Her legs slid down his waist, slow, her bare feet finding the cold hardwood. She didn't pull away from his hand on her throat. She stepped closer, her palm covering his knuckles, guiding them down. Down between her breasts, pressing until the frantic rhythm beat against his fingers through skin and bone.
"Then don't be soft," she whispered.
His breath caught. A raw, almost wounded sound—something she'd never heard from him, something that cracked the iron in his pale blue eyes. His fingers curled, gripping the fabric of her dress at her sternum, and then he was dropping. Not falling. Dropping to his knees like gravity had finally won, his body folding before her, and it wasn't submission. It was worship.
His mouth found her navel. Open, hot, his breath shuddering against her skin. She felt his hands slide down her hips, gripping, anchoring himself to her body like she was the only solid thing left in the room.
His lips moved lower. Her hipbone, the jut of it sharp under his tongue. He pressed his mouth there, held it, his shoulders beginning to shake. She threaded her fingers into his dark hair, not pulling, just holding. His breath came in rough, broken gusts against her skin.
Then lower still. The inside of her thigh, where his cum still trailed from earlier—a slick, cooling path he followed with his tongue. He licked it clean. Slowly. Reverently. His mouth traced the evidence of what he'd done to her, what he'd left inside her, and the groan that tore from his throat was almost a sob.
She felt his tears before she saw them—hot, sliding down the skin he was kissing. His shoulders heaved, once, twice, and then he pressed his forehead to her thigh, his hands fisting the fabric of her dress at her hips. His whole body trembled like a man standing on the edge of something he couldn't name.
"Roman."
He didn't answer. Couldn't. His mouth moved against her skin, shaping words she couldn't hear, his breath wet and broken. She cupped the back of his head, her thumb stroking the short hair at his nape, and let him shake.
He pulled back just enough to look up at her. His eyes were wrecked—red-rimmed, wet, the pale blue almost swallowed by pupil. The scar through his left eyebrow seemed harsher in the low light, a mark of violence on a man who was, right now, completely undone.
"Elena."
Her name scraped out of him like it cost everything he had left. His hands unclenched from her dress, spread flat against her thighs, and he pressed his mouth to the crease where her leg met her hip. He kissed her there, open-mouthed, his tongue tracing the salt of her skin and his own tears. His cock was hard against her calf, straining, but he didn't move to use it. He just kept kissing her—her hip, her belly, the dip of her waist—like he was memorizing her with his mouth.
"Roman."
She said his name like a door she was holding open. Soft. Certain. Her fingers still threaded through his dark hair, her thumb tracing the shell of his ear, and the sound of it—just his name, nothing more—hit him like a body blow.
He broke.
His mouth pressed hard against her inner thigh, the confession spilling hot and wet into her skin. "I don't know how to do this." The words came in Russian first, rough and guttural, then English, scraped raw. "I don't know how to love something without owning it. Without crushing it in my hands until it can't leave."
His fingers bit into her hips, not in demand but in terror—the grip of a man clinging to the edge. His breath shuddered against the cooling trail of his own cum still smeared on her thigh. "Every time you push back, I feel you slipping. Every time you defy me, I see you walking out that door. And I don't—I can't—"
The words dissolved into a sound she'd never heard from him. Not a sob. Something lower, something that lived in his chest and had never been given voice. His forehead ground against her hipbone, his shoulders heaving, and she felt the wet heat of tears sliding down to where his mouth still pressed.
"I told myself it was discipline," he rasped against her skin. "That you needed rules. That the punishments were for your safety. But I was lying. I've been lying since the night I brought you here." He pulled back just enough to look up at her, his pale eyes shattered, the scar through his left eyebrow stark against his wrecked face. "It was never about rules, Elena. It was about keeping you close. Making you mine so completely you couldn't leave. Because if you left—"
His voice cracked, and he pressed his mouth to her skin again, kissing the words directly into her flesh. "If you left, I would be nothing. I would be the monster everyone sees. The animal they paid to bleed. You are the only thing that makes me—" He stopped. Swallowed. "That makes me want to be something else."
She cupped his jaw, her thumb stroking the wet track of tears along his cheekbone. He flinched—not from her touch, but from the tenderness of it, as if gentleness was a language he'd forgotten how to understand.
"I know," she whispered. "Roman. I know."
He made a sound—wrecked, disbelieving—and turned his face into her palm, pressing his open mouth to the center of her hand. His whole body still trembled, a man coming apart at the seams, and she held him there, his mouth on her skin, her fingers in his hair, neither of