Chapter 42: Please Don’t Stop

He rewarded her immediately....no more teasing, mouth finding her center with precision, and her whole body lifted off the bed.

He worked her slowly, thoroughly, keeping her right at the edge without letting her fall. When she was sobbing....actually sobbing, her knuckles white against the silk restraints, his name broken into syllables in her throat.....he pulled back.

"No....no, don’t stop..."

"Breathe," he said.

"Dimitri I swear to God..."

"Breathe, Eve."

She breathed. Ragged, furious breaths.

He waited until the edge dulled slightly, then reached for the drawer again.

The vibrator was small, precise, designed for exactly this kind of work. He turned it on low and watched her hips jerk at the first contact.

"Too much?" he asked.

"Not enough," she gritted out.

He turned it up.

She cried out.

He brought her to the edge twice more....each time holding her there until she was incoherent, each time pulling back before she could fall. By the third time she was past words entirely, just sound, just sensation, completely unraveled.

He set the vibrator aside.

He undressed without hurry, watching her chest heave, her body flushed and gleaming and completely his. Then he positioned himself over her, and reached down and removed the blindfold.

Her eyes took a moment to focus. When they did, they found his face, and what was in them nearly stopped his chest.

Not just arousal. Not just desperation.

Something raw and real and terrifying.

He reached down and freed her wrists from the headboard, leaving the silk loosely around them, and felt her arms come around him immediately....pulling him down, pulling him closer, her face pressing into his neck.

He lined himself up.

Pushed just the head inside.

She went completely rigid....a full body gasp, her arms tightening around him, her whole being focused on that single inch of contact.

"Dimitri..." His name in her mouth like a prayer. "Please. Please, I need...."

He held there. Just that. Just enough to feel her body stretching around him, accepting him, desperately trying to pull him deeper.

Then he withdrew.

The sound she made was devastated.

"Not yet," he said, his voice rough. Rougher than he intended. Because this was costing him too....had been costing him for five weeks, this particular denial and the willpower required was becoming genuinely architectural.

"I hate you," she whispered. Without heat.

"No you don’t."

"No," she agreed, her voice breaking slightly on the word. "I don’t."

He gathered her against him, her back to his chest, his arm around her waist. She was still trembling. He pressed his lips to her temple and held her, his body wound tight with wanting, his mind made up.

Soon.

The denial was almost over. Her body was ready....had been ready, if he was being honest, for at least a week. What he’d been waiting for was something harder to define. Something about making sure she understood, completely and irreversibly, what she was choosing when she chose him.

After tonight, after everything she’d seen and felt and still chosen, he thought maybe she understood.

He brought her over the edge with his hand, finally, properly felt her shatter with his name on her lips and his arm around her waist and his mouth at her ear telling her she was his, she was perfect, she was the only thing in this world he would burn everything for.

Afterward, she turned in his arms to face him.

Her eyes were dark and soft and certain.

"Soon," she said quietly. Not a question.

He tucked her hair back from her face.

"Soon," he confirmed.

She pressed her forehead to his chest and slept.

Dimitri lay awake, her breath warm against his skin, and thought about the man in the room at the end of the corridor who had made the mistake of threatening her. Tomorrow he would get the rest of what he needed. And then that particular problem would be permanently resolved.

Tonight he held Eve while she slept and felt something shifting in his chest, slow, tectonic, inevitable and let it move.

***

Few Days Later

POV: EVE

Eve had learned, over the past five weeks, that when Dimitri said get dressed, we’re going out with that particular flatness in his voice, asking questions was pointless.

He’d tell her what she needed to know. Nothing more.

So she’d put on the dress Marco had laid out....deep emerald, fitted, more conservative than she’d expected....and followed Dimitri to the elevator without asking where they were going. He was dressed differently tonight. No suit jacket. Dark trousers, a black shirt with the sleeves already rolled, shoes that were expensive but built for movement rather than boardrooms.

She noticed his knuckles.

He’d wrapped them. Both hands, clean white athletic tape wound with practiced efficiency from mid-palm to just below the first knuckle. She’d stared at them in the elevator and said nothing.

The drive took forty minutes.

She watched the city change outside the window....the clean geometry of the financial district giving way to older neighborhoods, wider streets, industrial architecture. Warehouses. Loading docks. The kind of area that emptied out after business hours and filled back up with different kinds of business entirely.

Marco pulled off the main road and down a service lane that dead-ended at a warehouse with no signage and two men at the door built like architecture.

Eve looked at Dimitri.

He looked back at her with those storm-grey eyes and something that might, on anyone else, have been anticipation.

"Stay close to Marco," he said. "Don’t leave his side. Don’t talk to anyone I haven’t introduced you to."

"Where are we...."

"You’ll see." He got out of the car.

****

The noise hit her before the smell did.

A wall of sound....crowd noise, bass-heavy music, something primal underneath both of it that she felt in her sternum before she understood what it was. Then the smell: sweat, concrete, iron, alcohol, and underneath it all something copper that she identified after a moment as blood.