale,” she says to my chest. Her voice is shaking. “And Harvard. And anywhere else as far away from you as I can get.”

“You’re not moving to Connecticut.”

Her eyes snap up to mine. Furious. “Watch me.”

I tuck a loose braid behind her ear. She flinches. I do it anyway.

“No, baby,” I say. “You watch me.”

* * *

Misha’s in the hall with a garment bag from Neiman’s and fresh scrapes across his right knuckles. Dylan snatches the bag from him without a word and slams the bathroom door so hard the mirror rattles.

Misha sets a ring of keys on the table by my coffee. Seven. New and shiny.

“She okay?”

I wipe the blood off my lip with my thumb. “She’s perfect.”

She comes out ten minutes later in jeans and a soft gray sweater, her braids twisted up on her head, her bag over her shoulder. She doesn’t look at me. She walks straight past me to the door, and this time, I let her.

At the elevator, she stops. Turns around. Looks at me down the long hallway with her chin up and her eyes still red.

She doesn’t say anything. She just looks.

Then she gets in the elevator, and the doors close.