Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(50)

“I remember for both of us.”

“That’s trouble, I think.”

“Never trouble, Tanechka.”

I smile. Or more, my cheeks smile of their own accord. The drink has a hold on me now, but it feels good. I notice my glass still has pink in it. I thought I’d finished it. I finish it now. It’s good and sweet, and I want more of this feeling. Perhaps I’m drunk.

I like it.

“I don’t want to be a bad person,” I say. “The kind to hurt people and kill people.”

“You’re not a bad person,” he snarls. “You were never a bad person, okay? Never. And any kozel who would dare to suggest it—”

He stops. Because it’s me who suggested it.

“I’m sorry. I don’t let anyone say anything bad about you, that’s all, and you shouldn’t, either. There were infinite sides to you. You hurt people, and you saved people. You loved fiercely and wildly. You thought deeply. You and Mischa and Yuri and the group of us, we were a family. We would die for each other.”

Something in his voice catches.

“We would die for each other, and we’d want to die if we ever hurt each other,” he adds.

I feel this surge of warmth for him. It’s usually too much for me to look at him—the pull of him. But now, my senses dulled by drink, I like it.

So many nice things about Viktor. His neat, close-cropped hair, so forceful and intense like him. His rough, musky smell. I loved the way he shed his stark black jacket. And his white shirt, open at the collar, tie loose; this feels familiar, like so many things about him. The way his strong, corded neck rises from this civilized shirt. I think of his chest under there, hard and scarred.

Quickly I look down. “Why can’t you just let me be good?”

“I’ll let you be good when you stop thinking you’re bad.” His gaze falls to my chest, then back up. “You wear my shirt.”

I put on his shirt because all of the clothes he supplied for me are tight, but I see my mistake now. I should’ve seen it when I first donned it, surrounding myself with his smell, with him.

“You want to corrupt me, I think. You come to me and read to me, and I feel too much, and I don’t know what any of it is.”

He kisses my cheek. His touch is a familiar anchor. I feel like I’m drifting. The poem made me feel too emotional.

He kisses my forehead.

I straighten away from him. “I feel helpless around you. You would touch me, and I would like it, but I can’t have it.”

“I don’t have to touch you,” he says.

“Don’t, then,” I say.

He takes his hand from my shoulders and curls his fingers around the corners of the book, cradling it once more. “I’ll love you from here.”

We return to our stations, then. Two people sitting on the floor at the foot of a bed. One in chains.

He’s silent.

“Tell me more,” I say.

“About what?”

I don’t know. His voice is like old leather, pleasing and soft and strong. I just want to hear his voice, really, but I don’t want to say that. “All of it.”

“You loved it when I’d hold your wrists above your head,” he says.

I jerk to attention. “No, not like that. I wouldn’t like that, I think.”

“You would. You’d love it when I’d pin your wrists to the wall or to the cool, soft bed and hold you immobile. Make you my thing in every brutal, beautiful way.”

My face grows red. Is he right?

“I’d put my tongue into your ear. I’d lick the inside of your ear. You loved it. You said it felt like sliding through the universe. Like you were sliding in space. And then you would beg for my cock.”

I swallow. “I don’t believe you.” Except I do—the suggestion of it glitters like dark gems in my mind.

“We had a game where I would tie you up naked—”

“These games again.”

“You liked to give up your choice to me. It made you feel everything more intensely.”

My pulse races. I should stop him from this talk.

“I would tie you up naked on the bed, and you’d close your eyes, and I’d kiss you on different parts of your body. You wouldn’t know where to expect the next kiss.”

“That’s not the game you told me before.”

“It’s a different one. You’d try to feel where I was just about to kiss you before my lips touched your skin. You had to feel me in the empty space between my lips and your skin.”

I look away.

“When you felt me near, you’d open your eyes and look right at me. You had to catch me before I kissed you.”

I shouldn’t feel fascinated by it.

“A game of negative space. We had many ideas about empty space, negative space, you and I. It was a thing for us, as they put it here. We’d sometimes spar with one of us blindfolded, using a stick for a knife. That was about negative space, too. Feeling the other beyond your skin. You were as much a master of negative space in battle as you were in f*cking.”

I cringe at the savage word, so blunt and hungry. Fucking. I sip from my glass, just for something to do.

“When you were tied, you’d feel it more. You’d say that the air would tremble above the place where I was about to kiss. You were a master at that game, but sometimes I’d win, and I’d sneak in a kiss. I could always sneak under your defenses, lisichka.” He slides his hands around the back of my neck, up to my hair. He grasps my hair in his fist. “But you owned my heart.”