I’m back in the study in the Agosti mansion, the dark wood of the desk cold under my back, my skin so hot and flushed that everything feels cold except for him.
He feels good–impossibly so. His hands, his mouth, running over my skin, teasing all the places I like to be touched the most, his lips and teeth plucking at the sensitive flesh of my throat, his hands molding my breasts, squeezing and pinching. I arch up, wanting him, wanting more, and he gives it to me.
His lips on my belly, dragging downwards, to where I’m hot and wet and aching,needinghim in a way that I never knew I could. My fingers tangle in his curling dark hair, pulling him closer and pushing him down, my thighs wrapping around his head as his tongue skims lightly over my folds, brushing over flesh so sensitive that it feels like electric shocks across my skin.
My clit is throbbing, swollen, and needy. When he finally slides his tongue over it, I cry out, my whole body shuddering with the sensation. His hands hold my thighs open, spreading me, opening me up for him like a flower, and I gladly let them fall apart.
I’mfalling apart, dissolving, melting under his touch and his tongue. His lips lock around my clit, sucking, his tongue fluttering over it, his fingers pushing into me. I’m hollow, clenching around him, wanting more. I want his cock, wish there was some way for him to fuck and lick me at the same time. I want all of him, everything, and my hips drive down onto his fingers as he rolls my clit with his tongue, pushing me so close to the brink that I cling to him, almost afraid to go over the edge. I know how intense it will be, how good it feels, how only he can make me come, and I crave it as much as I fear it.
It doesn’t stop me from begging for it.
“Please, Max–” I cry out his name, bucking against his face. “Please make me come, please, please, I need it–”
He shoves his fingers deeper, curling them, fluttering his tongue over my throbbing clit, and in a wave of crashing pleasure, I–
I jerk awake on the hard cot, shivering, aching to my core for Max. The heat of the dream still lingers in my skin, leaving me flushed in the cold air, and I can feel how wet I am. I press my thighs together, hoping desperately that I didn’t cry out or moan in my sleep, and I wrap my arms around myself as I sit up slowly, fighting back the tears.
I want to go back into the dream. I want to be back with Max, spread open on his desk for his pleasure and mine, lost in something that was never mine to keep. It feels like something that happened to someone else, so far away that I can’t remember what it was like for it to be real.
I’ll never have it again, whether I die here or not. Max is gone, and the reality of it hits me all over again, like a punch to the gut, as I wrap my arms tighter around my stomach, shuddering with the emotions wracking me.
I was supposed to die today.I haven’t entirely come to terms with the fact that I didn’t. That the clock on my existence is stopped now, stuck and waiting for Obelensky to finish what he started.
A dead woman walking–or in my case, sitting.
A bubble of hysterical laughter bursts from my lips. As I look up into the dim yellow light past my cell, I suddenly realize a silhouetted figure is standing there.
I jerk backward, my heart pounding, as I scramble back on the cot. As I do, the figure steps into the light, closer to the bars, and I realize with a cold shock that it’s the same woman who burst into the room earlier today.
I’m almost certain that it’s her. I hadn’t been able to get more than just an impression of her in the moment, as panicked as I’d been. Still, I recognize her delicate heart-shaped face, the honey-blonde hair cascading around it, the blue eyes, and rosy bow-shaped mouth. She’s exquisitely beautiful, a doll in human form, slender and perfect in every aspect, dressed in slim black cigarette pants and a silk blouse with gold buttons and the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Diamond studs glitter at her ears, matching the solitaire hanging down in the neckline of her blouse, and she’s wearing pointy-toed black heels, sharp and high.
No one has ever looked less as if they belong in this place. She regards me silently from the other side of the bars, her icy blue eyes intent on my face, and I suddenly feel distinctly uncomfortable, as if she’s seeing something about me that even I was unaware of.
“How long have you been standing there?” I blurt out, my fingers digging into my sides.
“Long enough.” The woman’s voice is heavily accented, musical but with a faint rasp, as if she smokes cigarettes when she drinks. “Who were you dreaming about? A lover, I assume, from the blush on your cheeks.”
I can feel myself turning even redder, the heated flush that clung to me after the dream deepening. “Whoareyou?” I demand, my inclination towards politeness entirely eradicated by the situation I’m in. “What are you doing here, watching me sleep?”
The woman purses her lips, reaching out to curl her fingers around the bars. I’m amazed that she’s willing to touch them. Her right hand glints with gold and diamond stacking rings, and her nails are perfectly manicured, painted with a ballet-pink polish that only serves to emphasize how little she belongs in this damp, grimy place of misery.
“My name is Natalia,” she says softly, her voice rolling over the vowels. “I’m your half-sister, Sasha.”
It takes a moment for that to sink in, what she’s saying. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t wrap my head around the idea, even as I recognize that a legitimate daughter might be one of the only people who Obelensky wouldn’t shoot on sight for bursting into his office and speaking to him the way she had. “I don’t believe you,” I blurt out, still holding myself tightly. “I don’t–”
I don’t want to think of him having a daughter he cared about, one raised in privilege and luxury while I starved in foster homes, even though the logical part of my mind is well aware that having Obelensky for a father probably isn’t worth any amount of material comforts.
“You don’t have to believe me,” Natalia says softly. “But who else would have tried to stop him from shooting you? No one in Moscow knows who you are, Sasha. Not to be cruel–but no one cares.”
“Except you, apparently. Why? And how do you know who I am?” I demand, staring at her. “I don’t understand.”
“I have my ways of finding out my father’s secrets.” She smiles, her rosy mouth curling up in a smirk. “Especially when I hear that a young and pretty girl is being delivered to his cells. My father is a bad man in many ways, but that is not one of his proclivities. Those who wish him ill know better than to send young women to tempt him into giving up his secrets. So you’re not a caught spy.”
She shrugs. “I know other things that helped me to piece it together. Once I understood what he planned, I had to try to stop him. There’s no real reason for you to die, and I think my father knows this. He is simply obsessive about loose ends. But you are a loose end that goes nowhere, and I tried to make him understand this.”
“And–did it work?” I still don’t fully understand how all of this relates, or how Natalia has figured it out, but I feel a flicker of hope in my chest, as hard as I try to squash it before it can leap up.
Natalia’s mouth turns down at the edges. “He wouldn’t hear reason,” she admits, and there’s a sudden cold hollowness that spreads through me, worse even than it was before, as it extinguishes that tiny flicker of hope. It leaves me wishing I’d never had that moment at all.