Chapter 6: Balcony Domination
Sleep did not come easily. Deniel lay awake long after Naira’s breathing had settled into the deep, even rhythm of slumber, her body a soft weight against his side. The taste of the Ayam Masak Merah was gone, but the ghost of the feeling it invoked remained, a dull ache beneath his sternum. He stared at the ceiling, the city’s ambient light painting shifting patterns on its smooth surface. Pavel Kinski’s face floated in the darkness, smug and knowing. She looks like her mother.
He disentangled himself with care, sliding from the sheets without disturbing her. He pulled on a pair of black sweatpants and moved silently through the penthouse, a specter in his own domain. The glass doors to the balcony whispered open, and the humid night air, thick with the distant scent of rain and exhaust, wrapped around him.
He leaned on the cool railing, the city sprawled below like a circuit board of endless ambition. This was his kingdom. Forged in blood and silence. And now, a girl who smelled of tamarind and sighed his name in her sleep was unraveling its foundations from the inside out. The contradiction was a live wire in his gut. He craved her submission, the sweet power of her whispered Abang. He also craved the reckless, defiant light in her eyes when she challenged him. He wanted to consume her and protect her in the same brutal breath.
The whisper of silk on marble made him tense. He didn’t turn.
She stood in the doorway, a pale silhouette in a simple ivory nightgown, her hair a dark cascade over her shoulders. He could feel her hesitation, the weight of her gaze on his back.
“You’re awake,” she said softly.
“So are you.”
“I felt you leave.”
He finally turned. The moon painted her in shades of silver and blue, making her look ethereal, untouchable. Yet the memory of her damp and pliant beneath him, of her desperate cries, was seared into his flesh. The dichotomy was maddening.
“Come here,” he said, his voice a low command in the night.
She stepped onto the balcony, the breeze catching the thin silk of her gown, molding it to her slender frame. She stopped a few feet away, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Was it the food?” she asked, her eyes searching his face. “Did it… bring back a bad memory?”
He barked a short, humorless laugh. “No. Not bad.” He looked away, back at the city. “A memory that should have stayed dead.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Mrs. Azizah used to make it for you.”
The name, spoken in her gentle voice, was a physical blow. He turned his head sharply toward her. “How do you know that name?”
“You said it in your sleep. Once. A few weeks ago. You were… restless.” She took a tentative step closer. “You said ‘thank you, Mrs. Azizah.’”
He was exposed. A piece of his hidden history, laid bare by his own unconscious weakness. The vulnerability was a white-hot coal in his throat. He needed to reclaim control, to smother this softness under something harder, darker.
“Don’t,” he warned, the word a blade.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t look at me like you understand.” He pushed off the railing and closed the distance between them in two strides. He saw a flash of fear in her eyes, but she didn’t retreat. That defiance again. It ignited him. “You cook me a meal that twists my guts into knots. You whisper words that make me forget who I am. You look at me with those fucking eyes…” He grabbed her arm, his grip firm but not cruel. “What is your game, Naira?”
“No game,” she breathed, her chin lifting. “I was just… trying to be your wife.”
The statement was so simple, so devastatingly earnest, it stripped the anger from him, leaving only a raw, gnawing need. His wife. This fragile, strong creature was his wife. The legal document, the transaction, it all fell away. In this moment, she simply was.
He dragged her to the railing, turning her to face the dizzying drop. The glass was cold against her front. He stood close behind her, his body caging hers. “You want to be my wife?” he murmured, his lips grazing the shell of her ear. He rucked up the silk of her nightgown, his hands rough on the bare skin of her thighs. The hem gathered at her waist, exposing her to the night air. “Then be my wife. Right here. Where all of them can see.”
“They can’t see,” she whispered, trembling, but she arched her back, pressing her ass against the hard ridge of his erection straining against his sweatpants.
“They feel me,” he growled, biting her shoulder gently. “Every bastard down there in the dark feels my power. And tonight, they’ll feel it through you.” He undid the drawstring of his pants, freeing his cock. It was already rigid, swollen with a need that went beyond physical release. He spat into his palm, slicking himself roughly.
He pushed her panties to the side, not bothering to remove them. The delicate lace was a stark contrast to the brutal urgency of his movements. With one hand spread possessively over her stomach, pinning her to the railing, he used the other to guide himself to her entrance. He was throbbing, the head of his cock nudging against her slick heat.
“Call me Abang,” he demanded, his voice thick.
“Abang,” she whimpered, the submission in the word sending a jolt of pure fire to his core.
He drove into her in one deep, unforgiving thrust, burying himself to the hilt. A sharp cry was torn from her lips, swallowed by the vast hum of the city. She was so tight, so wet, her body clenching around him in shocked welcome.
“Again,” he snarled, beginning to move, a slow, deliberate retreat before slamming back home. The sound of their bodies meeting, skin on skin, was obscenely loud in the quiet night.
“Abang!” she cried out, her fingers scrambling for purchase on the smooth glass.
He settled into a punishing rhythm, each thrust punching the air from her lungs. He leaned over her, his chest to her back, his mouth at her neck. “This is what you do to me,” he rasped, his hips pistoning. “You make me wild. You make me forget every fucking rule. This sweet, tight cunt is my only religion now.”
His words were filthy, a crude incantation. He gripped her hipbone hard enough to bruise, his other hand sliding from her stomach down to the thatch of curls between her legs. He found her swollen clit and pressed, circling it with rough, demanding fingers.
She was sobbing now, a continuous stream of broken pleas and his name. “Abang, please… harder…”
“You want it harder, sayang?” He fucked her with renewed brutality, the force of his thrusts shaking the railing. “You want me to own you right out here in the open? To mark you so deep that every man who ever looks at you knows you’re mine?”
“Yes! Yes, yours!” Her orgasm ripped through her, a violent, screaming thing that made her inner muscles clamp down on him like a vise, milking him relentlessly.
The sensation shattered his own control. With a guttural roar that was part agony, part triumph, he spilled into her, his release hot and endless, pumping into her depths as he ground against her, sealing them together. He collapsed over her, his forehead pressed against her spine, both of them slick with sweat and gasping for air against the cold glass.
For a long minute, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing and the distant city. The neon glow bathed their tangled, exposed forms.
Slowly, carefully, he pulled out. He adjusted her nightgown, letting it fall back into place, a tender gesture at odds with the savage coupling. He turned her in his arms. Her face was flushed, tear-streaked, her eyes wide and dazed. He cupped her cheek, his thumb wiping away a stray tear.
“The memory,” he said, his voice now quiet, stripped bare. “It wasn’t bad. It was the only good one I had.”
She searched his face, her own softening with an understanding that terrified him more than any enemy ever had. She didn’t speak. She simply rose on her toes and pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth, a whisper of touch.
He scooped her up into his arms, carrying her back inside, away from the exposed edge of the world. He laid her on the bed and went to the bathroom, returning with a damp cloth. He cleaned her with the same focused care as before, then himself.
He slid into bed beside her, pulling her into the curve of his body. Her back fitted against his chest, her head tucked under his chin. He inhaled the scent of her hair, jasmine and sex and Naira.
Just as his eyes were growing heavy, her voice floated through the darkness, small and clear.
“She must have loved you very much, that Mrs. Azizah.”
Deniel’s arm tightened around her. He pressed his lips to her hair.
“She did,” he whispered into the dark.
And for the first time in twenty years, the memory didn’t feel like a loss. It felt like a bridge, fragile and swaying, to the woman in his arms. He closed his eyes, a strange, unnameable peace seeping into his bones just as the first grey light of dawn began to bleed into the sky. The threat of Pavel Kinski was still out there, a storm on the horizon. But here, in the eye of it, he held her, and for a moment, he was just a man. Not a boss. Not a monster. Just Deniel.
Outside, the city began to wake. Inside, he slept, his lips still buried in her hair, his last conscious thought a name that was not his own, but hers.