My father would be among the loudest of those people.

I, however, should probably have shut my big, dumb mouth. In a flash, Mikhail crosses the distance between us and cages me in.

His palm is flat against the wall next to my head. He holds his body stubbornly away from mine, but he might as well be smothering me. I feel him everywhere. Heat pours off of him and tingles across my skin.

He smells like mint and champagne as he dips his chin and whispers in my ear. "Do you want me to make good on that agreement, Viviana? Is that why you're still here?"

Truth be told, I don't know why I'm still here.

Fear? Habit? Curiosity?

I wrote Mikhail Novikov off the first night we met. I assumed he was a pompous asshole and never thought of him again, no matter how much I enjoyed the sight of him at functions Trofim dragged me along to.

No women dared get close to him. Mikhail didn't deign to talk to anyone else. He was a shadow on the edge of the room.

But now, he's revealing himself to be something else entirely.

I want to find out what.

"I'm still here because..." I duck under his arm and walk across the suite. "I'm still here because helping clean up some of this mess is the least I can do for the man who saved me."

I bend over and scoop a handful of glass shards into my palm. It's only when I turn around to find the trash can that I remember what I'm wearing. Or what I'm not wearing. Full coverage underwear, for one.

Mikhail is standing rigid against the wall. And he isn't the only one. There's a noticeable bulge at the front of his pants. A large, noticeable bulge.

My gaze drops down, back up, down again, and finally back up to the dark holes where his eyes once were. His pupils are blown wide.

Mikhail Novikov may be difficult to read, but I know desire when I see it.

He blinks a few times and seems to snap himself out of it. His mouth twists down into a scowl. "Me being here has nothing to do with saving you."

"Really? You had me fooled. 'Touch her again and I'll kill you,'" I say in a terrible impression of his voice. "Seems like it had at least a little to do with saving me."

"You think I came to save you? Is that why you're putting on this little show for me?" He crosses the distance between us and swats the glass shards out of my hand. They rain down over my bare feet, but I barely feel it. Not when Mikhail is staring into my soul. "Am I to collect my reward now?"

My cheeks burn. "I'm not putting on a show! I'm cleaning up the mess you and your brother made."

"This is why you're not the right fit for this world," he says almost to himself. "Someone does one nice thing for you and you're throwing away your chance at freedom. You don't owe me anything, Viviana. I didn't come here to save you."

If he keeps saying that, I might start to believe him.

Maybe that wouldn't be such a bad thing, though. As it is, my heart is doing an interesting little dubstep in my chest.

"You said Trofim wasn't a good fit for this world."

"He wasn't."

"But now, I'm not a good fit, either? Why not?" It doesn't matter. I shouldn't care. I don't care, actually. Still, I find myself adding, "Is that why I've never seen you with a woman before? Because no one is good enough for you?"

He's silent for a moment. His breath rasps in his chest, his throat, past his lips in plumes of mint and champagne. Then he sighs.

"Leave," he snarls even as he shifts closer to me. My hip brushes against his leg.

I stretch onto my toes. "You don't want to honor the deal our fathers made because you think you're better than me."

The words are barely out of my mouth when Mikhail's hand grips my neck. His thumb works into my pulse point as he tilts my head back so he's towering over me. "This has nothing to do with me being better than you."

I swallow, my neck bobbing against his fingers. "Then what's it about?"

He dips his head. More mint and sweet champagne wash over me as he whispers, "It's about me being the worst possible thing for you."

Who could be worse than Trofim?

Mikhail seems to see the question in my frown. He slides closer. His erection pushes against the lace of my nightgown and my eyes flare wide.

"My brother wanted you for a wife. He wanted an alliance. I couldn't care less about that. Fuck the deal our fathers made." His thumb strokes possessively along the column of my neck. "There is only one thing I want from you, Viviana."

"Take it," I breathe.

It's out of me before I can stop myself.

Mikhail shakes his head and walks me backwards. His long legs brush against mine until I fall back onto the bed.

"You shouldn't let yourself be someone's pawn. Not in this world." He looks down at me for a second before he wraps his big hands around my hips and jerks me to the edge of the bed. "I'm going to teach you why."

3

VIVIANA

"Trofim didn't deserve this," he muses as he strokes the outer curve of my ass, discovering an erogenous zone I didn't know existed five seconds ago.

Didn't deserve me?

No, he must mean sex in general.

I tend to agree. For the sake of the human race and future generations, Trofim and his evil seed shouldn't be allowed near any vaginas.

"Trofim and I never... We didn't... It was part of the arrangement. He never even came to my apartment."

I don't know why I feel the need to explain, but I do.

As soon as Iakov Novikov informed his son he couldn't touch me until we were married, I expected Trofim to throw a temper tantrum. Our engagement was planned by our respective paternal overlords to be just over six months long. That kind of celibacy was a lot to ask, even for me. Not that I had any desire to do the dirty with Trofim.

But the only desire Trofim had was to knock me around.

"You were together for six months." Mikhail sounds confused. Like that math isn't even close to mathing. Six months with no sex? Impossible.

I can practically hear his thoughts now. What's the point of living if I can't rip off my shirt and ravage maidens on the daily?

To be fair, as a maiden about to be ravaged, I get it. The promise of seeing what's going on beneath Mikhail's shirt is the current singular focus of my life.

"I'm sure six months without sex is like a lifetime for you," I drawl.

"Only the last six months."

I don't have time to understand what that means before he strokes his thumb over the soaked front of my panties. He groans a single time. Just one deep sound, low in his throat, before he slips his thumb under the lace. He plays in my wetness, dragging it up and down until I'm covered in myself. When the calloused pad of his thumb brushes over my clit, I jerk off the bed.

Mikhail arches a brow like I'm an interesting puzzle and does it again.

I want him to say something. I want him to talk dirty. Tell me I'm beautiful. Hell, call me a dirty slut. Just give me something.

But he is the same stoic, detached Mikhail I've seen only in passing for the last six months. Except now, he's sliding his thick middle finger inside of me.

"Oh my God." I arch my back, my head lolling against the mattress.

Mikhail is working his finger into me with an aloof professionalism that I am not in any way matching. He's calm, cool, and collected-I'm an absolute fucking mess.

I moan, rolling my hips to take more of him. I need more. I reach down and grab his wrist. I'm prepared to fuck myself with his finger if I have to.

But before I can, he pulls out of me.

I start to sit up, my body pulsing helplessly around nothing, my mind whirring as I try to come up with the world's least-prepared, most-convincing argument for why he should always be inside of me, starting, like, rightfuckingnow. Then Mikhail takes my wrist and pins my arm to the mattress above my head.

Belatedly, I register that he has unzipped his pants. That's probably why he let go of my wrist. To get himself ready.

Then my logistical thoughts burn up like space junk entering the atmosphere as Mikhail enters me. He presses his cock to my throbbing pussy and slides in.

"Big," I gasp. Sometime in the last six months, I must have lost my filter. Sometime in the last six seconds, I lost the power of speech.

But I'm not wrong. Just the head of him feels like too much.

Also, weirdly, not enough.

His fingers dig into the soft curves of my hips as he braces me. He holds me still as he fills me in a relentless, heady stroke.

"Better than I imagined," he rasps, sliding deeper inside of me.

Somewhere in the distance, a record scratches. Mikhail imagined this? Me? Us?

I don't have the neurons to process that. Not when I'm already at the brink of physical overwhelm processing the way he's stretching me. The way I've never been this full. The way people write songs about sex like this and here I am, having it, with Mikhail Novikov.

The brother of the man I was supposed to marry.

This is not the way I thought tonight was going to go.

I lift my hips and we fall together at a new angle. I clamp down around him. And Mikhail grunts.

My vision is blurring, but I look up at him. He's over top of me, granite jaw clenched. His lower lip is curled between his teeth. His brow is furrowed.

Testing a theory, I tighten around Mikhail again.

He growls and drives into me harder. His hand is wrapped so tightly around my wrist that my fingers are going numb. I send a silent thanks out to the editors of Cosmo for being a girl's best friend and encouraging me to add in a few sets of Kegels after yoga. Then I do it again.

"Don't," he warns.

He's looking at me. The ice in his eyes is everywhere now. It's spreading. His entire expression is frigid despite how hot he is between my legs.

My body flutters around him. Seeing Mikhail Novikov hovering over top of me is almost enough to push me over the edge.

"Don't what?" I gasp.

He slams into me, his weight pressing against my clit. "Don't move."

"I'm not."

He fixes me with a look that says he knows better. He knows what I'm up to.

Mikhail is a man who likes to be in control. Color me shocked.

"You're the one who told me I shouldn't be anyone's pawn," I remind him. Then I clench around him again.

I'm still holding tight when he jerks out of me. Before I can react or beg for forgiveness, Mikhail shoves my thighs wide and drops to his knees.

The moment his tongue delves into me, I realize the dangerous position I'm in. He could leave me like this, aching and needy. I'd probably go mad with wanting him. God, I bet he'd love that. Sick, cruel bastard.

"Is this your kink?" I rasp, grabbing a fistful of his hair. "Are you into edging until I combust?"

He doesn't respond. It's probably hard to talk with his lips wrapped around my clit, his tongue flicking at every sensitive part of me until I'm grinding against his mouth.

This sure doesn't feel like edging.

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 clit, 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 sexual 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 fucks 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 pussy, 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 fucking 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 sex 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.

Viviana.

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.

4

MIKHAIL

I should feel like a piece of shit.

Not for fucking my brother's girl-I would have gladly busted into the suite in the middle of Trofim's wedding night and fucked 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 shit 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 fucking 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.

But I saw.

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

I wanted her.

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 fuck-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 shit.

But I didn't.

I still don't.

Viviana Giordano is the first woman I've wanted-the first woman I've fucked-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 fuck. Viviana must have made the right choice and ran.

No matter how glad I am I finally got to feel her tighten around my cock, 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.

I meant what I told her last night: I didn't walk into this suite last night to save her.

I was on this path long before she made her dirty deal with my brother.

The moment I lost Alyona and our daughter, I knew I was done being the spare to my brother's heir. I was done waiting in the shadows while someone else called the shots. I was never going to let anyone else have the power to hold my family's fate in their hands.

I swore that much as I stood over my family's graves. Even as I swore I'd never have another family again.

Add "sworn bachelorhood" to the long list of reasons why I have no interest in taking Trofim's place at the altar today. I pledged my love, 'til death do us part.

Then death parted us and took my wife and daughter with it.

One pretty woman moaning my name is not going to change my mind about the things I vowed while I stood over the corpses of my wife and daughter. Even if I go to my grave thinking about the way Viviana milked my orgasm out of me.

I'm sure six months without sex is like a lifetime for you.

It wasn't. I did just fine for two and a half years.

The last six months, however, have dragged.

Hell, maybe I solved two problems last night. Trofim is out of the line of succession and Viviana should be out of my system.

I told her I only wanted one thing from her. The only thing I've wanted for six months. The thing I imagined every time I wrapped my hand around my cock.

So I took it.

Now, it's time to claim the rest of what is mine.

My father is sitting behind his desk when I walk through the door. It's barely dawn, but he's in a white button-down and an undone tuxedo tie. The suit jacket he's planning to wear to the wedding I just canceled is hanging from a hook behind him.

He doesn't look up from the letter he's writing as I enter. Someone probably warned him I was heading this way already. He knows it's me. He just doesn't care.

Until I drop Trofim's signet ring on his desk.

He stops mid-sentence. Stares down at it. Sits back.

Then he carefully picks up the ring with liver-spotted fingers that have grown shakier over the years and holds it to the lamplight. A spot of blood I didn't notice is dried into the grooves of the Novikov family crest. It was hard to inspect the ring too closely while it was deep inside of Viviana.

I bite back a rare smile when I realize I finger-fucked my brother's fiancée with the ring I won from him. It's almost poetic.

My father leans back in his chair and looks at me for the first time. He sighs, tired. "Is he dead?"

"As far as you're concerned, he might as well be. You're never going to see him again."

Iakov rolls his lips together and places the ring in the center of his desk. "What's the plan now?"

Are you going to kill me, too? The question is layered there, unspoken.

I could. It's been done before. A hostile takeover from within is the kind of patricidal shit that happens when power is passed to the person who happened to be born first rather than the person who is more qualified to wear the crown.

I overpowered Trofim. I stripped the ring off of his finger.

His position is mine.

"I'm going to wear that ring and become the next pakhan."

He nods. "And when will that be? My death?"

He's speaking evenly, staying calm. He's hiding it well, but he's terrified. Yet another sign that the sun is setting on his leadership.

The bloodstained legend who has run this Bratva for the last three decades wouldn't sit there and ask when he was going to die. He'd stand up and fight. But my father doesn't even bother calling for the guards I know are stationed nearby. He sees the writing on the wall, clear as day.

"I'm not going to kill you unless I have to."

His shoulders ease down from around his ears. If he's sad about his oldest son's fate, he doesn't show it. For thirty-one years, my father prepared the way for Trofim. He poured everything he had into making him a great leader. Now, he doesn't even shed a tear.

I never expected him to. Death is a cruel fact of our world. If you're powerful enough to avoid it yourself, then you'll live long enough to see everyone you care about die. One way or another, it takes everything from you.

"I didn't even have to fight him," I add. "He was too busy beating his fiancée to see me coming and too drunk to resist. I exiled him. With the promise to kill him if he ever returns."

He arches a graying brow. "I'm surprised you didn't kill him for hitting Viviana. You've always had a tender spot for that kind of thing."

"You're confusing me with Anatoly."