Page 110 of Immaculate Deception (Romanoff Bratva)

He releases me and presses my face into the sheets. I reach around and grab his thighs, drawing him closer as Dima grabs my wrists and uses my arms to leverage himself into me. It’s rough and dirty and I will never get enough.

I tilt my hips a little more. The next stroke is like an electric current zinging through me. It touches things I didn’t know could be touched, and I wail again into the pillow.

Dima thrusts faster. In a matter of seconds, my thighs are trembling, and yet another orgasm rips through me. My body clenches around him.

I feel Dima’s movements stutter. His thrusts become more purposeful, and when he finally releases, he collapses forward and rides out the last waves of his orgasm pressed against my back.

I’ve never felt quite so satiated or so exhausted. I thought I was tired before, but it’s nothing to the stupor that comes over me when we’re finished the second time.

I’m barely aware of Dima grabbing my towel from the floor and cleaning me up.

When he climbs in bed next to me, he pulls the blanket up under my chin and kisses my cheek. I smile and try to say something, but the words are lost in sleep.

After weeks of nightmares, I don’t have a single dream.

38

Arya

I can’t breathe.

There’s something around my neck. Hands, strong and clammy.

They’re Taras’s hands—I know it without even having to look. Choking the life out of me.

I thrash around, but my own hands are bound by my sides. I’m sweating and panicking and I want to scream so fucking badly but I can’t even draw in a breath to let it out—

My eyes open.

It’s not Taras.

It’s not anyone, actually.

I free my hands from their bindings—which turn out to be Dima’s sweaty bedsheets, not cuffs—and scrabble at my throat.

Iwasbeing choked, funnily enough. But it was Rose’s necklace doing the choking.

I’m safe. Taras is dead and gone.

I look to my side. Dima is slumbering. He’s as huge as ever, but there’s something so graceful and calm about him as he sleeps. His chest rises and falls, tattoos rippling with the motion. The ever-present downward sloping V of his eyebrows is smoothed out, softened.

He looks at peace.

I breathe out a long sigh and look down at the thin silver chain in my hand. The pendant dangles on the end of it. A half heart. Jagged where it’s broken down the middle.

A reminder that Rose’s world was split in two.

The image of her body lying slumped at the center of that tile spiral on Taras’s floor flashes before my mind’s eye.

All that blood.

And the green of her irises, so blank and vague and emotionless…

I shudder. And as I do, I feel a huge palm come to rest gently on my hip.

“Bad dreams?” Dima murmurs sleepily. His voice is husky, ragged, delicious.

“Something like that,” I answer with a sigh.

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