Page 57 of Reckless Heir
I process this fact and file it underproblems I cannot currently solve.
Because there's another fact underneath it: he chose to hold me. Not to stand me nearby, not to keep me at his elbow, not any of the hundred other choices available to a man who is always performing calculations. He pulled me against him and his arm is solid across my hip and his jaw is at my temple and even the calculation, even the staging of it, contains him.
That fact sits in me warm and inconvenient.
"Gentlemen," Aleksei says. His voice is exactly as it always is — unhurried, precise, carrying the particular weight of someone who doesn't need volume. "Shall we?"
"Five million entry," Dimitri says. Watching me.
"Of course," Aleksei says pleasantly.
The cards are dealt.
I sit. I put my hands on the edge of the table, which gives them something to do. I compose my face into the expression I've been practicing since October — pleasant, neutral, present but unreadable. I am a diplomat's daughter. I was trained for this by proximity and necessity long before I arrived at St. Gabriel.
And then Aleksei's hand moves under my dress.
My fingers grip the table edge.
Not his whole hand — just two fingers, sliding along the inside of my thigh with the absolute calm of someone who has just thrown five million dollars into a hand of cards and is very bored about it. He doesn't look at me. He looks at his cards.
Don't make a sound.
His fingers trace the inside of my thigh — not rushing, just tracing, the way you'd run a finger along the spine of a book you intend to read carefully. Back and forth. The silk of my dress bunched at my hip under his palm. The porthole window to my left shows dark water and distant city lights and the occasional strobe of a paparazzi lens.
The heir to my right bluffs. I can tell because his left hand moves slightly when the cards land. I've been reading tells for six weeks; it's the only thing keeping me functional right now.
Aleksei sees the bluff too. He raises without hesitation.
His fingers find the edge of my underwear.
Do not make a sound.
I breathe through my nose. Slow and even. My hands are flat on the glass table and I can see my own knuckles going white in the gold-lit reflection and I arrange my face into something I hope reads as bored and make myself hold Dimitri's gaze across the table because looking away would be a tell and I refuse to give him one.
Dimitri is watching me the way he always watches me — with the patient calculation of a man who has decided I'm the key tosomething and is waiting to find the lock. He can't see through the table. But he's watching my face and my face is the only thing I have control over right now, so I hold it.
One of the other heirs raises. Aleksei considers — actually considers, chips in hand, the picture of a man with nothing on his mind except the hand in front of him — and slides his fingers beneath the fabric.
The touch is light at first. Exploratory. He learns the shape of me through the thin cotton the way he learns everything — methodically, without rushing, building a picture. He finds where I'm warm. He finds where I'm wet. And the low sound he makes — barely there, exhaled through his nose, not for the room — is the most devastating thing that has happened to me in six weeks at St. Gabriel.
He raises. Five million becomes ten.
"Fold, Dimitri,"he says pleasantly.
And his fingers push inside me.
The sound I almost make is a very specific kind of violence against my own dignity. I swallow it whole. My knuckles are white on the table edge. The glass beneath my hands is cool and I focus on that — the cool of the glass, the faint hum of the table lighting, the somewhere-distant thrum of music from the deck above — and Aleksei adds chips to the pot with his free hand and says something to the heir on his left without changing his cadence at all.
He is playing poker.
He is also taking me apart, methodically, with two fingers, at a glass table in front of his rivals.
These things are happening simultaneously and with equal attention, which is possibly the most specifically terrifying thing he has ever done to me.
"They can't see," he says, very low, against my hair. His lips don't quite touch my ear. "But they would never forget if they could."
Stop,I think.Stop, stop, please don't stop.
