However You Want

Chapter3

‎Sienna

I stayed exactly where he left me.

Not because he told me to. Because my legs still felt useless, and the sheets smelled like s*x and expensive cologne and something darker I could not name yet. His release was still warm between my thighs. Every slight shift reminded me how roughly he had taken me and how completely I had let him.

The apartment was quiet except for the low murmur of his voice somewhere down the hall. I could not make out the words, only the tone—controlled, clipped, nothing like the rough sounds he had made against my neck ten minutes earlier.

I sat up slowly. The city lights painted long stripes across the bed. My dress was still on the floor near the door. My underwear was somewhere on the sheets. I found it, pulled it back on, and debated standing.

*Don’t move.*

The order echoed. Part of me wanted to ignore it on principle. The larger part was still too wrecked to test him.

I heard the soft click of a door closing, then footsteps returning. Lucian appeared in the doorway still completely naked, the phone no longer in his hand. The tattoos that had looked purely decorative under bar lighting now looked like warnings in the dim room. His expression had changed. The hungry edge was still there, but something colder sat underneath it.

He stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at me for a long moment.

“You’re still here.”

“You told me not to move.”

A faint crease appeared at the corner of his mouth. “And you listened.”

I did not answer. He climbed back onto the bed, knelt between my legs, and pushed them apart with his knees. His hands settled on my thighs, thumbs stroking the sensitive skin high on the inside. The casual possession of the gesture made my stomach tighten all over again.

“Who’s Nikolai?” I asked.

His thumbs stopped.

For a second, the only sound was the distant traffic far below the windows. Then he leaned down, braced one hand beside my head, and used the other to tilt my chin up.

“No one you need to worry about.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting tonight.”

I held his gaze. “You left the bed the second his name appeared on your phone. That does not feel like no one.”

Lucian’s eyes narrowed slightly. He studied me like he was deciding how much trouble I was about to become. Then he lowered his mouth to the side of my neck and bit down—not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough to leave a mark.

I hissed.

He licked the spot once and spoke against my skin. “You’re very curious for a woman who came here for a simple fuck.”

“Maybe I changed my mind about something simple.”

Something flickered across his face. Approval. Or warning. I could not tell which.

He sat back on his heels, still between my spread thighs, and reached for the nightstand drawer. I heard the soft rustle of foil. He rolled a condom on with practiced efficiency this time—something he had not bothered with earlier—and then looked at me again.

“Last chance to leave,” he said quietly. “After that, you'll stay until morning. No discussion.”

I should have stood up, gathered my dress, and walked out while I still could.

Instead, I hooked one leg around his hip and pulled him closer.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He pushed back inside me in one slow thrust.

This time I watched every flicker of expression on his face. The way his mouth fell open. The way his control tightened. I was still sensitive from the first two rounds; I felt it in the way my body fluttered around him.

He kept the pace measured. Deep. Controlled. The opposite of the near-violence he had given me earlier. My breathing changed. Soft, broken sounds slipped out of me with every roll of his hips. He braced himself over me and spoke low against my mouth.

“You asked about Nikolai.”

My eyes opened, hazy with pleasure but still sharp.

“He’s my brother,” he said. “And the call was business. Business that does not concern you.”

It was mostly true. The rest was carefully edited. None of that needed to touch me.

Not yet.

He changed the angle and felt my thighs start to tremble. I was close again. He reached between us and rubbed tight circles over my c**t, watching me fall apart for the third time with something that felt dangerously close to satisfaction.

When I came, he followed, burying himself deep and letting the orgasm tear through him with a low groan. For several seconds he stayed inside me, forehead pressed onto mine, breathing the same air.

Then his phone buzzed again on the nightstand.

My body tensed under him.

He did not reach for it immediately. He pulled out carefully, disposed of the condom, and only then glanced at the screen.

Nikolai again. Two words.

They’re here.

I watched his entire body go still.

He stood, crossed to the walk-in closet, and pulled on black pants and a fresh shirt with efficient movements. When he stepped back into the bedroom, I was sitting up, sheets pooled around my waist, watching him with a new wariness.

“You’re leaving,” I said.

“Not for long.”

“That does not sound like a one-night-stand sentence.”

He walked to the bed, cupped the side of my face, and dragged his thumb across my bottom lip. I was flushed, marked, and still wet from him. The sight seemed to scratch something possessive in him.

“Stay in this apartment,” he told me. “Do not open the door for anyone. Do not leave. I’ll be back before sunrise.”

My eyes narrowed. “And if I don’t?”

He leaned down until his mouth brushed my ear.

“Then you’ll find out exactly who Nikolai is. And why you should have taken the chance to leave when I offered it.”

He kissed the corner of my mouth once—soft, almost careful—and walked out of the bedroom.

Behind me, I heard the sheets rustle as I stood. He did not look back.

In the hallway he pressed the phone to his ear.

I remained alone in his bed with his marks on my neck and his warning still in my ears.

I had planned to leave before dawn.

Plans, it seemed, were already changing.

And if the men who had hit their warehouse had followed any of the usual patterns, they might already know he had not spent the night alone.

That meant I was no longer just a complication.

I was a liability.

And liabilities in his world rarely walked away clean.‎