Page 44 of Runaway Queen

I went.

17

NIKOLAI

Iused her head start to try to drag some sanity back into my mind. The dark possession that filled me when I was within arm’s reach of Sofia fogged my thoughts. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to strangle her. I wanted to eat her alive. Most of all, I wanted to bury myself so deep inside her, fill her up with my cum so full, she’d never get me out.

Yesterday had given me the answer I was so desperate for. Sofia might fight me and lie to me. She might keep her secrets from me. But she wouldn’t run from me and she wouldn’t send me back to jail.

That meant, in my world, she wanted to play. I’d oblige her.

I prowled the classroom, holding myself back just long enough. I was a fair sportsman after all. I hadn’t been exaggerating. Once I found her, I was going to fuck her until she screamed. If she really thought she could evade me, it would only make it more delicious when I caught her.

I gave her a good sixty seconds before I started after her.

I’d already dismissed Bran. He’d hit it off with some teacher and wanted to go and flirt with her some more. He was useful for herding Sofia in the right direction, and of course, terrifying her, but now I needed him gone. No one would get to see Sofia bare and begging except me.

The back of the school opened out into dense woods. They were the ones I’d already chased her through a few days ago, when she’d run right into the arms of the ice hockey players who had been sneaking off school grounds. One of them had been overly interested in my littlelastochka. He might need to play a little one on one, with his head as the puck, to understand. No one touched Sofia, Ms. Rossi, or whatever it was she was called here. No one except me.

I entered the woods. It was quiet, but there was a slight rustle straight ahead.

Sticking to the path, prom queen?It was like she wanted to get caught.

The smell of the woods filled my head, comforting and new at the same time. It wasn’t the same scent as the woods of my childhood. The underlying salt of the nearby ocean and the different plants and even the soil all made things a little different. I caught a glimpse of her in her shiny, pale-pink dress. I discarded my mask, sick of the way it fogged up my breath. I wanted to feel the forest air on my skin.

Sofia was different, too. The woman running ahead of me wasn’t the same one who’d run from me seven long years ago. The first time she’d run through the woods from me, my little insurance policy, trying to get away and be a good girl for her daddy, I had only felt want for her, not anger.

Sure, she’d allowed her father to enter into talks of an arranged marriage with my brother, but we’d both known there was no chance of it happening. That was the only thing I could possibly have been angry at her for. I wasn’t angry at her for scarring my face when we were both younger, or for running away when she was supposed to be my insurance. I wasn’t even mad at her for slipping that fateful message to the trucker who had brought the De Sanctis family down on us, and started my long incarceration in Casa Nera, and then, as fate would have it, prison.

None of that mattered now. None of it compared to the white-hot anger her betrayal had bred. She’d broken not only my heart but my mind.

She zigzagged through the trees ahead of me on the trail. I could catch her easily, but it seemed wise to run off a little of my energy, and hers. I wanted her panting and spent when I finally ran her down. I wanted her to tremble.

The truths were too hard to swallow, but seeing her alive, unharmed, smiling with her students, driving to work, living her little life, had forced them down my throat.

She rounded a bend and disappeared. I charged after her. Once around the bend, I slid to a stop. The trail before me was empty, when it shouldn’t be. She’d veered off the path.

“Sofia?Lastochka, I told you to run, not hide, you had better odds that way,” I called to the dark woods around us. It was too damn dark to follow her trail.

Instead, I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds of the forest and the smell of Sofia. I could make out her perfume in the air, faint as it was. It was a scent I’d dreamed about every single night for seven years. I’d never forget it. She hadn’t changed it, I was relieved to find out. Breathing deeply, pulling her scent into my lungs, I listened.

There was a faint rustling to the left, something small and uncaring about human presence. An animal of some kind. In the other direction, there was a slower, more careful sound, like someone trying very hard not to be heard.

I lunged to the right, startling Sofia into crying out. My body slammed into hers just as she attempted to stand, and we both tipped to the pine-needled ground.

“Got you, little swallow,” I breathed against her temple as I wrestled her writhing body onto her back.

She arched her chest forward as I grabbed her hands and pulled them above her head. Straddling her thighs, I felt alive in a way I hadn’t in years. Maybe it was the chase, maybe it was just her, but my blood was pounding in my veins, and that odd sense of unreality felt better here. Everything felt more real again, just touching the woman pinned beneath me.

Like always, when it came to Sofia, she was the poison and the cure.

“Niko,” she breathed, just as one of my hands fell to her neck, so prettily framed by her new hair.

I surrounded it with my palm, pressing firmly in, restricting her breathing a little, so her eyes grew wide. Those dark-brown orbs never left me. I released her hands just long enough to pull a tie from my pocket.

I bound her hands before she could realize my intention.

“Why are you doing this? If you want to hurt me, just hurt me, don’t play all these games.”