Chapter 5: A Taste of Home
The glass container sat on the polished mahogany of Deniel’s desk, a stark, humble contrast to the severe lines of his world. He dismissed Malik with a curt nod, waiting for the heavy door to seal shut behind him before he touched it. The office was silent, save for the low hum of the city thirty stories below. He lifted the lid.
The scent hit him first. Not the subtle, expensive aroma of his usual meals, crafted by chefs who knew his tastes as a business profile. This was something else entirely. Rich, tangy, deeply spiced—the kind of smell that didn’t linger in sterile air but clung to walls and memory. Ayam Masak Merah. He hadn’t tasted it in twenty years.
His fork broke through the layer of oil, spearing a piece of tender chicken. He brought it to his mouth, his movements deliberate, almost ritualistic. The flavor exploded—sweet, sour, a slow-building heat, the fragrant kiss of fried shallots. It was perfect. It was exact. It was a ghost.
For a moment, he wasn’t Deniel Volkov in a tower of glass and steel. He was a boy in a too-quiet house in Helsinki, sitting at a kitchen table that was always too large. Mrs. Azizah, his father’s housekeeper, would slide a plate before him. “Eat, sayang,” she’d murmur, her hand, rough from work, briefly on his head. It was the only touch that didn’t feel like an assessment. The only taste that felt like comfort. She’d been sent away when he was twelve, after his father decided the nostalgia was a weakness.
He ate. Methodically, obsessively. He sopped up the vibrant red gravy with the rice she’d packed, each bite a deliberate act of consumption. He wasn’t just eating food; he was consuming her effort, her quiet rebellion in his kitchen, the memory she had unknowingly weaponized. When the chicken and rice were gone, he stared into the container at the remnants of sauce and the single forgotten slice of cucumber. Without thought, he lifted the glass to his lips and drank the last of the gravy, the act undignified and deeply necessary.
He set the empty container down. His tongue swept over his lips, catching the final traces of tamarind and chili. A profound, unsettling stillness settled in his chest. The emotion was too large, too foreign. He compressed it, folding it into the dark corner where he kept everything that couldn’t be used.
His phone buzzed. Viktor’s update: At Marina Bay. All quiet.
He pictured her there. Holding her brother. Laughing with her mother. Spending his money in the open air, under the sun, with his shadow three steps behind. A liability walking in the light. Pavel Kinski’s face, smug and suggestive, flashed in his mind. She looks like her mother. The memory was a cold sliver in his gut.
The workday bled on. Contracts were signed. Threats, coded in corporate language, were issued and received. Malik came and went, his reports efficient. Through it all, the empty container remained on the corner of his desk, a silent witness.
As the sun began to dip, casting long, amber blades of light across the floor, the stillness in his chest expanded. It was no longer about containment. It was a pull. He stared at the cityscape, the endless grids of power and possession, and felt none of it.
He picked up his phone. “Viktor. Where exactly are they?”
“The Shoppes, sir. Level two, near the tea boutique.”
“I’m coming down. Don’t tell them.”
The elevator descent was a quiet purr. In the back of the armored sedan, he loosened his tie, then thought better of it. This wasn’t a casual visit. This was a deployment into unsecured territory. He saw Malik’s raised brow in his mind’s eye, the unspoken question. Why?
He didn’t have an answer that would satisfy a man like Malik. He wasn’t sure he had one that would satisfy himself.
The mall was a cathedral of muted luxury. His arrival caused a subtle ripple—a shift in posture from his own men stationed at various points, averted glances from security guards who sensed a different kind of authority. He found them near a fountain, its cheerful spray a jarring soundtrack to his own grim procession.
Naira was first. She stood frozen, the stuffed lion in her arms a plush, yellow absurdity. Her eyes widened, not with fear, but with a confusion that quickly hardened into a wary defense. She moved instinctively, a half-step in front of her mother and the stroller.
Mdm Aishah saw him next. Her face, which had been softened by the day’s laughter, closed like a fist. She pulled the stroller back, her hand protective on her son’s head. The baby, Adam, was oblivious, chewing on the lion’s ear.
Deniel stopped a few feet away, an intentional distance. The space between them hummed with unspoken history—his violent extraction of Naira from this woman’s home, the thrown phone, the implicit threat that lived in every silent day since.
“Naira,” he said, his voice softer than he intended. He nodded toward her mother. “Mdm Aishah.”
The woman gave a tight, shallow nod. Nothing more.
He looked at Naira. “The food was excellent.” It was all he could think to say.
A flicker of something—surprise, relief—crossed her face before it was schooled. “Thank you.”
Silence descended, thick and uncomfortable. Viktor and the other guards formed a loose, observant perimeter. Shoppers flowed around them, a stream parting around a rock.
Deniel’s gaze shifted to the stroller. The child, Adam, had big, dark eyes like his sister. He stared at Deniel with the fearless curiosity of the very young, a string of drool connecting him to the toy.
“He’s grown,” Deniel stated.
Mdm Aishah’s voice was cool, carefully polite. “Yes. Babies do.”
Another silence. Deniel was a man who commanded rooms with a look, whose silence made other men sweat. This silence made him feel clumsy. He had orchestrated multi-million-dollar deals and territorial wars with less personal investment than this moment on a polished mall floor.
He took a breath, the air scented with perfumed air and the faint, sweet smell of baby. “I realize,” he began, the words feeling strange in his mouth, “that our previous meeting was… under difficult circumstances.” He kept his eyes on Mdm Aishah, a direct address. “I wanted to introduce myself properly. I am Deniel.”
It was ludicrous. She knew exactly who he was. What he was. The debt he had bought, the daughter he had taken. Yet the formality mattered. It was a line drawn in the sand, a suggestion of a world where such niceties existed.
Mdm Aishah studied him. He saw the calculations in her eyes—the fear for her daughter, the loathing for his world, the desperate need to keep this interaction civil for the sake of the fragile peace holding her family together. She nodded again, slightly deeper this time. “Yes. I know.”
Naira was watching him, her expression unreadable. He could feel her trying to decipher him, to reconcile the man who had eaten her food alone in his tower with the one now standing awkwardly before her family.
Adam chose that moment to squeal, throwing the damp lion onto the floor at Deniel’s feet.
The action was so innocent, so blindingly normal, it shattered the tension into a thousand awkward pieces. Deniel looked down at the toy. He could have ignored it. He could have let Viktor pick it up. Every instinct of his position told him to.
Instead, he bent down. He picked up the soft, saliva-covered lion. He held it for a beat, feeling the absurdity of the moment seep into his bones. Then, he stepped forward and placed it gently back on the stroller’s tray, his hand briefly close to the child’s grasping fingers.
“He has a strong arm,” Deniel said, straightening.
A ghost of a smile touched Mdm Aishah’s lips, there and gone. “He does.”
The moment hung, fragile. Deniel knew his time was up. He had deployed, achieved his unclear objective, and now needed a tactical withdrawal.
“I have a car,” he said, looking at Naira. “I can take you home. Your mother and brother as well.”
Naira glanced at her mother, a silent question. Mdm Aishah’s politeness was armor. “Thank you, but we have our way. The MRT is quite simple.”
A refusal. A small one, but a reassertion of control. Deniel accepted it with a nod. “Of course.” He turned to Naira. “I’ll see you at home.”
He didn’t wait for a response. He turned, and his men fell into step around him, the human current of the mall swallowing them. He didn’t look back. He felt their eyes on his back—the mother’s suspicion, the wife’s confusion, the baby’s blank curiosity.
In the quiet of the sedan, rolling back into the bowels of his city, he pressed his head against the cool window. The taste of tamarind and chili was long gone from his mouth. All that remained was the memory of its ghost, and the lingering, vulnerable echo of a child’s dropped toy on polished stone. Malik would have questions. He had none of the answers.
He pulled out his phone, typed a brief message to Viktor, who was now trailing the family at a distance back to the MRT: Ensure they get home safely. All of them.
He stared at the message before sending it, then added two more words.
All of them.
He sent the message. The sedan slid into the underground garage of the tower, a concrete throat swallowing the vehicle whole. Silence greeted him in the penthouse, louder than any threat. He stood in the vast living room, the city’s lights a cold diorama beyond the glass, and felt the ghost of her cooking in the air. He shrugged off his jacket, the movement sharp, and poured two fingers of whiskey. He didn’t drink it. He just held the glass, watching the amber liquid catch the light, until the ice melted and the drink was ruined.
He showered, the scalding water doing nothing to erase the imprint of the day—the taste of the food, the child’s sticky toy, the frozen fear in her mother’s eyes. He dressed in simple black trousers and a grey t-shirt, attire that felt like a concession to the domesticity he was attempting. Then he waited.
He didn’t sit in his study or command the living room. He went to their bedroom. He sat on the edge of the vast bed, in the dark, his back to the city. He waited like a man anticipating a verdict, his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped. The familiar scent of her shampoo on the pillow beside him was a quiet torment.
He heard the private elevator chime its soft arrival. He heard the faint click of her heels on the marble, then the softer sound as she kicked them off in the hallway. The bedroom door opened, spilling a wedge of light from the hall across the floor. She paused in the doorway, a silhouette holding the stuffed lion by one paw.
“You’re home,” she said, her voice quiet with surprise.
“I am.” He didn’t move from the bed. “Close the door.”
She did, plunging the room back into near-darkness, lit only by the city’s glow. She set the lion on a chair, a yellow smudge in the shadows. He could feel her uncertainty radiating across the space.
“Come here,” he said, his voice low. “Sit.”
She approached slowly, her movements cautious, and sat beside him on the bed, leaving a careful foot of space between them. She was still in her day clothes, the blouse smelling faintly of the outside world. He didn’t touch her.
“How was the rest of your day?” he asked. The question felt bizarre coming from him.
She glanced at him, confused. “It was fine. We took the train home.”
“And the lion? He likes it?”
A small, hesitant smile touched her lips. “He chewed its ear off in the taxi.”
Deniel nodded, staring at his own hands. “What else did you buy?”
“Just some tea things for my mother. From that boutique you saw.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “It was… kind of you. To come.”
He dismissed that with a slight shake of his head. He wasn’t here for gratitude. “I ate the food. All of it.” He finally turned his head to look at her. In the dim light, her face was all soft angles and watchful eyes. “It tasted like something I hadn’t tasted in a very long time.”
She swallowed, her throat moving softly. “I’m glad.”
Silence stretched, but it was different from the silence in his office. This was thick, charged with things unsaid. He wanted to reach across that foot of space and pull her to him. He wanted to bury his face in her neck and inhale until the ghost of that other memory was gone. Instead, he asked for the one thing he truly craved.
“Say it again,” he murmured, his gaze dropping to her mouth.
“Say what?”
“What you called me this morning.” He looked back into her eyes, his own stripped of all pretense. “In the wardrobe. Say it like you did then.”
Her breath hitched, a tiny, sharp sound. She understood. Her lips parted, and when she spoke, her voice was a soft exhale, layered with a vulnerability that speared him straight through the chest. “Abang.”
The word hung in the dark between them, a delicate, shimmering thing. It unlocked something tight and feral behind his ribs. He didn’t move, letting the sound of it, the sweet submission and quiet trust in that single syllable, wash over him.
“Again,” he breathed, his own voice gone rough.
“Abang,” she whispered, softer still.
It was his undoing. The careful leash he’d held snapped.
He closed the distance between them in one fluid motion, his hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, his mouth finding hers. This kiss wasn’t like the others. It wasn’t about conquest or punishment or even hunger. It was a claim forged from a deeper, more desperate place. He kissed her with a raw need for connection, his tongue sweeping into her mouth, tasting her, claiming the word she’d given him.
She melted into it, a soft sigh escaping into him, her hands coming up to grasp his shoulders. He laid her back on the bed, following her down, his body covering hers without crushing her. He kissed her until they were both breathless, until the only sound was their ragged breathing mingling in the dark.
“Tell me about the tea set,” he said against her lips, his hands moving to the buttons of her blouse. “What did it look like?”
She was trembling beneath him, her eyes wide. “It was… white. With little blue flowers.” Her voice was a shaky thread.
He undid the first button, then the next, exposing the smooth skin of her chest. He bent his head, pressing his lips to the hollow of her throat. “And your mother? What did she say?”
“She said it was too much.” Naira gasped as his mouth found the swell of her breast through her lace bra. “She said I shouldn’t have…”
He peeled the blouse open, his fingers deft on the clasp of her bra. It fell away. “But you did,” he murmured, taking a tight peak into his mouth. He sucked gently, then less gently, his tongue circling until she arched beneath him. “With my money. You bought her something beautiful.”
“Yes,” she moaned, her fingers tangling in his hair.
He switched his attention to her other breast, lavishing it with the same rough worship. His hand slid down her stomach, over the waistband of her trousers, finding the heat between her legs even through the fabric. He palmed her there, a firm, possessive pressure that made her cry out.
“Did she like it?” he asked, his voice dark with intent. His fingers worked the button of her trousers, the zipper rasping down.
“She loved it,” Naira breathed, lifting her hips to help him pull the trousers and her panties down her legs.
He tossed them aside, leaving her completely naked beneath him. He knelt back, looking down at her in the city’s pallid light. She was spread open before him, beautiful and exposed, her chest heaving. His own desire was a hard, painful ache in his jeans.
“Good,” he said, the word thick. He undid his own fly, freeing his cock, which stood thick and rigid. He fisted it once, a rough stroke, his eyes never leaving hers. “Now tell me what you want.”
She stared at his hand moving on his own length, her lips parted. “I want you.”
“How?” He leaned over her, the head of his cock nudging through her folds, already slick. He didn’t enter her. He just rubbed himself against her, coating himself in her wetness. “Say it.”
She whimpered, her hips seeking more contact. “I want you inside me.”
He pushed in, just an inch, a slow, torturous invasion. Her inner muscles fluttered around him, greedy and tight. He hissed through his teeth. “Where, sayang?”
“In my… in my pussy,” she whispered, the obscenity sounding sacred in her soft voice. “Please, Abang. Fill my pussy.”
He drove the rest of the way in, a single, deep, devastating thrust that seated him to the hilt. They cried out together, a unified sound of shock and brutal satisfaction. He was so deep he could feel the frantic pulse of her cervix against him.
He didn’t move. He stayed buried there, his weight on his forearms, his face hovering above hers. Their breaths fogged the small space between them.
“Is this what you wanted?” he gritted out, feeling her walls clench rhythmically around him.
“Yes,” she sobbed, her legs wrapping around his waist, locking him in place.
“You feel like heaven,” he groaned, losing the battle for control. He began to move, a slow, deep roll of his hips that dragged his cock almost all the way out before sinking back in. “This perfect, tight cunt was made for me. You fucking hug me like a vise.”
His pace quickened, spurred on by her choked cries and the filthy, wet sound of their joining. He hooked an arm under her knee, hiking her leg higher, changing the angle. The new position made her scream, her nails scoring his back.
“Right there?” he grunted, hammering into that spot with ruthless precision. “You like that, don’t you? You like it when I fuck you deep, when I own this sweet hole.”
“Yes, Abang, yes!” Her head thrashed on the pillow, her orgasm building, a tangible tightness coiling in her core. “Don’t stop!”
He was slamming into her now, the bedframe hitting the wall with a solid, rhythmic thud. Sweat dripped from his brow onto her chest. He was fucking her with a pure, unadulterated need, a physical manifestation of all the words he couldn’t say—the fear, the possession, the terrifying tenderness.
“I’m gonna come,” she warned, her voice high and strained.
“Come on my cock,” he commanded, his own release coiling tight at the base of his spine. “Soak me. Let me feel you milk every fucking drop.”
Her climax ripped through her, a silent scream on her lips as her body convulsed around him, clamping down in rhythmic pulses. The sensation tore his own orgasm from him. With a ragged roar, he drove into her one last, deep time, spilling hot and endless inside her, his body shuddering with the force of it.
He collapsed, careful to keep his weight on his elbows, his face buried in the crook of her neck. They lay like that, glued together by sweat and spend, their hearts hammering a frantic, synchronized rhythm against each other’s skin. The city lights swam beyond the window, indifferent.
Slowly, carefully, he withdrew. He fetched a warm cloth from the adjoining bathroom, its mundane task a stark contrast to the rawness of moments before. He cleaned her with a gentleness that felt foreign to his own hands, wiping the evidence of their coupling from her thighs. She watched him, her eyes heavy-lidded and soft.
He tossed the cloth aside and pulled her into his body, her back to his front, wrapping himself around her. His arm banded across her waist, his hand splayed possessively over her stomach. He pressed his lips to her damp hair.
In the dark, with her scent enveloping him and her body soft and pliant in his arms, the truth settled into his bones, cold and absolute. He was ruined for her. This wasn’t possession anymore. It was something far more perilous. The thought should have terrified him. As he felt her breathing even out into sleep, all he felt was a grim, singular certainty. He would burn the world before he’d let anything take this from him. The shadow of Pavel Kinski’s smirk flickered at the edge of his consciousness, a direct threat to this newfound, fragile peace. He tightened his hold, and she murmured his name in her sleep.