Loyal.
And yet despite all of that, I most hours left alone, I couldn’t stop my hand from wondering as much as my mind did, and I couldn’t stop the dissatisfaction in knowing that bringing myself pleasure didn’t feel as good as Hadrien’s hands, and that perhaps Hadrien was right about my father.
“So, what did you see in that Russian guy, anyway?”
We were seated at the dinner table. I had begun to lose track of the days, knowing only that the daily routine had begun to set in, and it had been a few weeks since Hadrien had taken me. Hadrien would wake, make breakfast. He would allow me about the house, mostly because he kept everything bolted up, but I had already accepted that running wasn’t the smartest idea, and I wasn’t going to attempt another… round of seduction. He often spent a lot of time in his office, where he would take calls. I had listened in, sometimes, and picked up the fact that he was a hired gun, yes, but seemed to be in a charge of a larger group of people, and coordinated them. It made me wonder how on earth he had been the one to take a faulty hit, but that was less my concern at the moment. He had yet to do anything about getting me back to my father, which I had thought was his intention in the first place, with keeping me alive.
I looked over to him from my plate. I had already eaten more than him, but he was a shockingly good cook, and the steak, pasta, and vegetables on my plate were more appealing than trying to ignore the fact that he was, once more, shirtless, and for some reason that made me ache between my legs.
Deliberately, I took another bite before I answered him.
“What does that matter to you?”
He shrugged – a common gesture for him, I was finding – and sat back in his chair.
“It doesn’t really, I was just curious. Didn’t seem like your type.”
I raised my brow. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
“Well I mean did you even pick the guy out?” he asked. “I can’t imagine so.”
“I thought you already drew your own conclusions about my fiancé and how I got him,” I said, setting my fork down. “Given the way you’ve treated me I don’t think I feel like being made fun of anymore about it.” I went to stand, intent on leaving him. I might have had my own private handling of Hadrien, but face-to-face I refused to deal with such abuse. He waved me down, though, shaking his head.
“Look,” he started. “I’m an asshole. I get that. I popped your man full of holes and then I put my dirty, lecherous hands all over you. I get it, you don’t like me.” He grinned, as if this didn’t bother him a bit. “But I am curious. Yeah, I drew my own conclusions, but honestly I have no idea how a girl like you went along with all that. Give me some, ah, perspective, yeah?”
My look, certainly, was skeptical, but he appeared to at least… genuinely want to get to know about what he’d asked. I eyed him suspiciously, nevertheless, but sat back down.
“My father,” I said cordially, “chose Viktor. He and Vladimir have been friends for a while. When Vlad moved back to Russia some years back, they kept in touch. When Vlad came back, my father welcomed him with open arms. Given I was twenty-one already, and Viktor was twenty-five, they decided it was a good time to settle their children down, and being good friends, it was natural that we would get married.”
“Just like that?” Hadrien questioned.
“Just like that.”
He was surprisingly quiet for a moment, and I thought that the conversation was over. It was not.
“And what did you think about that?”
“What did I think about it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “What, did your father just pop up to your room one day, say ‘hey, Corella, you’re going to marry this guy,’ and you were just like ‘okay, daddy, whatever you say.’”
I frowned at his mocking tone, and steeled myself, imagining where this conversation was heading.
“My father let me know that he was considering arranging my marriage, and when he and Vladimir talked it over, everything was set. I was honored to be given the chance to marry Viktor, and carry on my family’s legacy –”
“You mean you were honored to be a bargaining chip.”
My hands slammed down on the table.
“Again with this bargaining chip thing! What does it even matter to you? As the only child of my father, it is my duty to my father and my Don to carry on the legacy as he sees fit! What is wrong with that?!”
“Did you ever even want to marry Viktor?”
“I don’t have to—”
“Princess, did you ever want to marry Viktor. If you and Vicky had just met on the street like normal people one day, and had gotten to know each other, would you have wanted to marry him anyway?”
“Why does it matter—”
He held his hand up, and stood.
“That’s all the answer I need. It’s okay, Princess. Plenty of people do things they don’t want to for family.”
“Why do you assume that I didn’t want to do it?” I asked after a moment, as calmly as I could, feeling… like there was truth in his words I refused to admit to him. He raised a brow at me.
“Because if you couldn’t answer with a very enthusiastic yes right off the bat, then obviously you’re just trying to hold on to the fact it’s what you were supposed to do, not what you wanted to do.” He paused. “Did you love him? Even a little?”
I glanced away.
“Why did you have to kill him?” I asked, deciding to avoid the question and deflect the round of interrogation onto him. “Why?”
“I told you. Botched job. Dumb mistake. One I’m attempting to fix.”
“And yet you haven’t asked me once for my father’s number so you can call him and arrange to have me taken home.”
It was the first time that I think I had actually thrown Hadrien off. He looked taken off guard from the question, and his joking, care-free manner slid away quickly. I thought maybe I’d angered him, but he merely stared at me, and shook his head.
“Finish eating up, Princess. Don’t want that food to go to waste.”
Hadrien left, and his departure put a stagnant halt to our conversation. I could have let him have his solitude, but… no.
I don’t know what propelled me from my chair. It was kinetic energy and frustration, anger, confusion. I followed him, and grabbed him by his arm to yank him back.
“Why?” I demanded as he turned his surprised face towards me. “You claim that you want to use my life in order to secure your own freedom for your mistake, but you haven’t once legitimately tried to get me back to my father. And then you go on and on about me being a bargaining chip, as if you keeping me here is some sort of favor that you’re doing for me. What is your deal?”
It was like static, between us. Before I could react, he had his hands in my hair, and his lips were on mine once more.
I was taken off guard, but like the other night, I didn’t stop him. He backed me against the table, shoved the plates out of the way, and laid me back. He pressed solidly between my legs.
“You want the truth, Princess?” he breathed against my mouth. “I’m trying to figure out if sending you back packing to your daddy is worth losing the opportunity to have you.”
My face reddened.
“You want me around for sex?”
“I want you around for whatever you wanna give me. If it’s sex, I’m not gonna say no unless you do.”
And then he was kissing me again, and I had no idea what to think about that, aside from the fact that it wasn’t fair that I had never been allowed to indulge in a man touching me the way Hadrien did. But this… this was insane! It had to be.
“You want to kidnap me,” I accused weakly against his mouth, my nails digging into his shoulders, neither pulling him closer, nor pushing him away.
“Pretty sure you want it, too.”
“Liar.”
He pulled away, then, just a little. He looked me in the eyes with those brilliant green ones of his. I flushed further as he slid his hand b
etween my legs. I had on a borrowed pair of basketball shorts, and they already barely stayed up as it was. They were big enough that he was able to slip his hand into one of the legs, right between my thighs were my sex was already soaked.
“Am I?” He kept my gaze as he began to stroke between my folds, teasing outside my entrance but never slipping fully inside. Instead he spread around the wetness down there, and flicked his fingers lightly over the pleasurable bud of nerves down there. I gasped at the feeling.
“Truth be told, as soon as I looked at you, I knew I couldn’t kill you,” he said. “Those wide eyes… I’ve killed a lot of people, but I couldn’t kill you. I made up the bit about taking you back to your father. You have to know that I can’t do that. Come on Princess, you’ve gotta be smarter than that.”
He continued to touch me, and I looked up at him, eyes glazed, knowing that he was right. If he had ever planned on taking me to my father, he would have made arrangements long before now. But he wanted me more than he wanted to risk my father and Vladimir’s wraths.
And yet… I wasn’t angry.
“You knew it would come to this.”
“I wanted it to come to this. And admit it, Princess. You want it, too.”
He was right. He was so, so right. And maybe I hadn’t known it before Viktor was taken away, but there was a part of me that was grateful that our marriage plans had been cut short. I didn’t want Viktor to be dead… But I also knew that it hadn’t been my choice. If I went back to my father, the next one wouldn’t be my choice. And even though Hadrien had taken me against my will, he had made it my choice to give him the one thing I had never been allowed to give another. Was it a fair exchange? Was it even reasonable?
Reason didn’t really matter, though, when I brought his lips back to mine, and rocked my hips against his hand. There were no more words from there, and I was fine with that. I don’t think I’d have been able to say anything that we didn’t both already know – Hadrien had made a mistake the night that he had killed Viktor, but we were both going to get something out of it that night, and it was going to be right then and there.
He pulled my shorts away from me, and tossed them to the floor. I had no panties on, and once more found myself exposed to him. He was insistent, wanting, and as he kissed me hungrily, our mouths open to each other, he fiddled with the zipper of his jeans. My body was alight with anticipation, and a bit of nervousness. I had no idea how this was going to go, and I knew that on the off chance I ever did get back to my father, he would consider me ruined if he ever found out.
I didn’t care.
I had envisioned my first time as slow, and tender. Loving. But I didn’t want it slow with Hadrien. I wanted him hard, and as soon as possible. I was almost afraid I would chicken out. So when he slid his length against me, testing my resolve between my slick, wet lips, over the swollen bud there, I bucked against him, and whined.
“Don’t stop now,” I said. “We both want it, remember?”
My want was enough consent for Hadrien, and there, as I was spread out on his dining room table, he slid into me in one go. I gasped, unused to so much inside me once. It didn’t hurt, but I felt full, and I clung to him as the full length of him pressed deep within me. I buried my face in his neck, getting accustomed to him.
Hadrien’s hands found mine, fingers twining before he pinned them to the table, and I moaned embarrassingly loud as he bucked into me. It felt ten times the head spinning, insane sort of pleasure that his fingers had when he had first touched me, and I could feel myself flutter and pulse around his thick member as he drove into me. The table squeaked and moved beneath us, but he didn’t stop and for that I was grateful.
Gone were thoughts of my father’s disapproval. No more were thoughts of Viktor, dead. All I could think of, was how good Hadrien felt inside me, how he filled me, the depth he reached and how he didn’t let up on me. Even as I came undone before him, biting into his shoulder as I tightened around his length, he still drove into me, growling and grunting as his hips bucked.
When it came time for him to reach his completion, he was harder, faster. I reached that point of ecstasy again, and it felt mind blowing as his movements became erratic, before he slipped out. I felt the hot splash of release against my thigh, and I laid there on the table as he kept himself propped up over me.
There was a present ache between my legs, and I felt my wetness dripping from me. It was more intense than any time I had experimentally touched myself after Hadrien’s initial intrusions. His own dripped down my thigh, onto the table. We were quiet for a moment, and looked at each other.
I expected to feel guilt. I expected to feel dirty. Instead, I felt like a weight had been lifted off of me. I didn’t know how to process that, so I said the first thing that came to my mind.
“I didn’t want Viktor to die,” I said softly.
“I know, Princess,” Hadrien muttered to me.
“But I didn’t want to be his wife, either. He was nice… like a best friend.”
“Then I’m sorry for killing your best friend. And kidnapping you.”
The laugh came to me before I could stop it.
“Are you sorry for kidnapping me?”
“Not really.” He pulled away, and tucked his now soft member into his pants. He pulled a chair up and sat in it, and I sat up. I didn’t bother with shorts, and he didn’t bother handing them to me. We sat in silence for a little, and after a moment I spoke up.
“I’m not going back to my father for a while, am I?”
“Pretty sure I’d be killed if that were the case.”
I tilted my head. “You could have just been a proper bad guy and told me you weren’t planning on doing so, you know.”
“I just took your virginity after a few weeks of knowing you. Bad guy is kind of my thing, you know. You at least had fun, that’s for sure.”
I blushed a bit.
“Well don’t expect it to happen again. It was just… It was good,” I offered, though good didn’t exactly encompass it right. Hadrien laughed.
“Just good. Okay, Princess.”
Chapter 5
The following week turned into two, turned into another month. Fall slipped seamlessly into winter, and rather than an expanse of nothing outside, there was a constant blanket of white.
Hadrien had taken to not keeping the place locked up. He came and went as he pleased, and I stayed at his home. His jobs were executed in the evenings, at night, when he started taking them up again, figuring that no one aside from myself was the wiser about his involvement in Viktor’s death. During the day, he planned his hits, lounged about with me, or talked to me. We got to know each other. I learned that he was once a man of the mafia himself, not one of my fathers, but one nevertheless. He had fallen in love with the Don’s daughter, and it hadn’t ended well for him, hence, where he was now.
In turn, I told him about my life. How I had grown up, more details of the relationship with my father, with Viktor. We would have sex before, after these conversations. Our knowledge of each other’s bodies fell in line with our knowledge of each other’s minds. I missed my father… but I was becoming comfortable with the freedom that I had with Hadrien. It wasn’t a freedom in that, I could go wherever I wanted. I had always had that, to an extent. But it was a freedom to… be myself. To enjoy what I liked. To say what I wanted and to be treated like what I said and what I wanted wasn’t silly. It would be strange, I imagined, looking from the outside in, but that freedom was more precious than anything.
Hadrien, for what it was worth, turned out to be a tender man, despite his cockiness. I think that’s part of what made me less inclined to try to get away from him as the weeks wore on. He never raised a hand nor voice to me. If I wasn’t in the mood for sex, he didn’t press it – in fact, he seemed to enjoy when I came to him. It was like a fire between us, easily kindled, when I would slip into bed and climb on top of him, take my pleasure on his lap. There was an excitement to it that I had never
felt before. A rebelliousness. And the more that I thought of how much control my father had had over my life, and how much he had kept from me – not just sex, but the experience of living as a person with their own thoughts and wants, outside of family duty – the less and less I wanted to go home.
Perhaps it was cruel, but I barely even thought of Viktor. I mourned him… I missed him. But with Viktor came my virtual imprisonment. With Hadrien came something new.
With Hadrien, there was potential. It didn’t really matter to me how we had gotten to that point.
Chapter 6
“I think we should leave.”
I was straddled atop Hadrien, after a night of fooling around, and sex. Our bodies were sweaty, and spent. His seed had made its home between my legs and dripped thickly down my thighs. That had become customary – the hot splash of his satisfaction inside me. I’d come to enjoy it.
He ran his hands up thighs, to my belly, up to cup my breasts. His thumbs flicked over my nipples, circling. Though he was flaccid, his own member red and spent from many rounds, he still enjoyed touching me this way in the afterglow.
“You think we should leave?” he asked softly, watching the way the flesh of my breasts gave to the explorations of his hands.
I nodded.
“You’re not going to send me back,” I said. “I don’t want to go back. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And as much as I like this house, you have to admit only being in here all of the time has to be a drag for you.”
He laughed.
“Fair enough. I can go wherever I want, though.”
“But I can’t. Not around here.”
He frowned a little, as if he had never really thought of that before, as if that hadn’t actually crossed his mind.
“Oh.”
“Oh indeed.”
I rolled off of him, slipping beside his body. I pressed against him, enjoying the lingering heightened temperature of his skin from our activities. He wrapped his arm around me and propped his chin on my head, and allowed me to continue.
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