Defiant Queen: A Dark Bratva Academy Romance, page 8
“Good girl.”
His hand connects again right after he growls the words, and suddenly, the rush is back. Suddenly, I’m gasping as it all starts to flood right back into my brain—like wires fusing back together.
My mouth falls open, and I moan into the duvet as the punishing spanks rain down on my ass. Every cry of pleasure, every begged whimper for more—all of it from the last few weeks comes rushing into me.
Kisses. Touches. Him and I.
I’ve lost track of how many times he’s spanked me. All I know is, the stinging pain has somehow turned into something erotic that turns me to liquid fire. It’s transcending hurt into something cathartic.
Something I need.
His hand spanks my ass over and over, until suddenly, two of his thick fingers slide between my legs and sink into my needy slickness.
“Konstantin—!” I choke, whining in pleasure into the sheets.
He growls behind me, his fingers plunging into my pussy as I claw at the bed. He suddenly drops down behind me, and I whine in protest when his fingers slide from between my legs.
Until suddenly, something even better replaces them.
His mouth.
My eyes roll back, and I cry out, moaning into the bed. I grip the duvet, whimpering and melting for his tongue as he drives it into me. His mouth hums over my sex, sucking at my clit as his hands grip my hips, pulling me back hard against him.
And wantonly—shamelessly—I give in to it. I push back, needing more of him—aching for more of his mouth as he demands the pleasure from my body.
His tongue snakes over my clit, swirling around and around until all I know is white heat and exploding pleasure. With a jolt, I scream, shattering as the orgasm erupts in my core. I cry out into the bed, shuddering as I come for him.
And suddenly, I can see.
Everything.
I see Grigori dropping me, Lizbet, and Lukas off at campus. I see the flickering lamplight. I see him—Konstantin, looming in my doorway that first night.
I see me, lost in the hallways, and then tumbling into him.
In fact, that’s what I keep seeing: me, lost. And then falling into Konstantin.
Found.
I see every moment. Every gasped moan. Every fevered kiss. Every synapse repairing itself—all of it, all the way up until the night of the formal dance, when I left.
That’s where it goes dark.
When Konstantin slowly pulls away from me and stands, I shiver. I turn my head, and our eyes lock with an energy that seems to explode and crackle though the air around us.
“More,” I choke, desperately. “I need m—”
“I know you do.”
His hands yank his belt open. He shoves his pants and his briefs down, letting his massive cock spring free, hot against the back of my thigh. Our eyes lock, his lips curled fiercely as he wraps his hand around his length, drags the head over my lips…
And slams into me, hard.
I cry out, the sheer size of him taking my breath away. But the hurt is so good. The feel of him utterly filling me, and taking me, has me climbing the walls in pleasure.
I drop my face into the bed, arching my back as he snarls behind me. His thrusts are hard and deep—demanding and unflinching, just like him.
Just like I need.
His fingers dig into my skin, and his other hand slides up to grab a fistful of my hair. I moan, my toes curling against the floor. My choked gasps of pleasure ringing in my ears as he pounds into me.
Every thrust is a memory. Every bolt of energy in my core is wires fusing back together. Every cry of pleasure is another puzzle piece falling into place.
It’s the mist lifting. It’s the fog clearing.
He hisses, thrusting harder, fucking me into the bed as his abs crash against my ass. More and more comes rushing back as I start to tighten, so close to the edge; so close to what I know I need to remember.
Konstantin’s hand tightens in my hair. His other one slides between my legs to press the pad of a finger hard against my clit.
And I start to fall.
“Wait!” I choke. “I’m so close!”
“I know.”
Not to coming, I try and scream. But my body is too wound up, too ready to explode.
I am close to coming—seconds away. But that’s not what I meant.
I meant I’m so close to remembering everything.
But then, all I know is the way I’m exploding for him. All I know is the detonation of pleasure that thunders through me, turning me to cinders as I scream into the bed and shatter.
I fall into the climax, pushing back to him, needing him. Konstantin groans, sheathing himself in my clenching body as he gives in and follows me into the deep. I can feel him swelling as his cum spills deep in my pussy, filling me.
I’m shaking as he slowly draws out of me. He turns me, pulling me up and into his arms as his mouth descends to crush against mine. He kisses me fiercely, turning my already weak legs to jelly.
“I remember.”
I choke the words into his lips. And I remember so much.
About him.
About us.
His eyes flicker as he pulls back to hook his gaze into me.
“You remember what?” He growls quietly.
I swallow.
“That even though you’re a grumpy psychotic prick…”
He smirks, amused.
“Even with that,” I whisper. “I kind of like you.”
His lips curl slightly.
“Do you, now?”
I nod, biting my lip.
“And you like me, too.”
His eyes flicker with mercurial heat.
“I mean I asked you to a formal dance, and you said yes. It must have been for a reason.”
“Maybe I just like punch.”
“Or maybe you like me, too—”
My moan is muffled as he crushes his mouth to mine, silencing me with a kiss so deep my toes curl.
“Now,” he growls. “Per repetition.”
I tremble as he steps away from me, tucking his slick cock back into his pants.
“You will shower. You will dress up, and then you will come downstairs in half an hour. And you will be sitting on the edge of the table, in front of my chair, with your legs spread wide.”
I shiver, biting my lip.
“For you?”
His lips curl.
“For you.”
He grabs me, and suddenly, he’s kissing me hard, again—bruising my lips. I have no concept of how long, but when we pull apart, something’s changed.
Sort of.
He’s still the vicious tyrant.
But I’m not bucking his power anymore
I’m craving it
11
After I’ve devoured her on the dining room table, and then fucked her, twice, on top of it, I find myself back in my room, in bed.
With her lying next to me, asleep. Not in her own bed. In mine.
Fuck repetition.
The room is lit only by the moonlight coming in through the windows. I turn, my eyes tracing over the curve of her jaw—her face nestled into my chest. Her eyes closed—not tightly, but serenely.
At peace.
I think back to the day in London, when the team I brought in woke her up from four years of darkness. My jaw sets, my brow furrowing as I remember seeing her asleep in the hospital bed.
She didn’t look like this. Not peaceful. Not at ease and resting. It was too restful. Too deep.
Looking at her when she was asleep like that was like looking at her dead.
I tense, fury exploding through me—the need to rage or destroy something—something like anyone who would hurt her. But instead, I breathe, and my grip on her tightens just a little.
I remember.
Her words from early, in her bedroom before dinner, flash through my mind. And I know they’re true, too. So much was coming back to her before Odessa. And then that fuck Bagan shoved her back ten paces, back to her semi-dreamland where she had to grasp at threads to remember shit.
For that, I want to revive his corpse just so I can kill him again, slower.
But she’s strong. Mara is stronger than anyone—her sister, or even me—give her credit for. Like now, even with that setback, how she’s dragging herself back out of the darkness. She’s remembering.
There’s just parts of her past I’m not sure if I want her to ever remember.
As far as she’s come back since Odessa, though, there’s still the gap from right before she left. We talked about that in bed before she fell asleep against me mid-sentence.
She still doesn’t know why she ran the night of the dance, with no mention to anyone—even Lizbet—why.
It frustrates her to no end.
It infuriates me.
Not directed at her. But at her circumstances. It confounds me that I don’t know what almost took her away from me—what would have taken her away from me if I hadn’t gotten there in time.
“Please don’t kill me.”
My face tenses. That’s another mystery involving her disappearance. That when I saved her, she looked at me like I was her executioner. It would be simple to explain that away with her own confused state, having just been drugged by that shit-stain detective—that she thought I was him, or something.
But I know it’s not that. She looked at me. She looked right at me.
And she was horrified.
Like I said… there are parts of her past I’m not sure if I want her to ever remember. Like the plays she set in motion before.
I don’t know if I want her to know those things anymore. I want to lock the secrets and skeletons deep in the closet and keep them there, forever.
Next to me, Mara shifts, murmuring. I glance at her, but all I see is a smile as she snuggles closer to me, still fast asleep.
Dream good dreams, I want to tell her.
No nightmares allowed. Not anymore.
I hold her tight as I close my eyes. I’m going to hold her tight. Always.
Then I fade to sleep.
I’ve wished for only good dreams, without nightmares for Mara. So instead, they come for me.
I tense as I realize I’m walking into a hell I remember from my past—a place I was only brought once, by my father. To this day, even knowing how vile a demon he was, I still don’t know why he’d have brought me, when I was just twelve, to that place.
The place where he, and Semyon Belsky, and other moral-less, insidiously cruel and disgusting pieces of shit like them were members. The place that let them do what they wanted to satiate the bloodthirsty and carnal desires coursing through their black hearts that society would be aghast at.
I dream of the house in Montenegro, on the cliff.
A black house, with a black door.
Crna Kuça.
I remember knowing even more I walked through the front door that this place was evil beyond comprehension. I remember the pretty boys and girls not much older than me, dressed nicely as they served drinks, food, and narcotics to the men in expensive suits smoking cigars and laughing as they planned the horrors they’d play out during their visit that night.
The pretty boys and girls who smiled, but with a vacancy in their eyes that chilled my blood.
My father told me we were there to see a fight: “a boxing match, Konstantin,” he’d told me. “Only a real one. A real fight, with real consequences. Like a fight should have.”
He didn’t prepare me for the ring where two boys who were maybe sixteen or eighteen circled each other shirtless. Without gloves. With hollow, vacant looks in their eyes, like they already knew death.
He didn’t prepare me for the fact that death himself had a seat at that ring—that of the two boys inside those ropes, only one would be leaving.
When I asked to leave halfway through, my father told me to stop being a pussy. He told me we were only there so that he could toughen me up. Then he told me if I blinked, he’s put me in the ring next.
After the first fight, after they cleared away the body of one of the boys as men roared with laughter and cheered as they drank whiskey and exchanged money to settle bets, a second pair was brought in.
I told my father I needed to piss, so I could leave. A guard pointed me down a hallway to the bathrooms—which I did really need to use. But to throw up, not to piss.
Instead though, I got lost. I went down the wrong hallway, my brain still reeling from what I’d seen. Then another wrong one. Then a staircase. When I started to panic at the sounds of screaming coming from somewhere, I opened a door, blindly.
What I saw inside to this day makes me wish I really was blind when I opened that door.
I remember the man, shirtless, snarling and cackling with a manic, inhuman glee. I remember that he was doused in blood. I remember the bloody blade in his hand.
But mostly, I remember the screaming of the boy my age tied to the chair, who this man was flaying with the knife.
I don’t know it yet, but years later, I’ll meet this boy again.
The man turned at the sound of the horrified choke that lodged in my throat. And suddenly, I realized I knew him. He’d been to our house, barely a month before, where he had business with my father.
I’d met his daughter, who he’d brought with him.
“Get out!” The man roared at me. “Get out!”
I remember turning and bolting from the room… right into my father.
His face was livid as he grabbed me, and then slammed the door to that room from hell shut behind me.
“Father—” I choked. “The man in there is—”
“What did you see?”
I was old enough to know it was a threat, not a question. And that’s when I realized we could still hear the boy screaming. And that my father didn’t care.
“What is this place?” I choked.
“What did you see?”
I shuddered.
“Answer me, Konstantin.”
“I saw Mr. Belsky… he had a knife, and he was cutting a boy—”
He slapped me, hard.
“We don’t talk of this place with judgment,” he snarled at me. “Here, money and power rule, not morals. Here is where kings come to do what they must in order to lead without tearing themselves apart. You too, will come here.”
The words were like an even more vicious slap. But I knew they weren’t true.
I will never come here. Not like you, or that man inside the room.
“No, I won’t,” I whispered.
He chuckled.
“I said the same thing when your grandfather brought me here.”
His eyes narrowed at me.
“Kill the weakness in you, Konstantin. Kill compassion and love. Or in this business, they will kill you.”
I flinched at the guttural sound of the boy in the room screaming in agony.
My father didn’t.
“Cut out your own heart, son.”
The boy screams again, and the sick comes rushing out of my mouth.
The dream fades. It always ends there. This time, as it frequently does, it melts to the other time I wanted to die to not be aware of the reality around me
This time, I’m in the summer house, in Rye. I’m waking from my sleep there after surprising my mother with my visit, because I’ve just heard another scream.
I’m walking quietly downstairs, and then to the basement door. I’m hearing men laughing and jeering. I’m hearing the horrible dead sound of flesh against flesh.
I’m tiptoeing down the stairs and witnessing a horror that shreds my soul in half.
Then I see them cock the gun, press it to her head, and pull the trigger.
One bullet ending her misery, and the next one slicing through my ribs as I ran.
I wake up snarling in my bed, grabbing at my side in horror.
But there’s no wound there. No bullet. No blood. Mara is there at my side instead—a softness instead of pain.
A balm to soothe the roaring inferno in my heart.
She’s still asleep. Still dreaming peacefully with a small smile on her lips.
No nightmares.
Good.
If my having them means she doesn’t, then that’s fine.
My phone lights up on the bedside table. I glance over and reach for it, my eyes narrowing as I see Gavan’s text.
My lips curl.
Slowly, though I don’t want to, I slide out from under her. I tuck her gently into the covers, and then dress silently.
Outside, I cross through the darkness of the campus like a wraith, until I get to one of the side-gates in the large, guarded walls of Oxford Hills Academy. I’m sure the others—Lukas, Ilya, and Misha—have their own way out of here—I’d bet a tunnel or something out from under Lordship.
But I use a different, more blunt, more straightforward way when I need to leave this place: power and money.
I just simply bribe the right guards.
The ones manning this gate at night are ones I’ve paid handsomely. They just nod when they see me, opening the gate for me as if they’re my own personal patrolmen. I step through, glance around, and then cross the road to a waiting black SUV.
Inside, Gavan just nods, smiling grimly as he pulls away and drives down the road. Soon enough, we get to a small farmhouse that I had Vadim buy when I first arrived at the academy. Currently, it’s where Gavan and a few of my more trusted men are staying, as backup security near OHA.
Gavan shuts the engine off and we both step out.
“We found him trying to sneak onto campus. He hasn’t said shit to me, but I thought you’d enjoy having a try.”
My jaw clenches.
“I mean, he’s here under Dima’s orders, obviously,” Gavan mutters. “One of my guys recognizes him as a foot soldier who reports to Boris Leonychka, who—”
“Is one of the cockroaches who followed Dima,” I mutter as we get to the side door of the farmhouse that leads to the basement.
Gavan swings it open.
“He’s not going to say shit, Konstantin.”
“We’ll see.”
Downstairs, my eyes adjust to the dimness quickly. I nod to the four other men I know, and then turn to smile thinly at the other man tied to a chair in the middle of the floor.
