Five hours later, and I felt like I’d never slept. We’d gotten a lift from a lonely old trucker who talked constantly. Nikolai was silent, staring at the road, his arm around me. He’d taken off the restraints but had a gun tucked into my side the whole time. I answered our driver’s questions vaguely, and tried not to freak out as the truck carried me further toward New York.
Even scarier was that I’d written my father’s number on the dirty cab door when Nikolai hadn’t been looking. A dusty scribble on the unwashed surface that I hoped the trucker would see later, and call. A tiny, pitiful cry for help? Or a call for my owner to collect me? I could hear Nikolai’s mocking voice in my ear.
After last night, I needed to get away more than ever. The tangled emotion over what had happened in the small hours was sending me crazy. Guilt crowded my head and crawled across my skin whenever I remembered Nikolai rocking against me. I hadn’t wanted to get away. I hadn’t wanted him to stop. That was the awful, terrifying truth. There was a landslide of want inside me, threatening to break free. He was the only man who had ever threatened to smash the walls I’d built and never cared about the consequences. I had to get away from him before I stopped wanting to.
“Well, what’s the grand plan now?” I asked Nikolai hours later when we stood in a small, clean motel room.
He moved around, checking the locks on the windows. He looked utterly exhausted. “We get cleaned up. Do you want to shower first, or do you want me to go? Answer quickly before I decide we should save water and do it together.” He turned to me and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll go first,” I blurted.
Peering into the bathroom, I was disappointed to find there was only one tiny window, which was nothing more than a slit near the ceiling.
“Leave the door open,” Niko called, sitting on a chair and working his boots off.
I paused. “Excuse me?”
“Did I stutter? Leave the fucking door open.”
“But… you’ll see everything,” I said faintly. Maybe I was exhausted, too, because my brain was clearly lagging.
He appraised me in a lazy inspection. “I promise not to look.”
Something simmered in my blood at the heat in his eyes. It wasn’t fear, not by a long shot, and that scared me more than anything.
“Come on, lastochka, we don’t have all day.” With that, he stood and stripped off his black t-shirt.
I froze as I took in the multitude of cuts and dark-purple bruises, visible even under all his ink. A slow, dripping wound decorated his side.
“You’re hurt,” I heard myself say. That had better not be sympathy in my damn voice.
“On any given day, just assume I’m bleeding from somewhere.” He sighed and then undid his jeans, pushing them down in one fluid movement.
Holy crap. A glimpse of long leg muscle and rounded, grabbable ass in black boxers seared across my eyes as I turned around quickly and moved behind the door. My heart pounded, and this time, it had nothing to do with the thought of getting away.
I took my clothes off quickly, leaving my underwear on. Moving to the shower, I pulled the curtain aside and turned on the rusted taps. In the mirror, I saw Nikolai. Sitting in just underwear, he had lit a cigarette and was smoking lazily. I risked a glance over my shoulder and met his eyes.
He was watching me.
I didn’t dare look lower to see his nearly naked body, even though I wanted to. I climbed behind the curtain and took my underwear off, washing them under the warm shower and rubbing at them with a little bar of soap.
I showered as quickly as I could, painfully aware of Nikolai outside the door. I wrapped the towel around me and tucked it between my breasts. Stepping out of the tub, I glanced at Nikolai’s broad, tattooed back as he sat at the table, fiddling with a dismantled gun. I turned to the mirror. My eyes were wild and huge. I didn’t look like myself at all. I looked—I searched for the right word—excited.
No, that couldn’t be it. It couldn’t. If it was, I was as messed up in the head as the psychopath in the next room.
“Beautiful,” Nikolai said quietly, a purr in his voice.
He was leaning in the doorway, naked except for black boxers. I tore my eyes from his sculpted body with effort. I had the motel comb in my hand. It was a flimsy piece of plastic that would break a second into combing my long hair.
Nikolai eyed my tight grip and smirked. “You had a better chance with the screwdriver, prom queen.”
I flushed, embarrassed to be reminded of last night. “Right. What’s the point of having a weapon if I don’t have the killer instinct? Looks like Antonio was right after all,” I muttered, rambling to deflect but only heading deeper into vulnerable territory.
Nikolai’s eyes narrowed at me, and he sauntered into the room. His body was a mess under the ink. He was hurt in multiple places; blood crusted his side, and his wrists were a gory sight. I tensed when he passed behind me, looking over my shoulder at my reflection.
“You call your father Antonio? Is there no love lost between Daddy Tony and his precious little princess?”
“Why do you care? Want to bond over our daddy issues? Didn’t you kill your father a few days ago?”
Nikolai smirked. “Jealous?” He leaned in and caged me against the counter with an arm on each side, his skin scorching hot against my bare shoulders. “Do you want to be me when you grow up?”
“I think we both saw last night that I could never be.”
“Wrong. Everyone has the killer instinct in the right circumstances. You slipped through my hands, distracted me, and got the upper hand, even if just for a second. Last night, you were impressive in more ways than one,” Nikolai said, threatening to turn the conversation back to the most embarrassing part of the night.
“Yet you’re still breathing.” I couldn’t drag my gaze from his.
In the light around the mirror, his eyes looked nearly silver. The cut in his neck from the screwdriver had opened and left a dried line of blood at some point. I’d done that. Even that turned my stomach.
He pulled my hair back from behind my ear, exposing the place where he’d cut out my father’s microchip. “You’re still bleeding.”
He reached for the first-aid kit on the counter. He had me pinned by his hips against the sink. I couldn’t move, even if I wanted to. I didn’t try. The casual ease in Nikolai’s possessive touch thrilled something dark and twisted inside me.
“Do you want to know why you didn’t act? You won’t like it,” he warned, spreading a pea of antibacterial cream on the tender skin behind my ear.
I held still, not sure what to make of his brutal tenderness. “Why?”
“Because you aren’t afraid for your life with me. Not really.” He snapped the lid back on the cream and pulled a small Band-Aid from the kit.
“You’re crazy. Of course, I am,” I responded, feeling called out and seen. I was, wasn’t I?
Maybe you’re more scared of going home and disappointing Antonio yet again?
Nikolai watched me carefully after he smoothed on the Band-Aid and brought my rapidly drying hair around to lie across my shoulders. “If you were, I’d be dead.”
“You were too strong for me. You could have taken the weapon from me at any time.” I dredged up an argument I hoped held weight. When in doubt, deflect. “Why didn’t you disarm me?”
“I guess I’m not afraid for my life with you either, lastochka. I guess I trust you.”
My mouth dropped open in shock and a strange, twisting kind of horror as I knew he was being serious.
“You shouldn’t,” I warned as he stepped back and reached into the shower to turn it back on.
I remembered the message I’d left in the dirt on the truck. My secret note…
Black guilt writhed in my chest, and anger followed.
Time might be running out for Nikolai, and he had no idea. I shouldn’t care. He’d dragged me through the woods, shot people, threatened them. I shouldn’t care at all.
He turned back to me and picked up the bloody rag of rope he’d used to tie my hands earlier. Thankfully, my long sleeves had protected most of my skin from getting too burned by it. He snapped it between his hands.
“Over here, by the shower rail,” he said shortly.
I stared at him. “I thought you trusted me.”
He let out a chuckle. “I trust you not to cut my throat in cold blood. I don’t trust you not to run away. Now, hold your hands together, and be a good girl, or I’ll take you into the shower with me.”
Unwillingly, I walked toward him. It was an old showerhead fixed over a rusty tub. A pole ran down one side and around the top, where the ratty shower curtain hung. He tied my hands in front of me and looped them over the pole. Thankfully, my towel didn’t budge. I’d rolled it and tucked it into the valley between my breasts as if my life depended on it.
He moved away and turned toward the shower, dropping his boxers in a fluid motion. I got an eyeful of his muscled, golden-skinned ass before blinking my eyes shut.
“What the hell?” I muttered, the shower curtain drawing back with a metallic ring.
As the water splashed, I risked opening my eyes. He was right there, at the other end of the bath. His head was under the running shower, and rivulets of gleaming water slipped down his impressive body. He was turned toward the wall, resting his hands on it, and for one long, uninterrupted moment, I was free to stare.
Then his eyes snapped to mine as he tilted his head toward me.
“Why are you making me watch you shower?” I demanded, but the heat in my voice had disappeared, sliding down inside me to pool between my legs.
I had to be a special kind of insane, because the sight of Nikolai Chernov, dripping wet, with a long, thick hard-on straining up his belly had me squirming and panting like the twenty-two-year-old virgin I was. I had no experience with this kind of thing. I was totally out of my depth.
“How can I keep an eye on you if I can’t see you? Besides, I never said you had to watch.”
He soaped his hands and washed his body. The white bubbles fizzed against his inked skin, and I couldn’t have looked away if someone paid me. He turned back to the wall and washed, keeping me in sight but otherwise ignoring me.
I glanced away and tried to calm my racing heart. After a few seconds, my gaze always drifted back to him. He’d turned for a second, twisting his back toward me, and deep dimples pitted the top of his ass where his back met his hips. He shifted, one hand moving lower across his hard-packed abs and lower still, gripping his balls. His cock was long and thick, with a full mushroom-shaped top. Heavy veins worked up the long column, and it was flushed a reddish-purple like it was angry. His hand moved on the rigid shaft, up and down.
Is he going to jerk himself off right here, with me watching?
Just the thought made me feel faint. I looked away, clearing my throat.
He chuckled, and I blushed even more.
“You can look your fill. Hell, you can touch if you want to…”
“You’re a pig. Do you get off on being watched?” My challenge was just an excuse to look back. My gaze instantly fastened on the hard-packed muscles of his powerful abdomen and the head of his cock, bobbing well past his belly button. That was a good nine inches there. Christ. I needed a bucket of ice water to stick my head in.
“Depends on who’s watching, I suppose. If the watcher is you? Then fuck yes, I get off on it.”
He lowered his soapy hand between his legs, fisting his thick cock and stroking it from root to the round tip. He leaned a shoulder against the tile, his eyes burrowing into me.
I blinked and looked away, my cheeks burning. My breath rushed in and out of my chest like I’d been running. Something hot moved through me as I stood there, the man who’d haunted my dreams and nightmares in equal measure pumping his hand up and down his hard-on.
“Look at me, Sofia. I know you want to.”
“No, I don’t.”
His chuckle only made me blush even more. “Liar,” he murmured and then sighed. “After the day I’ve had, and of course, being around you constantly, I’m going to need to take the edge off before we sleep. Look away if you don’t want to see,” he said, a note of amusement in his voice that I didn’t trust myself to answer.
Instead, I gave him the finger as best I could with my bound hands and closed my eyes exaggeratedly. My ears strained for sounds, and curiosity roared inside me. I felt offended and turned on. I couldn’t deny it. It was just like Nikolai to do whatever the hell he wanted.
He knows you want him, the voice inside my head whispered knowingly.
I ground my teeth and tried to deny it, even though it seemed impossible. A sound cut through the fall of water, a low, masculine groan. It set my blood on fire. Why was this turning me on? I had no idea, and yet, I couldn’t deny that the thought of him beating off right there, and all I had to do to see was open my eyes, was twisting me inside out. He grunted, and the sound of wet, rhythmic movements filled the air.
“Fuck,” Niko muttered between clenched teeth. He was going to come.
Before I knew it, my eyes were open. He had one arm braced against the tile, and the other working his huge dick with powerful strokes. His hips were bucking into his hand, his long back bent over his task as water poured across the tattoos decorating nearly every inch of his torso.
“That’s right, Sofia, eyes on me,” Niko grunted as my eyes finally met his.
At the shock of the connection between us, a shiver went through Nikolai, and a stream of obscenities left him as he came hard. His cock jerked, and long ribbons of cum shot over his hand, up his belly, and onto the bath floor.
His eyes never left mine. It was shockingly, crudely intimate, and I couldn’t have looked away if the police had stormed in at that very moment and freed me from my captor. The urgency of his look made me feel like he was coming inside me, instead of on the other side of the bath. It almost felt odd not to feel his hot, thick spend dripping down my leg. The satisfied, intense expression on his face was such a thorough claiming.
“So, I guess you do get off watching?” His voice was amused and sated.
Heat stained my cheeks as I jerked my eyes from the sight of his cum-streaked hand still holding his fat length. Even after coming, it hardly seemed to have softened.
“You’re the only one getting off, Niko.”
“You want to hop in here, then? I’d hate to leave you high and dry.”
I felt angrier at his chuckle.
He was right, I couldn’t hide from him. Somehow, he saw beneath every defense I’d ever been able to hold in front of him.
“I might have watched, but that doesn’t mean it turned me on,” I said, sounding prim and inexperienced even to my own ears.
Now Niko tipped his head back and laughed. “Sofia, you crack me up, sweetheart. I could make a liar out of you right now, slide my hand up under that towel and check that statement for myself, but I won’t. Not unless you beg me to.”
He threw me a wicked smirk and turned away to grab the tiny motel shampoo bottle, leaving me with the glorious sight of his muscled ass to feast my eyes on.
I raised my chin and held my tongue, not trusting myself to speak. Choosing a spot on the tile where black mold was growing tendrils, I deliberately turned away. I stared at it hard, ignoring my curiosity and burning desire to look back at him.
Later, I lay on one side of the bed, sheets pulled up to my neck, watching Nikolai patch up his various wounds. He’d skipped the small Band-Aids in the kit and gone for the other thing he’d stolen from the gas station. A role of silver duct tape. He wrapped a thick cut in his shoulder with it, patting it smooth. I was intrigued by his toughness. It wasn’t an act, like a lot of men in my family put on. Silvio, my cousin, was a good example. Nikolai was genuinely tough.
He ignored a dozen cuts that I thought should be treated and only focused on the ones that were bad enough to drip a constant stream of blood. I cringed at the thought of him ripping off the duct tape at a later date.
He’d lit another cigarette in the bathroom, dragging nicotine into his lungs as he patched himself up. I coughed as the smell reached me. The smell wasn’t off-putting. I was used to it at home, but tonight, it irritated my lungs.
He raised an eyebrow at me, catching my gaze on him in the mirror.
“Those things will kill you, you know,” I muttered.
He let out a bark of a laugh. “So? You should tell me to smoke ten at once in that case.”
Right. I’m meant to want this man dead. I should want him dead. He’d hauled me all over the woods, held a gun to my back, and threatened to shoot me. He’d shot Gino, poor, innocent, inept Gino.
“Whatever, knock yourself out,” I muttered and turned onto my back, careful to keep the sheets high.
I had nothing but my underwear to sleep in. I’d dried it out with the hairdryer. The rest of my clothes needed a lot longer and would probably still be damp tomorrow when I put them back on. I shivered at the thought of tomorrow. What was going to happen? Had my father gotten my message?
“Here, drink this. You must be thirsty,” Nikolai said, opening a bottle of mineral water and passing it to me.
I was beyond thirsty. Now that he’d mentioned it, the desire to drink roared to life. I accepted the bottle and took a long swallow and then another. I gulped the cool liquid.
Nikolai appeared on the other side of the bed, finally clean and patched up. It was still early, yet both of us were ready to sleep. A silent agreement. Nikolai’s dark-ringed eyes seemed to grow heavier and heavier as time ticked by, and I needed a break from his wolfish gaze on me. Being around the youngest Chernov was unsettling and always had been. I felt too much; my skin tingled, and my senses were heightened. It was exhausting. Worse still, all the constant touching and glimpses of his hotter-than-hell body, not to mention the scene in the shower, had my skin feverishly hot and my panties damp. I was in a constant state of being turned on and terrified at the same time. I’d die if he found out the former.
I clutched the sheet when Nikolai attempted to pull it back. “I don’t have clothes on.”
“Not my problem,” he pointed out flatly.
“A gentleman would sleep on top of the covers, or better still, on the chair over there.” I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell that Nikolai would do that, but it felt good to point it out. Someone had to remember how crazy all this was. Something rational should send a message to my pathetically curious body that this man was my captor and enemy.
Nikolai laughed heartily and tugged the covers back. “You have a great sense of humor, lastochka. I don’t know if anyone has ever told you that before.”
“They haven’t, and I wasn’t joking.”
Nikolai tutted. “Then no one in your life appreciates good comedy.” He dropped his towel.
I twisted my head to stare at the ceiling, heat flooding my cheeks.
“I guess they don’t get you like I get you,” he said, climbing into the bed beside me.
The mattress dipped, tempting me to roll into him. His warmth filled the cavern under the sheets immediately.
“You don’t get me,” I protested darkly.
“Sure I do. I’d bet I’m the only one in your life who does,” Niko said matter-of-factly. His tone pissed me off.
I turned on my side after checking that he was covered. Crap, just the thought that he was naked and only an arm’s reach from me was doing something to my belly, sending it liquid and warm.
“Okay, then. What do I feel, if you know me so well?”
Nikolai cracked his knuckles, and I stared at the ink on his fingers and the backs of his hands.
“You’re bored and lonely, locked up in that compound of yours, like a princess in a tower,” he said quietly. He turned his head to pin me to the spot with those disturbing gray eyes. “You’re trapped in a cage, a pretty bird for Antonio De Sanctis to trot out and display… my little swallow with clipped wings.”
Sudden unwanted tears burned in my throat. I felt that strange connection to Niko hum to life again as we stared at each other. My desperation to get away had faded somewhat, knowing that I’d set something into motion that would see me saved. Swapping one devil for another. The knowledge that soon everything would be back to normal in my heavily controlled, unadventurous, dull life. A boring march onward toward marriage to a stranger I didn’t love and death at the end of the road. Nothing felt exciting. After the last few days with Niko, I doubted anything would ever feel exciting again.
A little swallow with clipped wings. He had no idea how right he was.
“Wow, so insightful. It doesn’t take a genius to guess that someone with a paranoid, powerful father like mine would be locked away. Tell me something less obvious,” I challenged him.
He was quiet, mulling over his words for a long moment. “You want something to happen to you. You want to be free, but you also want to hide. You’re afraid, not just of never being free… but of the opposite as well. A little bird with clipped wings in the real world won’t go far. A domesticated animal that forgot how to survive in the wild. You long for freedom, but you fear it, too. The cage is inside here.”
His finger tapped my forehead, and I jerked my head away.
Bingo. I hated how well he saw me. “You’re wrong,” I managed to say after a moment. That same emotion burning in my throat. “That’s not me,” I lied. I couldn’t let him know how right he was, even though I was pretty sure he knew. “Maybe it’s you,” I added, trying to rile him.
Nikolai was silent so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer me. “It’s not my wings that are clipped, lastochka, it’s my heart that’s defective, and my cage isn’t something I can ever escape. It’s made of bones and buried deep.”
Those words sent that burn of feeling roaring back to life in my throat. I swallowed, trying to shift it. There was something unbearably sad and tragic about Nikolai Chernov, and there always had been. Wasn’t that the very thing that had drawn me so effortlessly to him five years ago? His beauty and his tragedy, his strange personal code of honor and his darkness. I’d seen them all, all the disjointed, misshapen parts that made up this dangerous man.
“Are you going to New York to kill your brother?”
He shifted. “I don’t know. Should I? He’d make a good pakhan. Better than me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Nikolai was the most unpredictable person I’d ever met. Things that motivated the men in my family didn’t motivate him. He didn’t seem interested in money, and by the sounds of it, power wasn’t attractive either. He had plenty in his own right, but the power to command other men was usually a universal fantasy, or so living with my father and cousin had led me to believe. Nikolai wasn’t anything like them while being just as deadly at the same time.
“So, why are we going to New York?”
“Because it’s my move, and New York is the board we play on. Enough questions. We need to sleep.”
I felt him shift, and my lingering thoughts flew from my head. A hot hand came to rest on my stomach, and I tensed.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my voice a frantic whisper.
He had turned toward me, and now his breath fanned against the side of my face. Awareness tore through my every nerve.
“I can’t let you sleep like this beside me, wait until I’m out and creep away. You know that, Sofia,” he said quietly.
I swallowed a hard knot of tension and dizzying heat. “So, what are you going to do?” I couldn’t get the promise from last night out of my head. I’ll pin you in place with my cock, and you can fall asleep on it. My body betrayed me by warming at the thought.
“I could tie your arms above your head to the bedframe, but it’ll be uncomfortable, or I could tie you to me. Your choice.”
I turned to look at him finally and jolted when I realized how close he was. This close, I could see the silver streaks in his gray eyes and the thickness of his dark eyelashes, resting like fans against his golden skin. Really, those eyelashes were completely unfair on a man.
I should try to get away in the night, shouldn’t I? Being tied to him would be more comfortable, but then how would I have a chance?
“I choose the headboard,” I said quickly.
He studied me for a moment longer, and then his full lip quirked upward. “To me it is, then.”
“What? Why? That’s the opposite of what I chose,” I protested as he reached for my hands.
“You might be good at hiding your thoughts around the other people in your life, but not around me. I see you. And yes, in answer to your obvious thought process, it will be harder to get away if you’re tied to me,” he said.
I pushed his hands away, fighting him as he twisted his upper body over me. He locked my hands to my sides, his bare chest pressing against my bra.
He was so huge and heavy and smelled so male. At that moment, my strength left my body. He smelled like the woods, and a hint of smoke, underlaid with a masculine musk that dragged at my senses. I couldn’t put my finger on the scent. There was nothing like it. It was just him. My belly grew warmer at the lungful I took of him as he pressed against me, holding me down.
“Don’t play with me right now, Sofia, unless you really mean it.” My hands shook at his soft growl.
I didn’t know if I was pushing against his grip or fighting my desire to reach for him. I couldn’t even imagine my father’s face at finding out his perfect, untouched trophy daughter had been fucked by Nikolai Chernov.
His body was hard on mine, and I distantly realized that I could feel his hard-on, bare and wet at the tip, pressing against my thigh. How easy it would be to squirm more against him and let him force his way between my legs. I could even pretend that I didn’t want him to if it made it easier to explain later. He could force my legs apart with his thickly muscled thigh, rip my panties down, and sink inside me. Like he’d been my first kiss five years ago, he could be my first everything.
I swallowed thickly as conflicting thoughts warred in my head.
Nikolai waited, seeming to sense that I was wrestling with my darkness. If there was anyone who understood that, it was him.
“Enough,” he said after a long moment, his voice deeper than ever. “Give me your wrists.”
Just like that, he took the choice off my shoulders. It stung like a rejection. He wrapped the tie around my wrists gently, making it far too loose, and then bound the end around his wrist, pulling it together much tighter.
With my hands bound before me, pressed together in an obscene prayer gesture, he tugged me to my side, and I found myself lying on his shoulder, my hands clasped together on his broad chest. His scent and warmth made me feel things I never let myself feel. His other hand came around my back, and he tugged me closer.
I didn’t know what to say. It felt too intimate, too tender. It felt worse than if he’d forced himself anywhere else, strangely. It felt caring, and I couldn’t cope with that from this brutal, dangerous man. It was more dangerous than any other depraved thing I’d seen him do.
“Don’t overthink it, Sofia. Sleep now.”
“I can’t sleep in new places,” I muttered.
Despite my words, my eyes were growing heavier and heavier. I wasn’t lying. I had trouble sleeping at the best of times. I took sleeping tablets at home to manage a few hours. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept without them.
“Do you want to hear a bedtime story?” Nikolai said. There was something comforting about his voice.
The gently mocking question should have pissed me off, and it shouldn’t have worked, but it did. I was getting more and more sleepy. I should be too scared to sleep. I should work on getting away, but my body was sinking into a warm river, threatening to wash me downstream. I knew this feeling.
“You drugged me? Motherfucker,” I muttered.
“I couldn’t have you getting away again, prom queen.”
I snorted softly, my words unfiltered. “You don’t need me, Niko, and we both know it. I’m nothing to you.”
He took so long to answer. I jerked awake again when he murmured, “You’re wrong, Sofia. You’re still my prize, and you always will be.”
I felt myself drifting only moments later, my consciousness slipping away, but not before I felt Nikolai lightly press his face against the top of my head and inhale.
Then there was only darkness.
