Page 56 of Kazimir

“Overwhelmed?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, honest because it was the only currency he accepted from me. “But not the bad kind.”

“That is enough,” he murmured, and the bass line swelled like it agreed. I sank deeper into him and remembered the girl who had slowed her mopping of the diner floor at closing time because she didn’t want to spend another night at home alone. I watched the club feed its people without ever letting them starve for the important things: choice, safety, permission to feel hunger without shame. I felt the vows still humming on my skin. If war came, they would be shields and spears around us. If it didn’t—if by some miracle the world took a breath and decided not to break tonight—then this was a kind of peace I wanted to memorize down to the exact scent notes.

I turned and pressed my palm to his chest, over the place where his heart didn’t beat like mine but existed, steady and relentless anyway. “Thank you,” I whispered, so quietly that it got lodged just under his jaw. He turned his head and kissed my temple, then the corner of my mouth.

“Always,” he said.

Below us, the club opened its throat and began to sing.

I didn’t mean to turn on his lap like a starving thing. It just happened—the kind of inevitability that had nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with the way his hands bracketed my hips as if they’d been built for that job and no other. One second I was watching the club learn its own breath; the next I was turned around, knees digging into the arms of his throne, kissing him like I was done pretending I could live anywhere but his mouth.

He tasted like winter and smoke and the first promise of something that would ruin me in the ways that counted. His lips were patient at first, coaxing, testing how far I’d let him pull me open. I answered the only way that made sense—by taking more. My fingers tunneled into his hair and found the place at the nape where it turned silkier, and I tugged until he groaned into me, that low, controlled sound he made when he decided to stop pretending he wasn’t made of want.

“Easy,” he murmured, though his hands slid from my hips to cup the curve of my ass and held me down against the hard line of him. “I will lose the last shreds of my dignity.”

“You don’t need them,” I said into his mouth, then pulled back enough to see his face. The purple light carved his cheekbones into something that would have made a lesser woman a puritan. For a moment, everything inside me went quiet. “I don’t know how to say thank you in a way that tells the truth,” I said, the words raw and unadorned. “Six months ago, I slept on a cot in a room that smelled like bleach and fear. I ate soup out of paper cups and thought loneliness was a way of life instead of a feeling. I woke up every day with nothing. And tonight I stood by a king and watched people who don’t even know me promise to keep me alive. You did this. You turned my life from ash into…into something that has shape and warmth.”

He stilled the way he did when language mattered. The club throbbed under us; light shifted; laughter lifted and fell. “You did this,” he said softly. “I am only the man who recognized it.”

“Maybe,” I allowed, swallowing the lump that tried to climb into my voice. “But I need you to hear that I was a ghost with skin, and now I’m—” I didn’t have a word for what I was. A woman with wings that remembered the sky; a mate with a vampire’s claim ringed around her throat. “Now I’m home.”

His eyes flared, pupils wide. “Then show me,” he said, and the request wasn’t a command so much as a key he slid into my ribcage and turned.

I rocked against him, slow and deliberate, until the buttons of his trousers became a lesson in friction I wanted to memorize. The music below reached up and slipped its tempo under my skin, and I moved to it without shame. His breath shortened. My dress bunched higher with every shift of my knees, the fabric dragging up my thighs.

When his hand found the hem and slipped beneath, I didn’t stop him. I spread for him instead, shameless as the woman I had been with him since I realized I was his and he was mine. His fingers skimmed the tops of my thighs and then higher, along the seam of my panties where heat pooled and pooled until I thought it might overrun me. He found me slick and trembling and made a sound that had nothing to do with culture or self-control.

“Bozhe moi,” he whispered. “You have ruined me for anyone but you.”

“Good,” I said, a laugh riding my breath and breaking apart when his middle finger slid through my wetness. “I plan to be greedy with you.”

“Happily,” he replied, and circled my clit in a rhythm that married the bass line’s throb to the steady purpose of a man who always kept his word. I buried my face in his neck, biting down on a groan, and tasted the cool edge of his skin. He worked me until my legs shook and my grip on his shoulders turned into claw marks he’d wear like jewelry later. He could have made me come right there, above his entire kingdom, and I would have let him. Instead, he pulled his hand away, and I made a sound that might have embarrassed me if I’d had any dignity left to lose.

“No,” he said, voice midnight-dark. “Not here. I want you spread out under me. I want every sound.” Then he stood with me clinging like a shadow, and the way he lifted me made something utterly animal purr low in my belly. One arm under my thighs, one at my back, he took the private staircase to the third floor like I weighed nothing, like gravity had finally agreed to cooperate. The guard at the base looked down respectfully at his own shoes. The corridor smelled like old paper and polished wood. The hush felt like a cathedral where nobody lied.

He kicked the office door shut behind us. The room breathed around us in shadow and amber. He’d tinted the glass wall that looked down onto the club’s main floor a smoky gray. The desk—an inheritance older than most countries—wore a single ring of light, as if it, too, had a halo. But it was the sofa I wanted—broad and low, upholstered in leather so soft my fingertips tingled with excitement for what I was about to do.

“Sit,” I told him.

The word snapped in the air. Some small, crooked part of me waited for resistance. He only arched an eyebrow like I’d amused him, then sank onto the couch like a king choosing to kneel in private. I followed him down, but not to his side. I dropped to my knees between his spread thighs, the carpet plush enough to cradle my bones, and pushed his jacket back off his shoulders with hands that didn’t tremble so much as hum. I undid the buttons of his expensive dress shirt and removed his cufflinks and carefully laid them next to me. I gave each sleeve a pull, removing his shirt, then sat back a moment and admired his beautifully chiseled chest and abs.

“You didn’t happen to know Michelangelo did you?”

He watched me with that grave attention he never spared for anyone else, wondering at my question. I slid my palms along his thighs, up from the sharp line of his knee to where the muscle thickened. He was hard under my touch even through the fabric, cock straining against the remaining buttons, and I took a second just to press my mouth to him through the cloth, a kiss that was more claim than tease. His breath stopped. Mine did not.

“But you couldn’t have been the model for his David. Based on this…”

I worked the closures with fingers that had learned patience in other lives, then freed him. The sight of him—thick, long, the head already slick and blushed a deeper color than the rest—pulled a curse out of me that would have had choir directors yanking on my ear in other centuries.

“So fucking beautiful,” I said, because it was true, and because he let my honesty feed him as efficiently as my blood ever would. I worked his trousers down until they were on the floor and out of my way.

His mouth twitched. “You will be the end of me.”

“Not tonight,” I murmured, and leaned in. I licked the bead of pre-come from the tip with a wide, slow drag of my tongue, savoring the taste—salt with a faint sweetness I could have hunted in a blindfold. He groaned, head falling back against the cushion, throat bared, which made me want to bite him. I wondered what that meant. His hand flexed in my hair but didn’t guide. I set my own pace.

I took him into my mouth as far as I could without triggering my gag reflex, breathing through my nose, the heft of him filling me better than any word. One hand wrapped around the base to keep the rhythm even, the other sliding to cup the weight of his balls, rolling them gently in my palm, giving counterpoint to the suction of my lips. I drew back slowly, slicking him with saliva, then plunged down again, tongue flattened, pressure constant. The wet sounds were obscene in the kind of way that made my core clench—obscene because there was nothing concealed about what I wanted to give him.