Chapter 6
1199 Words
Chapter Six: Hunger Beneath the Silence
The storm broke at midnight.
Not in the sky, but in her.
Lena lay on her side in the enormous bed, the sheets tangled around her hips, her bare legs stretched out against the cool linen. Her hair spilled across the pillow like ink, damp at the temples. Sleep refused to come. Her heart refused to still.
It had been a quiet dinner.
Too quiet.
Nikolai hadn’t spoken more than a few words. But she’d felt his gaze on her like a touch that never landed—watching, measuring, holding back a hunger he never named aloud. He was restraint wrapped in silk. And she, for all her sharpness, was starting to burn for it.
The sketch she had touched still lived in her mind. Her own addition—the scar—lingered like a confession. A wound only she could mark. A piece of him she’d taken.
She wasn’t sure what disturbed her more:
That he had let her.
Or that she had wanted to leave something on his version of her.
A mark of her reality on his obsession.
With a frustrated sigh, Lena pushed the sheets aside and rose from the bed. She didn’t bother with a robe this time—just padded barefoot through the villa in a black camisole and silk shorts that felt more like skin than clothing. The moonlight turned the marble floors silver, her reflection flickering across glass and shadow as she moved.
She wasn’t sure where she was going.
Until her feet stopped at his studio door.
This time, she didn’t hesitate.
The door was already cracked open.
He was waiting again.
Nikolai stood near the canvas, a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, his shirt unbuttoned at the throat. Candlelight flickered across the muscles of his forearms as he turned to look at her—calm, unreadable, and utterly aware of her body, her mood, her fire.
“You don’t sleep,” she said softly.
“Not when I’m thinking.”
“About me?”
“Always.”
The words should’ve chilled her.
But they didn’t.
She stepped into the room, her arms loose at her sides. “You said you wanted me to surrender.”
He set the glass down. “I did.”
“And if I do… what happens next?”
He didn’t move.
Didn’t smile.
He only said, “You stop running from what you already want.”
Her breath caught.
And that was the beginning.
**
He kissed her like an artist would.
No rush. No mess. Just slow precision—each movement calculated to draw something out of her. He cupped her jaw with one hand, brushed his thumb beneath her lip, and lowered his mouth to hers like he was about to ruin a masterpiece and relish every second of it.
Lena let herself fall into it.
Not passively.
Not as a woman being seduced.
But as a woman who had decided—finally—to answer fire with fire.
She kissed him back harder. Bit his bottom lip. Dug her fingers into his hair.
Nikolai groaned softly, the sound low and dark in his throat. “Careful,” he warned, pulling her closer. “I won’t be gentle.”
“I’m not asking for gentle,” she whispered.
**
They didn’t make it to the bed.
Nikolai lifted her onto the table beside the canvas. Charcoal sticks clattered to the floor. Her head tilted back as his mouth traced her collarbone, down her chest, to the place just beneath her ribs where breath turned into trembling.
“You don’t have to understand this,” he murmured, voice rough. “Just feel it.”
Lena closed her eyes as his hands slid beneath the silk waistband of her shorts. She wasn’t used to being touched like this—like she wasn’t a body, or a trophy, or a fantasy.
He touched her like she was his.
Not in the way others had tried to claim her.
But like she was already part of him.
Like he’d been building toward this moment since the first stroke of the first sketch.
And maybe he had.
She gasped as he slid inside her—slow, deep, unrelenting.
No pretense. No lie.
Just need.
Just him.
Her nails raked down his back as he moved—harder, faster, until she wasn’t sure where she ended and he began. Her name spilled from his mouth like worship. Her moans echoed off the studio walls. And when it was over, when they collapsed in a tangle of breath and sweat and heat, Lena stared up at the cracked ceiling above the studio and knew something had changed.
She had crossed a line.
And there was no going back.
**
She woke hours later in his bed.
Not the guest suite. His.
The sheets smelled like cedar and turpentine and him.
Nikolai wasn’t beside her, but his warmth lingered in the fabric. On her skin.
She sat up slowly, brushing her hair back. Her body ached, but not from pain. From intensity. From being taken and seen and made into something alive again.
She rose and wrapped herself in one of his button-down shirts, then padded barefoot into the hallway. It was still dark. Still silent.
Except for the sound of music.
Not the jagged kind from before.
But something haunting. Gentle. Played only for her.
She followed it down the corridor to the east terrace.
Nikolai sat at the piano again, fingers ghosting over the keys. He didn’t look at her when she approached. Didn’t speak.
Lena stood there in his shirt, arms folded, watching him.
He finished the piece with a final, lingering note that hung in the air like smoke.
Then turned his head.
Their eyes met.
“You came back,” he said.
“I never left.”
A pause.
“Do you regret it?”
“No.”
She walked closer, her voice quiet. “But I need to know something.”
“Ask.”
“This isn’t just about obsession for you… is it?”
He didn’t blink. “It started that way.”
“And now?”
He looked at her like she was already the answer.
And then, simply, “Now… it’s devotion.”
She exhaled. “And what am I supposed to do with that?”
Nikolai stood, walked over to her, and placed his hands gently on her hips.
“Whatever you want,” he said. “But you can’t pretend this doesn’t belong to you now.”
He touched her chest. Her heart.
Then his own.
“I would burn everything I own to keep this.”
Her lips parted.
Because somewhere in the depths of her chest, she realized she wasn’t afraid of his devotion anymore.
She was afraid of what she might give him in return.
Because for all his power, all his silence, all his control—
He was already hers, too.
**
They stood like that as the sky lightened behind them.
No commands.
No lies.
No masks.
Only hunger.
Only silence.
And two people beginning to understand that obsession, when returned, becomes something far more dangerous:
Love.
- Writer
