Page 42 of City Of Thieves
“Your language drops along with your mask when you’re backed against a wall,dolcezza.We should try the hot water next and see what happens.” With this, he rams his hand against the faucet again. “Hell, maybe this will melt you back to life.”
A beat later, scalding heat is stripping the cold from my skin and flowing like lava through my veins, along with something else I’d rather die than ever acknowledge.
“Are you working for Vasily Belov?” he demands, slamming my wrists against the tiles again. “Is that why he sent me to you?”
Belov.The last name makes me shiver despite the heat. “I have no idea who you’re talking about!”
“Is he the reason you have the Bratva tattoo on your skin, or maybe that’s his brother Oleg’s doing?”
“The tattoo was a stupid mistake during high school. I was grounded for a week because of it.” I glare back, watching as he shakes his head with a twisted smile on his face.
“You’ve told so many lies, Tatiana, you wouldn’t know the truth if it bled you dry. If you were a man, I would have tortured this out of you by now.”
“I don’t know anyone named Belov!”
“Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. But you’re wrong about one thing…” He takes a half-step closer, pressing his chest against mine, something even harder nudging against my stomach and sending another shiver coursing through me. “I don’t just seemypain, Tatiana. I see yours, too. I saw it the moment I stepped into your art gallery and found you hiding amongst your paintings. Somewhere along the way, you chose to lose yourself in them because the alternative of living in the real world was too fucking awful to contemplate.”
Inhaling sharply, I let his words plant poisonous vines inside me as the lock to another of my box of secrets shatters.
“Am I getting close yet, Empress?” he says, his mouth hovering right over mine, hot water spilling all around, making us one. “Because as pretty as those canvasses are, I much prefer your truth.”
I go to laugh in his face, but my composure crumbles. I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve lost, sitting all alone in Moscow, clutching the brown teddy bear I gave her the night she was born.
A beat later, I’m crying again.
Hating him again.
Spilling my heart and fears to him again.
“He won’t let me see her!” I scream, helplessly. “He won’t let me see her!”
“Who won’t?” he demands. “Who are you talking about?”
“I can’t tell you!”
“Goddamn it!” The grip on my wrists tightens, and then my next words are caught in the snare of his lips as his mouth is smashing down onto mine.
My body responds like the worst kind of traitor, straining against my restraints to press myself against him, accepting his rough intrusion, groaning as his hands drop to cup my jaw as he deepens the kiss, driving an unforgiving tongue inside me.
My arms find their way around his neck as he pushes me back against the tiles, hungering for something I haven’t wanted in forever myself, his touch numbing all my doubt.
“Fuck,” he hisses, pulling back to look at me for a second, before he’s claiming my mouth again—our mutual canvas of hate stripping back to reveal the sketches of our lust underneath. “Jesus Christ.”
His hand moves between my legs, and I moan into his mouth, keeping my eyes shut tight from the stinging water as I clutch at his wet forearms to keep myself upright. Sliding my panties to the side, he thrusts one finger inside me as my leg curls around his thigh to give him all the access he wants.
“I need to taste you right now,dolcezza,” I hear him snarl, his urgency making me moan with desire.
As if he’d give me any choice.
I feel so fragile in his hands, a shell cracked open by a brutally handsome force of nature.
I feel safe for the first time in years.
With the water still falling, he sinks to his knees, hooking his thumbs into my panties and dragging them down with him. Coaxing my leg around his shoulder, he spreads me wide with his fingers and wraps those talented lips around my clit.
My lower back jackknifes away from the tiles as the sensation reverberates in every nerve. “Oh, God.”
I tip my head back, my fingers tangling up in his wet hair as he slides me over his face, burying his tongue inside me, fucking me for a few leisurely strokes, then letting his own fingers take over, pressing in one, and then two. Massaging a spot that makes my knees buckle. At the same time, he’s back circling my clit again, alternating it with vicious sucks as my head spins wildly. I can’t even feel the water anymore. It’s nothing compared to the molten heat in my core, spilling out onto his face and down my thighs.
