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I will spank that pretty ass red until you cannot sit in your panties for a week.

Heat shoots down my spine and pools between my thighs. I can picture the exact narrowing of his eyes as he types it.

Lev

What are you wearing under that skirt right now?

I think of the red lace set I put on this morning, barely there, and my breathing goes shallow.

Come back and unwrap it yourself. It is a surprise.

Lev

Take it all off and wait for me inside that surprise.

Shame and filthy anticipation crash through me at the same time. I press my thighs together under the desk against the ache and refuse to back down.

Then one more line arrives.

Lev

You still have not fixed your emergency contact.

I stare at it. Then I type, before I can talk myself out of it:

It is already right.

I read the two words back, I see exactly what I have just admitted, and I send them anyway.

I’m halfway through composing a filthier, braver line when the office door swings open.

A woman stands in the doorway, and every clever thing in my head goes quiet. She is tall and slender and pale in a way that looks lit from inside, everything I’m not, her hair a soft flaxen, her eyes a gentle cornflower blue. She could be thirty. She could be fifty. There’s no telling with her.

“I’m here to see Lev,” she says, and she says his first name the way you say a name you have worn smooth with years of use.

The easy familiarity of it lands somewhere low and cold in my chest. Nobody says his name like that. His men call him Pakhan and swallow the rest. His clients say Mr. Volkov and hold their breath. This woman says Lev as though it belongs to her, as though she has moaned it across a pillow a thousand times, and I hate that I noticed the difference at all.

I put on my assistant voice. “I’m sorry, he’s out of the office at the moment. Did you have an appointment?”

“I don’t need one.” She smiles, gentle and certain of herself. “Tell him Miss Lebedeva is here.”

The name is on no list I keep. We do get guests who arrive without appointments, but they are always broad, dangerous men in dark coats, never someone like her.

I step to the side and call him. He picks up on the second ring.

“Miss me already?” His voice is warm, teasing.

“There is a visitor here for you,” I say, keeping it level. “She has no appointment. She gave the name Miss Lebedeva.”

Dead silence pours down the line. It stretches long enough that I check the screen to make sure the call has not dropped.

“Who did you say?” he asks at last, and his voice has changed completely, gone low and raw and strange, as though I pressed on a bruise he forgot he was carrying.

“Miss Lebedeva,” I repeat. Across the room the woman watches me, and her mouth curves faintly, patient.

“Keep her there,” he says. “I’m coming.”

A chair scrapes hard on his end, and I hear his footsteps moving fast. He hangs up before I can get out another word.