Page 20 of The Pakhan's Captive
She stares at me.
I reach down and cut the zip-ties. First her wrists. Then her ankles. I step back.
She doesn’t move. She stares at her freed hands, then at me, then at the door behind me. The calculation happening behind her eyes is almost visible.
I raise an eyebrow. “Well?”
Nothing. She looks shocked.
“You’ve been telling me you’ll kill me since Vienna,” I say. “Here you are. Here I am. No restraints. Is your father’s death not enough motivation, or?—”
She launches out of the chair.
She’s faster than I expect and angrier than is tactically sound.
She goes for my throat first, which is actually the correct instinct, and I let her get close enough that her hands make contact before I move.
I catch both wrists, step into her momentum and turn, and she slams into my chest.
I wrap one arm around her from behind, pinning both her arms to her sides, and her back hits the wall with me pressed flush against her from behind and there is no space between us. None. Not anywhere.
She explodes.
Writhing, twisting, head snapping back trying to connect with my face, feet scrambling for purchase against the wall.
Her whole body is working against mine and she’s not weak.
She’s driven by something without an off switch, and I tighten my hold until I can feel every single breath she takes, her ribs expanding and contracting against the locked bar of my arm, the full length of her back against my chest, her hips pressed back into mine with nowhere to go.
Her hair is against my jaw.
She smells like fear and cold air and something underneath it that is just her.
The air leaves my chest.
Not all at once. Slowly, like something deflating that I didn’t know was full. She shifts against me trying, to break my grip.
The movement does something I refuse to examine, and I press her harder into the wall to stop it.
That is categorically worse because now she’s completely still and I can feel everything.
Every place we’re touching.
The sharp intake of her breath.
The way her body, despite every furious signal her mind is sending, has gone from fighting to something more complicated than fighting.
She makes a small sound.
I should have let Lyosha do this.
I reach around her, one-handed, and start searching.
Outside jacket pockets first.
Her breathing is fast and shallow against my forearm.
I move to the inside pocket and she twists hard, but I pin her flat again, my chest to her back, my hand continuing its search with a focus I am working extremely hard to maintain because she is pressed against every inch of me and the clinical part of this is losing ground by the second.
