Page 22 of Dangerous Secrets

Using two fingers, he opened her up, fitted himself to her and thrust, harder than he intended. He gritted his teeth against the pleasure, holding his shaking torso up on one arm so he wouldn’t crush her, breathing hard through his nose.

Jesus, she was tight. Incredibly tight. A little blood drifted back up into his head. He frowned.Tootight.

He looked down at her. She looked uncomfortable, almost in pain. Goddammit.

“Charity,” he croaked. “Please tell me you’re not a virgin.”

She looked up at him, appalled. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “It doesn’t growback, does it?”

A laugh exploded out of his chest and somehow exited his dick and he collapsed on to her, laughing and coming in equally excited bursts.

Chapter Seven

Vassily stared into the fire, listening to the silence of the house. Normally, he listened to music at night. Some nights it relaxed him enough to sleep. Most nights, though, he sat in his armchair, hoping to keep the memories at bay.

He didn’t want music, or vodka or even the company of one of his men.

He neededher, needed to talk to her. Oh how he longed for that connection with Katya—with Charity. That soft female energy wrapped in such a beautiful package, truly a gift of the gods. Katya had been his soul-mate, she’d kept him going when he sank into his depressions.

He felt completely bereft, half a creature. He’d thought his heart and soul had died with Katya, but this new Katya revived them. He was whole again. Once Katya was completely his once more, he would turn back the clock. He had the power to do only what the gods could do, bring back his Katya.

Charity.

He cursed. Lately he’d caught himself several times calling Charity Katya. He stopped at the first syllable and Charity though he was calling her a cat.

He covered up by saying she reminded him of a cat. Elegant, self-contained, graceful, with brilliant clear eyes. She smiled every time.

And yet—and yet shewasKatya. Nothing would convince Vassily that Charity wasn’t the reincarnation of his very heart.

He hadn’t been able to save Katya. She’d been tossed into a pitch-black hole with ravening sharp-toothed monsters at the bottom.

The scene came to him nightly, with a drumbeat of slick sweat and panic. The scene was always the same. The frozen tundra stretching for eternity, gray and featureless, the strongest fence imaginable—ten thousand miles of frozen nothingness. No one had ever escaped alive across that endless, frozen fence.

The prisoners—most sick, dehydrated, half-starved and without enough clothes for the sub-zero temperatures—had been herded out from the train wagons like cattle. Blinking dazedly in the meager winter sunlight, the first sunlight they’d seen in ten days, they’d tumbled out of the freight wagon on unsteady limbs, half-dead already merely from the journey.

Vassily had tried to shield Katya as best he could through the endless journey. He’d given her his coat and had maneuvered her against a wall with his back to the pack to give her a modicum of privacy.

He had no food or water to give her, nor comfort. They both knew what was coming. They’d heard the stories. Vassily had once interviewed a zek from Stalin’s camps for a newspaper article.

They knew.

Katya knew.

They spoke little through the endless journey. There was little to say.

Vassily had done his best to hide Katya from the guards when they stumbled down the ramp, but it didn’t work—couldn’t work. Katya moved like a beautiful woman.

He’d put his coat over her head and ordered her to walk hunched over, like an old lady. But Katya’s beautiful ankles had been visible. And snatches of her glorious pale gold hair slid out from the tight bun to curl around her shoulders.

Vassily’s heart sank when he heard the first guard cry out, a wolf scenting fresh meat. In a second, the whole pack had descended, ripping her out of his arms, carrying her away, meat for the night.

Vassily could still hear her screams, see her slender white arm outstretched, drowning in a sea of louts. He’d fought, as hard as an intellectual could. But these were brutal men, one step up from the prisoners they guarded, and used to violence. One blow from a guard’s rifle butt and he went down like a felled bull.

He gained consciousness to the sounds of Katya’s screams. They lasted all day and all night. Through a small window in the freezing hut where the new zeks had been herded, Vassily could see the guards lined up, most with their pants open, rigid cocks out. Waiting for their turn to fuck the beautiful Moscow intellectual. Laughing and smoking. Going right back to the end of the line once they’d had their turn.

Some hadn’t seen a woman in decades.

By the second day, the screams stopped.

---