Ivory Ashes

Chapter 4 Episode 4

He drives a finger into me again and I cry out. “Mikhail!”

He growls in response and that vibration is all it takes. I explode in a mess of gushing tremors that I’m way too far gone to be embarrassed about. I pull on his hair and drive my heels into his back as an orgasm more powerful than anything I’ve ever felt tilts my planet off its axis.

His tongue slows, lapping at me as my legs tremble over his shoulders.

When he pulls back, his lips are slick. His hair is sticking up where I dug my fingers in. He is gloriously disheveled and I can’t even bear to look at him.

I stare at the ceiling instead. “Was that my punishment?”

“No.” He pushes my legs aside and they fall open around his waist. His erection pushes against my opening. “I wanted to know what you taste like before I fill you with my cum.”

I’m drained. Spent. Used up and discarded.

Then he slides in me to the hilt and I’m back.

When he presses his thumb to my c**t, I might as well be one of those emergency flashlights with the hand cranks. Every time Mikhail touches me, I light up. My lust could power a lighthouse. A beacon. One of those spotlights outside of the circus.

Come one and all, and witness never-before-seen heights of s****l arousal!

“This can’t be real.” I lift my arms over my head because I’m not sure what to do with them otherwise. I’m fully out of my body.

Until Mikhail uses his other hand to gather up my wrists. He holds them firmly while he f***s me.

“Please…” I whimper. I don’t even know what I’m asking for.

He shakes his head. “Not yet.”

Tears are forming in the corners of my eyes. I need to come right now. What could he possibly be waiting for? What could feel better than this?

I’m not sure if I said all of that out loud or if Mikhail is as deep in my head as he is my p***y, but he responds.

“I want to finish on your chest. Your stomach. Your ass. I want to paint you like you’re mine.” He growls again, slams home in me again and again. “But you’re so f*****g tight…”

I clench around him, the rumblings of another orgasm taking hold. I drag my hand down the flat plane of his stomach. “Later. Do it later. Next time.”

We’ll do this again, won’t we? Several more times. We have to. This can’t be it.

Even if this is it, I want what he promised. I want him to finish inside of me.

I don’t want him to pull away.

He tips his head back, the long column of his throat strained as he drives in and out of me again and again.

I fist the front of his shirt. I’m lowkey dying a little bit at the fact that this is the best s*x I’ve ever had in my life and he didn’t even take off his shirt. “There, Mikhail. Right—Don’t stop.”

He looks down at me and for one fleeting second, I see him. The real him. The heat in his eyes. The fire burning beneath the surface.

The iceman has an inferno raging inside of him.

In a flash, it consumes us both.

I cry out as Mikhail roars, twitching out a release deep inside of me. Distantly, I recognize what he’s saying. The name he’s calling out again and again. My name.

We come down together, panting and slicked with sweat. Mikhail collapses on top of me, his heavy weight pressing me comfortably into the mattress. Then he rolls away, tucks himself back into his pants, and stares up at the ceiling.

I want to know if he’s thinking the same things I am, but I actually don’t know what I’m thinking. My mind is a mess.

Will Trofim come back for me?

Am I going to marry Mikhail?

If I do, will my father approve? I know far too well what happens when he doesn’t.

Questions and possibilities chase each other around my head, circling until the warmth has leached out of my limbs and I’m shivering and sore.

I look over and Mikhail is still next to me, his eyes closed. His breathing is deep and even… sleeping.

Fuck knows he earned a nap.

So have I—but what happens when we wake up?

I hear Mikhail’s voice in my head. You should leave while you still can.

Carefully, I slide off of the bed. Evidence of what we did is sticky between my legs, sliding down my inner thighs, as I tug on a pair of jeans.

There’s no time to clean up. No time to make myself presentable.

If I want to go, I have to go now.

So why do I stop in the doorway and look back?

Mikhail’s long legs are draped over the side of the bed. One hand is resting across his stomach. Regret pangs through me so painfully my breath catches.

This—this is the danger of Mikhail Novikov. There’s a reason he lurks on the edges. There’s a reason he shields himself with an icy, indifferent mask. He reveals nothing because all it takes is one tiny sliver of him… and you’re hooked.

I close my eyes before I turn away.

Then, without looking back, I slip into the hallway and run like hell.

I should feel like a piece of s**t.

Not for f*****g my brother’s girl—I would have gladly busted into the suite in the middle of Trofim’s wedding night and f****d his new bride first just to spite him.

But Viviana never belonged to him. Not in any way that mattered.

No, I should feel like a piece of s**t because I wanted her at all.

Since the day we met, actually.

The only reason I was at their engagement party is because my father demanded it. “Family unity is important, Mikhail,” he snarled when I suggested staying home. “You need to show your loyalty to your brother. You need to remind people that you’re still here.”

Still here after my world shattered. Still here after they took everything from me.

“Plus,” he added, “Helen will be there.”

It would have been physically impossible for me to care any less about Helen Drakos, the Greek mafia princess. My father didn’t care about her, either. Not really.

Then and always, my father’s goal was to make sure everyone knew the full might of the Novikov Bratva. He didn’t want there to be any more questions about whose horse the family name was being hitched to.

Before my father announced Trofim as his official heir, there were whispers it would be me. That it should be me.

I don’t mind answering those questions with an obvious truth: It should have been.

But I played the dutiful spare and watched Trofim parade his new pet around their engagement party without ever really looking at the spectacle. She was a nameless, faceless woman in a green dress. My sadistic brother’s trophy.

Then Viviana came over to me.

I felt her watching me as the party dragged on. It was a prickling awareness. An itch down my neck. The same kind I feel when I’m being approached from behind. A vulnerability I can’t ignore.

She hadn’t tried to talk to me all night. There was no time, not when Trofim needed everyone to see the woman he would impregnate and then spend the next lifetime cheating on with a revolving door of mistresses.

I couldn’t even blame him—well, not for that, anyway. It’s what our father did. His father before him. A real noble lineage of Novikov pakhans f*****g anything with a heartbeat, wedding vows be damned.

I was the freak who broke the mold. Alyona and I were only twenty-three when we got married, and I never once even thought of straying from her.

But during a break in the parade, Viviana slipped away. Trofim was caught up in a financial circle jerk with a group of businessmen desperate to strike deals with our family and too afraid to approach our father. He didn’t see his little wifey-to-be cross the room. He didn’t see her walk towards me.

I noticed all of it without noticing the one thing that was truly important.

That realization rang loud and clear only once she was standing in front of me. The moment she curled her honey gold hair behind her ear and smiled.

It wasn’t some fate bullshit or love at first sight. Life has kicked me when I’m down enough times for me to know that there’s no reason to roll over and show it your soft underbelly. No, it was that my brother’s fiancée had f**k-me lips and an ass I wanted to take a bite out of.

The second thought quickly chased the tail of the first: I should feel like a piece of s**t.

Viviana Giordano is the first woman I’ve wanted—the first woman I’ve f****d—since I lost Alyona three years ago. And I still don’t feel one shred of guilt.

I spread my arms out across the bed in a long stretch. It’s empty, thank f**k. Viviana must have made the right choice and ran.

No matter how glad I am I finally got to feel her tighten around my c**k, it wouldn’t have been worth it if she’d tried to stick around afterward. The last thing I need is some lovesick damsel in distress pining after me.