Chapter 7: Power Play
The storm finally broke outside the penthouse windows, sheets of rain blurring the city’s neon grid into watercolor streaks. The only sounds were the drumming on glass, the low hum of the climate system, and their ragged breathing.
Pace was still pinned beneath her on the deep leather sofa, his suit jacket torn open, his shirt hanging from his shoulders. The raw, claiming fury he’d displayed over the desk had been banked, replaced by a stunned, desperate tension. She had stopped him, physically risen and pushed him down. The shock of that alone had stolen his breath.
Lina held herself above him, her knees digging into the plush leather on either side of his hips. Her silver-blonde hair fell in a chaotic curtain, catching the intermittent flashes of lightning. She placed her palms flat on his bare chest, feeling the frantic hammer of his heart against her skin.
“Sit still,” she said, her voice a low command that brooked no argument. “It’s my turn.” Her violet eyes held his, stripped of all scientific detachment, burning with a fury that was entirely personal. “You think I’m like other women that you could fuck?”
A ragged laugh escaped him, tinged with pain and a wild kind of admiration. His hands, which had been moving to grasp her waist, froze at her glare.
“Bold for you to say,” he gritted out, his hips giving an involuntary jerk beneath her. The movement made her sink down slightly, and they both hissed. He was still buried inside her, an intense, full ache. “You think I’m a man-whore?”
His words were broken by the sensation of her tight, wet heat around him. He tried to focus. “I have ah… been… saving myself… for….”
Another subtle, torturous roll of her hips cut him off. His head fell back against the armrest, a tendon in his neck standing out in stark relief. “Ah, fuck… Lina, you’re killing me.” His hands lifted, instinctively reaching for the perfect, pale curve of her breast where her torn blouse gaped open.
Slap.
Her hand came down on his wrist, not a playfully coy tap, but a sharp, stinging rebuke. The sound was crisp in the quiet room. “Don’t.”
He let his hand fall, surrendering it to the leather. His dark eyes were almost black with need. “Who?” she demanded, beginning to move then, a slow, grinding rise that made him see stars, followed by a devastating sink back down. “An aristocratic mafia boss like you would never, fuck—” Her own curse was punched out of her as she took him fully, the stretch still breathtaking. “Ah… you’re huge.”
“Lina….” Her name was a prayer and a curse on his lips. His control was unraveling, fraying at the edges under her deliberate, excruciating pace. “Don’t you… ah… fuck, I need to fuck you—” His hands spasmed on the sofa, gripping nothing.
“No, Pace.” Her voice was steel, her movements becoming more assured, a deep, rocking rhythm that had sweat beading on his temple. She leaned forward, her hair brushing his face. “My turn now.”
She set a relentless pace, using the strength in her thighs to ride him, taking exactly what she wanted, how she wanted it. Each downward stroke was a claim. Each slow withdrawal a torment. She watched his face, studied the collapse of his composed mask—the parted lips, the clenched jaw, the utter abandon in his eyes as he was forced to simply feel.
“I…” he gasped, the words torn from some deep, hidden place he never visited. “Have always… liked you… since…”
She stilled, poised above him, her body a vice around his. The air crackled. “Since when?”
Lightning flashed, illuminating the raw honesty on his face. “Since the damn charity gala. Two years ago. You were arguing with that fossil from the review board about epigenetic funding. You eviscerated him with three sentences and didn’t even spill your champagne.” A shudder wracked him. “I thought… Christ, I thought you were the most terrifying, beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
The confession hung between them, more intimate than any physical act. Lina’s cool exterior fissured. Her rhythm faltered. In that moment of vulnerability, Pace’s dominance surged back, but transformed. It wasn’t about taking now. It was about giving.
He moved his hands, not to grip or control, but to slide reverently up her thighs to her hips. “Your turn,” he echoed, his voice gruff. “But let me… let me help you.”
His touch was a question. She gave a sharp, almost imperceptible nod.
He guided her then, his strength supporting her, allowing her to maintain the power but deepening the angle, tilting his hips to meet her downward strokes. The new friction was blinding. A broken sound escaped her, the first true loss of control she’d allowed herself.
“There,” he whispered, watching her fall apart. “Right there, Lina. Take it. It’s yours.”
The clinical part of her mind short-circuited. This wasn’t an experiment. This wasn’t observation. This was a raw, fucking convergence. Her breaths came in sharp gasps that matched the rhythm of their joining. The slick, filthy sound of their bodies filled the space between crashes of thunder. She could feel every inch of him, the brutal thickness, the way he stretched and filled her so completely it bordered on pain.
“Pace,” she choked out, her fingers digging into his shoulders.
“I know,” he grunted, his own restraint vaporizing. “Fuck, I know. Come for me. Let me feel it.”
It was the command in his voice, the final permission, that undid her. Her body clenched around him in a series of fierce, relentless spasms, a silent scream on her lips as the world dissolved into white-hot sensation. He held her through it, his own release slamming into him immediately after, triggered by the convulsive grip of her body. He came with a raw shout, his hips driving up into her one last, devastating time, pumping his release deep inside her.
For long minutes, there was only the sound of the storm and their heaving breaths. She collapsed forward onto his chest, her ear pressed over the still-galloping rhythm of his heart. His arms came around her, not trapping, but holding.
The warmth between them cooled. The reality of the room—the scattered blueprints, the ghost of Vito’s disapproving presence, the relentless city outside—seeped back in.
Pace’s hand came up, his fingers tracing a slow, puzzling line down her bare spine. “He was right, you know,” he said quietly, his voice rough with spent passion.
Lina didn’t lift her head. “Who?”
“Vito. In the garage.” He paused, choosing his words with a care he seldom used. “It was always going to be this. Never the other thing.”
She understood. Either you’re fucking her or killing her. The dangerous equation laid bare in a damp underground garage. The choice, it seemed, had been made long before either of them acknowledged it.
She finally lifted her head, her violet eyes meeting his. The ice was gone, replaced by a complicated, wary warmth. “This changes nothing,” she stated, a scientist asserting a fact.
A slow, genuine smile touched Pace’s mouth, the most vulnerable expression she’d ever seen on him. “Lina,” he said, brushing a damp strand of hair from her cheek. “It changes everything.”
Downstairs, in the secure lobby, Vito watched the storm and sipped cold espresso. He didn’t need a report. He’d seen the shift in Pace’s eyes before he’d even turned to leave the penthouse. The balance of power had not just shifted; it had been permanently, perilously altered. He finished his bitter drink, the fate of the family now irrevocably tied to a woman with silver-blonde hair and the capacity to make Pace Augustus say ‘please’.
Vito crushed the tiny espresso cup in his hand, the ceramic cracking but not quite cutting his calloused palm. He let the shards fall into the rainwater pooling on the limestone balcony ledge. The storm was cleaning the city, but it couldn’t touch the stain of this complication.
“Pace…” he muttered to the downpour, his voice a gravelly echo of his earlier fury in the garage. “I never saw you like this.” A cold droplet hit his neck, tracing the same path his fury had taken hours before. “And the worst person has got to be Doctor Vesperine.”
He saw her again in his mind’s eye, pinned over that desk, taking Pace’s ruthless fucking with a silence more unnerving than any scream. Her violet eyes had been open, watching him. Calculating.
“What’s so special about her anyway?” he asked the empty night, the question he’d swallowed down in the penthouse now boiling over. “You can have all aristocratic women, the connected daughters, the fucking princesses. Yet you chose an underworld scientist. A ghost who works in a lab and looks at us all like we’re specimens.”
He leaned heavily on the railing, the weight of decades of careful strategy feeling suddenly precarious. “Curse this family. Hah…” The laugh was hollow, eaten by the wind. He had seen empires fall for less than a pretty face and a clever mind. This felt like both, and something far more dangerous.
The leather of the sofa was cold now against my back. Pace’s weight had shifted, but his heat remained, a brand seared into my skin. I could feel the ache between my legs, a deep, throbbing reminder of his possession and my submission. And my own surprising, terrifying command.
I turned my head on the cushion. He was staring at the ceiling, his profile stark in the intermittent lightning. The melancholic haze he’d mentioned seemed to have settled over him, softening the harsh lines of his jaw. It made him look younger, far removed from the man who’d fucked me raw on his desk to make a point to his consigliere.
A different hunger stirred, low and insistent. Not for completion—my body was still singing from it—but for dominion of a subtler kind. For the taste of his vulnerability.
“Pace.”
He didn’t look at me. “Hmm?”
“I want to suck you again.”
That got his attention. His head turned, his dark eyes searching my face in the gloom. A faint, bewildered smile touched his lips. “Hey. I fucked you too many times already today. We’re… even.”
I pushed myself up on one elbow, the ruined silk of my blouse falling open. “Don’t get too sweet for me now.” My voice was flat, devoid of the warmth he might have expected. This wasn’t an invitation. It was a directive. “Just follow me.”
I stood, my legs only slightly unsteady, and walked naked toward the door that led to his private washroom. I didn’t look back to see if he obeyed.
The marble floor was ice under my feet. The room was all black tile and chrome, lit by a single, low strip of light behind the mirror. I stopped in the center, the cold air raising goosebumps on my skin.
I heard his footsteps behind me, heavy and slow.
His hands settled on my bare hips from behind, his thumbs stroking the pronounced curves of my pelvis. His erection was already pressing against the small of my back, hard and hot. He’d been telling the truth.
“Kitten, I—” he started, his voice thick.
I twisted in his grasp, breaking his hold. “Kitten?” The word felt alien, ridiculous. “What the fuck?”
He reached out and grabbed a handful of my hair, not painfully, but with enough force to tilt my head back. His eyes were no longer melancholic; they were dark pools of frustrated desire. “Shut up. I’m in a melancholy now. I’ve been calling you ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ for weeks in my head. ‘Kitten’ just… slipped out.” He released my hair, his hand dropping to his own hard length, giving himself a rough, slow stroke. His gaze was challenging, almost angry. “Fine. You can suck me off again. I’m actually hard again. Satisfied?”
I didn’t answer with words. I dropped to my knees on the cold marble, the shock of the temperature a sharp contrast to the heat radiating from him. I didn’t tease. I took the swollen head of his cock into my mouth immediately, my tongue flattening against the frenulum.
“Fuck,” he breathed, his hands going to the wall on either side of me for support.
I took him deeper, my jaw stretching to accommodate his girth. The taste of him was familiar now—salt, skin, and the faint, musky remnant of our sex. I hollowed my cheeks and sucked hard, pulling a ragged groan from his throat. My hands cupped his balls, heavy and tight, rolling them gently in my palms as I worked my mouth up and down his shaft.
“Mmhmm,” I hummed around him, the vibration making his whole body jolt.
“Fuck, kitten…” The pet name was a strangled plea this time. His hips began a shallow, involuntary thrust, pushing deeper into my throat. I relaxed, letting him, my eyes watering as he hit the back. One of his hands left the wall and tangled in my hair, not guiding, just holding on as if he were drowning.
I looked up at him then, my violet eyes streaming, my mouth stretched obscenely wide around him. I saw the last vestige of Pace Augustus, the feared figurehead, completely unravel. His head was thrown back, cords standing out in his neck, his mouth slack with pure, helpless sensation.
I doubled my efforts, my tongue working relentlessly, my throat accepting each thrust. The sounds were filthy, wet, and open-mouthed. Slurping, gagging, his broken curses raining down on me. His grip on my hair tightened, his thrusts becoming more urgent, losing rhythm.
“I’m gonna… right in your fucking mouth…” he warned, his voice shattered.
I just took him deeper, my nose pressed into the coarse hair at his base. I wanted it. I wanted this final, messy surrender.
With a shout that was half-sob, he came, pumping his release in hot, salty spurts down my throat. I swallowed every drop, milking him with my mouth until he was twitching and sensitive, until his hands fell from my hair to brace against his knees as he gasped for air.
I sat back on my heels, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. The cold of the floor had seeped into my bones. He looked down at me, spent and utterly exposed.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. The power in the room had silently, decisively, shifted.
The power in the room had silently, decisively, shifted. I remained on my knees, the cold marble biting into my skin, and looked up at him through the damp fringe of my hair. His breath was still coming in ragged pulls, his body softened but his expression hardening into something unreadable. The melancholic haze had burned away, replaced by a sharp, calculating focus that returned the room’s chill to my bones.
I stood, my muscles protesting, and walked past him into the bedroom without a word. The massive bed was a ruin of twisted linen, a testament to the desk, the sofa, the floor. I crawled onto it, letting the silence stretch until it was a living thing between us.
Pace appeared in the doorway, a silhouette against the bathroom light. He watched me.
“Fine,” I said, my voice oddly clear in the quiet. “You can call me Kitten.” I rolled onto my back, spreading my legs slightly, the slick evidence of my own arousal gleaming in the low light. “Now that I think of it…” I let my hand trail down my stomach, through the silver-blonde curls, finding myself swollen, sensitive, and utterly soaked. “…I’m wet again.”
He was across the room in three silent strides, his hand wrapping around my ankle, dragging me roughly to the edge of the bed. He loomed over me, his cock, half-hard again, brushing against my inner thigh. “Lina,” he said, his voice a gravelly warning. “I’ve fucked you again and there’s no turning back.”
The sheer, stupid finality of it almost made me laugh. “I know.” I reached up and traced the scar that cut through his eyebrow, a detail I’d catalogued the first time I saw his file. “I’m a doctor, remember?” His eyes narrowed. I kept mine open, fearless. “I’ve come prepared for this.”
His body went still above me. “What the fuck?”
“I mean,” I said, shifting my hips so the head of his cock notched against my opening, making us both gasp, “I’ve taken a vial.” I pushed up, taking an inch of him, watching his control fracture. “In case negotiation of saving your half-brother failed.” Another slow, torturous inch. His jaw was clenched so tight I heard his teeth grind. “I know I’m gonna be used as a sex slave for the Augustus family anyway.”
For a second, there was only the sound of our mingled breath. Then his hand came down, not on me, but on the headboard beside my skull with a crack that shook the frame. “Lina.” His voice was dangerously low. “How dare you think of my family that way?” His hips drove forward, burying himself to the hilt inside me in one brutal stroke, punching the air from my lungs. “I mean of course I’d use you as my slave but not in that—”
The correction, the stumble, was more revealing than any confession. I wrapped my legs around his waist, locking my ankles, taking all of him. “Gotcha.” I arched, forcing him deeper. “No worries.” I smiled then, a real one, all teeth and triumph. “I love your cock anyway.”
The raw, vulgar truth of it hung between us. His nostrils flared, a storm breaking in his dark eyes. “Ohh, so my cock is a trophy now, yeah?” In one violent, fluid motion, he hooked his hands under my knees and flipped me over onto my stomach, my face pressed into the musky sheets. His weight came down on me, relentless. “You’re so gonna get my hard punishment.”
My laugh was muffled by the linen. I shoved back against him, impaling myself further, the stretch a glorious burn. “Punish me if you can.” I tilted my head, catching his reflected gaze in the dark window, my smirk unmistakable.
He saw it. A raw, animal sound ripped from his throat. “Fuck…”
His hand fisted in my hair, yanking my head back. His other arm banded across my chest, pinning me in place. There was no more talk. He set a punishing, rhythmic pace, each thrust a battering ram designed to shatter my composure. The wet, meaty sound of our connection filled the room. “You want this trophy?” he grunted, slamming home. “You take it. You take all of it.”
I did. I met every drive, my own hips snapping back, my inner muscles clamping down on him in vicious pulses. “Yes—” It was a hiss, torn from me.
“You and your fucking vials,” he snarled, his breath hot on my neck. “Your plans.” His pace became erratic, frantic. “You think you’re in control?”
“I am,” I gasped, pushing up on my elbows to take him even deeper, the angle hitting a spot that made my vision blur. “You’re the one… fucking your brother’s only chance… into a mattress…”
He roared. His release was a volcanic thing, a series of ragged, helpless thrusts as he poured himself inside me, his body convulsing against mine. I followed, my own climax ripping through me with silent, seismic intensity, my body milking him through every last pulse.
Collapse. Heat. The smell of sex and salt. His weight was crushing, anchoring.
His mouth was against my shoulder, his words slurred with exhaustion. “What was in the vial?”
I closed my eyes. “An inhibitor. For pregnancy.” I felt him stiffen. “And a neuromuscular blocker. Fast-acting. Enough to drop a two-hundred-pound man for ten minutes.” I paused. “Long enough to get to the panic button sewn into my coat lining, or to grab the letter opener from your desk and sever your femoral artery.”
The silence this time was absolute. He rolled off me, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. I didn’t move.
“You were never a slave,” he said finally, the words flat.
“No,” I agreed, staring at the wall. “I was an insurance policy. For my research. For my life. For your brother.” I turned my head to look at him. “You don’t save a man from a rival family’s black-site lab by asking nicely, Pace. You trade. I was the asset.”
He was quiet for a long time. The storm had passed, leaving a bruised, pre-dawn stillness. When he spoke again, his voice was stripped bare. “And now?”
Now. The question vibrated in the space between our bodies. I thought of the vial, now useless in my abandoned coat. I thought of Vito’s disgust, the cold garage, the terrifying liberty in his touch. I thought of the raw, unvarnished truth I’d just fucked into him.
I shifted, wincing at the ache, and turned onto my side to face him. I didn’t reach out. “Now,” I said, “the negotiations have fundamentally changed.”
A ghost of his old smirk touched his mouth, but his eyes remained serious, tracing the lines of my face as if memorizing a new map.