Page 21 of Mafia King's Broken Vow

“Control is the illusion we both live inside.” She sighs. “You, with your precision and emotional calculus. Me, with clinical distance and neat little files.”

The honesty catches me off guard. Not because it’s unexpected. But because it’s real.

Raw.

And rare.

“For all our insight,” I murmur, “we still play the game. We name it, dissect it, and continue to play it.”

“Because the alternative is what?” she asks. Not sarcastic. Not mocking. Just…honest.

I lean forward.

She doesn’t retreat.

Not even an inch.

“Vulnerability,” I say, and the word feels like glass in my mouth.

We’re too close now. When did that happen? I can feel her breath on my skin, see the way her lips part slightly. The space between us crackles with something that has nothing to do with therapy.

“Is that what this is?” she whispers. “Vulnerability?”

My hand moves without permission, fingers ghosting along her jaw. The silk of her skin makes my breath catch. Blood rushes south with embarrassing urgency, and I have to fight the urge to pull her against me, to find out if her mouth tastes as sweet as it looks. My free hand clenches the arm rest, nails digging in.

“Tell me to stop.” The plea in my voice horrifies me. I’m begging. Yakov Gagarin doesn’t beg. But here I am, desperate for her to either damn us both or save us. My hand shakes against her jaw. She has to feel it, has to know she’s destroying me.

She leans in, and my control snaps another fraction. I’m hard beneath my trousers—painfully, obviously hard—and she’s close enough to notice if she looked down. The thought makes me harder still. When did I become this desperate? This hungry?

The faint scent of her perfume finds me again, amber and shadow and something feminine beneath it all.

I tilt my head. “Is that what unnerves you, Dr. Agapova? The risk of seeing me clearly, or the possibility that I might see you?”

She holds my stare, and I want to consume her. Want to taste that defiance on my tongue, feel it melt into surrender. My whole body coils with the need to claim, to possess, to devour.

“I think,” she says, “we’re both afraid of the same thing.”

“And what’s that?”

“Finding something human in the monster. Or something monstrous in the human.”

The answer is too close to the truth.

Closer than I want it to be.

Before I can respond, she leans back, reclaiming the space between us, reasserting the line between us.

“Our time’s almost up,” she says, though the clock on the wall disagrees. “We’ve gone far enough for today.”

I know what this is. Not weakness. Not fear. Just caution. She senses it too—the shift in the current, the place where professionalism begins to fracture into something messier.

“Retreating already, Doctor?” I ask, voice smooth but laced with steel.

“Setting boundaries,” she corrects. “Something I suspect you’re intimately familiar with, given how many you’ve built.”

I lean back in my seat too, projecting calm I no longer fully feel.

“Same time Friday, then?”