Page 9 of Mafia King’s Broken Vow (New York Bratva #5)

Without thinking—and that’s the problem, I’m not thinking anymore—I reach out, my fingers barely grazing her wrist. The movement surprises me as much as her.

This wasn’t planned. This wasn’t strategic.

This is pure, unfiltered need. The contact sends electricity shooting up my arm.

My heart hammers against my ribs, too fast, too hard.

I’m supposed to be breaking her down, but my hand trembles as it touches her skin.

Who’s really losing control here?

“I…” I start to say something, anything to regain the upper hand, but the words die.

Because I’m touching her, and my mind has gone blank.

All my careful strategies, my practiced manipulations—gone.

There’s just her skin under mine and the terrifying realization that I’d do anything to keep touching it.

“Mila.” Just her name. Nothing more. “You’re drowning right now. That same look. Like you’re underwater, watching something terrible happen that you can’t prevent.”

She straightens, and for a moment, I think she’ll pack up and leave. But she doesn’t.

“It’s not your fault she died alone, Mila.”

Something breaks in her expression. Not tears. Something worse. Raw recognition.

“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?”

“Yes.” She stands up and moves toward the door but pauses just before leaving. “Consider this before our next session, Mr. Gagarin. Not what they want from you. What you want. What healing—not obedience—might actually look like.”

That stops me. Not because the question is complicated. But because no one’s ever asked it before.

Not my father. Not the Volkovs. Not even me.

“An interesting experiment,” I reply, voice measured.

“Not an experiment,” she says softly, her hand on the door. “A question you deserve to answer.”

Then she’s gone. The phantom pressure of her skin under my fingertips lingers, the memory of her pulse racing beneath my touch.

I slump against the cushion, my body thrumming with unsatisfied need. My hands shake as I press them to my thighs. I’m breathing like I’ve run miles, chest heaving, skin too hot beneath my clothes.

Jesus. Three sessions, and she has me coming apart at the seams.

I move to the window, watching her exit below. She stumbles slightly on the path, then recovers. But I saw it. That tiny break in her perfect control.

The stumble makes something primitive roar to life in my chest. She’s weakening.

Soon she won’t be able to run. Soon she’ll stop wanting to.

I imagine her stumbling again, but next time into my arms. Into my bed.

Into the cage I’ll build just for her, where boundaries don’t exist and the only word she remembers is my name.

My phone buzzes. A text from the guards: “Session ended early. Everything all right?”

I don’t respond. Instead, I pull out the business card I lifted from her jacket the last time. Dr. Marina Agapova. Her personal number written on the back in careful script.

She asked what I want. What healing looks like.

I trace my thumb over her name and know exactly what I want. Her. Broken open. As raw and vulnerable as she was for those few seconds.

But not here. Not in this therapeutic cage.

Somewhere she can’t hide behind her job. Somewhere she’ll have to admit what we both already know—this stopped being about therapy the moment I touched her.

I pocket the card and smile.

I adjust myself with a grimace, willing my body to calm. But I know it won’t, not until I have her. Not until she’s beneath me, around me, admitting that she burns for me the way I’m burning for her.

The ache in my body is nothing compared to the ache in my chest, a hollow, gnawing need that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the woman who just walked away.

It’s a long time until Friday.