Page 120 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
Lily came up behind me and dropped a kiss on the top of my head and said, in my ear, "He's a goner. You've ruined him for life. Good work."
I laughed, watery, into my grandmother's hand.
It was very late when the family began, in twos and threes, to drift out of the gallery. The candles had burned low. The cake table was a soft wreckage. Mikhail had carried Rhea to bed an hour ago with Beom-Beom under his arm, and I had kissed her hair while she was already half asleep against his shoulder. Halmoni had let Jade walk her to her room.
Daniil found me at the window.
He put his hands at my hips and bent and kissed the side of my neck once, slow, and then he said into my ear, very low, "Come."
He walked me through the quiet house to his room. His hand stayed at the small of my back the whole way, warm through the silk, steady. We passed a tall lamp on a console near the corner, and the light caught the gold band on his left hand and the gold band on mine in the same moment, two small flashes side by side, before the dark folded back over them. We did not talk. We did not need to.
He shut the door behind us. The latch clicked very small in the quiet, and I felt it land somewhere low in my belly. I could hear my own breathing now. I could hear his, slower than mine, deeper, the breathing of a man who had been holding himself together carefully all day and was just now allowing his shoulders to lower. The bedside lamp was on low. Some thoughtful soul had turned the bed down, sheets folded back into a soft white triangle.
I turned to him in the middle of the room and he did not move toward me right away. He just looked at me for a long beat, the way he had looked at me from the altar, like there was something he was still putting together inside his head about the fact of me being here, in this dress, in his room, with his name now sitting on the end of mine.
"Wife," he said, soft, like he was tasting the word.
My breath caught. "Husband."
He crossed the carpet. He did not hurry. He came close enough that I could feel the heat off his chest through the silk of my dress, and he lifted one hand and brushed a piece of hair back behind my ear with the careful deliberate slowness of a man who had decided to take all night.
He turned me, gently, by the shoulders, and stood behind me in front of the long mirror. I watched us in the glass. My hair was still pinned at the nape with my grandmother's old wooden hairpin. His ring lay light on my left hand. His mother's ring lay above it on the same finger, two small bands stacked, his and his line. His hands came to my shoulders and rested there, not pulling, just holding, his thumbs moving over the bare skin at the top of my arms in two small arcs.
"You are my wife," he said, low, into the side of my hair.
"I am."
His fingertips traced up from the top of my shoulder blade to the soft hollow at the back of my neck before he ever wentlooking for the zipper. He bent his head and pressed his mouth to that hollow, dry and warm, and held it there a beat. Then his hand slid down between my shoulder blades and found the small tab at the top of the zipper.
He took his time. Tooth by tooth. He worked it down in small careful increments, and at the same time he moved his mouth along the curve of my shoulder, an easy line of kisses, dry and reverent. I felt the cool air on my back as the silk parted, inch by inch. His knuckles brushed the bare line of my spine and I shivered. He felt it. His mouth paused at the side of my throat for one breath.
The zipper kept going. Past the small of my back. Past the curve where my hips started. The dress sighed open under his hand. He set it free at the bottom and brought both palms back up the bare line of my spine, then ran them out along my shoulders and slid the silk straps off the points of both shoulders.
"Daniil."
"Sssh."
He eased the dress off my shoulders. His palms followed the fabric down, all the way to my wrists, and the cloth went with them, and then the silk slipped soft over the small rise of my belly and pooled around my ankles. I stepped out of it. He bent and kissed the top of my left shoulder blade, just once, like a vow he was leaving on the skin.
I was standing in the things I had picked out for tonight, things that had never been worn before and would not be worn again. A pale silk camisole, the color of the inside of a shell. The smallest possible silk shorts under it, the same shade, with one thin band of lace at the top that lay just below the rise at my belly. Just for him. Just for tonight.
He stepped back one half step. He looked at me the way a man looks at a thing he is not sure he is allowed to have, andthen his face shifted into the look of a man who knew, plainly, that he was.
"Beautiful," he said. It was not a word he used often. He used it now.
"I picked it for you."
"I know."
He stepped close again. He cupped the side of my face with one hand and ran his thumb along my cheekbone, and his eyes did the slow careful sweep he did when he was committing a thing to memory.
His palm came up and settled flat over the curve at my belly, on top of the silk, fingers spread wide enough to cover almost the whole of it.
His breath stopped.
I felt it stop. His chest, against my arm, went very still for a beat. Then it started again, slow, deliberate, like he was teaching himself how to breathe with that hand there.
"Both of you," he said, very low. "Mine."
