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Not hard. Not painful. But completely.

I had touched him before. I knew the warmth of him, the solidity, the way he existed in space with a density that most people didn’t have. I thought I knew all about it already.

I was wrong.

His hands around my wrists, his face six inches from mine, and his breath even and slow while mine had stopped cooperating entirely told me so.

“Let go,” I said.

He let go. Immediately, stepping back and releasing me with the same controlled deliberateness with which he had caught me. The immediate absence of his hands was its own kind of information that I resented receiving, not that I would ever admit to anyone.

I should have stepped back. I should have put distance between us.

I stepped forward instead.

I tilted my chin up and looked at him. I watched something happen in his face, a shift below the surface of his control where the control was working hardest, visible only because I had spent enough time watching for it.

“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Sofia.”

My name in his voice.

I identified heat in my own body.

“Or what?” I questioned, my voice just a whisper.

He kissed me. There was nothing gentle in it, nothing tentative or exploratory. It was a decision executed. His hand came up and caught my jaw. His mouth was on mine, and the kiss was brief and fierce. My lips caught his, moving with equal fervor.

He pulled back.

His hands moved to my hips—both of them, grip firm, not quite gentle, present in a way that was itself a statement—and he held me there for three seconds that I experienced with a distinctly irrational clarity.

And then he said, “Tell me to stop.”

I said nothing.

He walked me backward until the back of my knees met the edge of the low settee beneath the window, and I sat. He stayed standing for a moment, looking at me in the shifting neon light from the Strip, and his expression had finally come undone enough that I could see what was underneath—not softness, nothing as simple as that. Something more controlled than softness and more dangerous. I could see the attention of a man who had decided what he wanted and was no longer exerting the energy to conceal it.

He went to his knees in front of me.

The breath left my body.

I had understood, in some functional way, where this was going. What I had not understood was the way Viktor Golovin knelt. He knelt like it was a choice fully made, like it cost him nothing and meant everything. His hands moved. My uniform skirt, my stockings, the careful and entirely unrushed removal of the space between his mouth and my skin.

The heat from his open mouth made my insides dance with anticipation before his lips touched my core. Then his tongue moved over my clit, and my waist bucked off the chair. He held my waist down as he started to flick his tongue over my core, his eyes on mine.

“Oh, fuck,” I breathed, my chest already heaving.

Then his mouth closed over my core, and he sucked the tender flesh in.

“Oh,” I moaned, shutting my mouth immediately, holding on to a piece of self-control.

He continued, faster and even faster. He sucked and nipped and licked, making me writhe on the chair.

He took his time.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and looked at the ceiling. I felt the Las Vegas Strip burning on the other side of the glass behind me and thought about absolutely nothing coherent for an unspecified period of time.

The release, when it came, unmade me quietly. Not loudly—I didn’t have it in me to be loud, the room felt too close for loudness, Viktor felt too close—but completely, a wave that started somewhere low and moved through everything, my hand still pressed to my mouth, my other hand having found his shoulder at some point without my conscious authorization.