Page 42 of Only for Him (Starkov Bratva #1)

GISELLE

His mouth is still on mine when I move forward, into him, over him.

There’s no space left. No air. No God.

Just water and heat and Roman’s skin against mine, slick and waiting.

I hook my arms around his neck and kiss him like I’m still trying to erase what happened downstairs. Not the pain or the blood, but the pleasure and power.

He made it so easy. He made it feel fucking holy.

There is no erasing it, and the only thing I can do is to sink deeper until I make a home in it.

Just like my body is making a home for this brutal, beautiful, and scarred man. His cock pulses against my belly and my pussy responds in kind, soaking down my inner thighs as my clit throbs.

I moan into his mouth and he swallows it, twisting my hair around his fist and tugging until pain skitters down my spine like sparks catching fire.

The warm water hits my shoulders in steady arcs. My nipples, tight and aching as they brush his hard chest. His hands slide along my wet skin, guiding me back against cool porcelain, and I shiver. I taste him as he kisses my collarbone, trying to stay here— but a flash of dread twists my stomach.

Because I’ve already betrayed him by feeding Arata his prints.

I wrap my arms around his neck, seeking stability in a moment that feels so precarious. His hands find my breasts, cupping and teasing my nipples. Pleasure roils through me and whips my belly to a burning heat.

That knowledge coils in me like a wire pulled taut—and still, I want him. Still, I open my legs when he slides his fingers between them and groans at what he finds.

“Fuck,” he murmurs. “You’re dripping for me, little viper.”

I balance myself, tangle my fingers in his hair as I lean back, allowing him to take control. His hands are everywhere—raking down my spine, gripping my ass, spreading me open like he already knows exactly how I’ll fall apart.

Like I’m a melody he wrote himself.

My thighs tremble as he presses me back against the shower wall, cock sliding upwards between my folds and grinding on my clit. I should stop this. I should tell him I need time, that I’m not thinking clearly, that I just tortured a man to death and I might not know who I am anymore.

That I don’t deserve to be here, in his arms, because I’m not the woman he thinks I am.

That word on his shoulder applies to me, too.

I’m a traitor.

But when he lifts me like I weigh nothing, my legs wrap around his waist. I cry out, not from pain, but from the unbearable stretch of desire. I can’t stop him. I don’t have it in me. I need this too fucking much.

Will he still want me? When he finds out I’ve betrayed him?

I don’t care. Oh, God, I don’t care. My pussy is achingly empty without him. I’m empty without him, and I know as soon as he enters me I’ll break open and spill out as the final bits of the woman I used to be goes flowing down the drain.

I don’t want to be her anymore.

I need him to take me like I’m his, because his is all I want to be.

I’m lost in the rhythm of water and flesh and sensation, the gentle glide of his fingers digging into my hair and my own digging into the ridges of muscle at his shoulder, tremors of his pulse beneath my touch.

Roman’s breath is warm against my skin as his mouth drifts lower, trailing kisses down my collarbone and down my chest, igniting every nerve ending. I arch against him, urging him to take me deeper and drown me in everything that is us .

One final moment of clarity pierces through the haze—what I’ve done, how far I've gone to keep him close.

“What am I doing?” I whisper, a plea and a confession.

He pauses, his piercing blue eyes searching for something I’m not sure I can give. I’m an imposter in this realm of shadows and light, balancing on the razor's edge of lust and remorse.

“It’s just us, little viper,” he murmurs, his voice gravelly with need. “Let go of everything else.”

“Roman,” I plead, my hips jerking towards the hardness that still teases me everywhere but where I need it. I need him inside me. I need him to fuck me so bad, I can feel the desperation squirming like an animal between my teeth.

"Tell me you want this," he growls, mouth at my throat.

"I want this," I breathe, clawing at his back. "I want you."

He thrusts inside me with one hard, brutal thrust that knocks the air from my lungs.

I gasp. My head hits the tile. My nails dig into his shoulders.

He groans like the feel of me wrapped around him is a prayer answered.

And then he starts to move.

Hard. Deep. Relentless. His hips punish me for ever existing without him. I’m not sure I ever did.

The rhythm pounds through me, shoving everything else out—my guilt, my doubt, my fear. There’s only this. The man who baptized me in blood. The cock that’s rearranging everything I thought I knew about what I needed.

He kisses me like he’s starving. Like I’m the last soft thing he’ll ever get to taste.

And I kiss him back like I’m not afraid of anything anymore.

Each thrust of his hips is measured yet urgent, my body arching in time with the spray until that hot pulse of release builds behind my ribs, making the entire world fade into nothing.

“Let go, little viper,” he coaxes in my ear. “Let go for me.”

But I can’t, oh God, I can’t, the need is torturing me, the pressure building up so fast that I feel like I’m fucking dying each time he pulls out, reborn each time he plunges deep again, hitting me in all the places that feel like heaven.

I’m too close, too far, too full of everything except permission.

Then his hand closes around my throat, holding me still against the tile.

“Look at me while I fuck you,” he commands, and something inside me obeys.

His eyes blaze through me—feral, possessive, devout. And when he says it again, it’s not a request.

“Come for me,” he growls.

I shatter.

Pleasure rips through me, ripping apart every piece of who I was. I’m no longer Giselle the cop, Giselle the sister, Giselle the liar.

I’m just his.

“Good girl,” he hisses, driving inside me so deep that I gasp at the whiplash of coming again even before the last is through, feeling him shudder and clench against me before cumming inside me—releasing into my quivering, clenching, greedy slit, pumping every last drop as I milk him dry.

I let out a soft, jagged moan. We hover there, bodies slick and steaming, hearts racing in perfect rhythm, washed clean and stained all at once.

Time unravels, and as I slide my fingers along the contours of his chest, I catch the glimpse of promise and threat painted across his face.

He’s still hard, and I’m still desperate, ready for whatever darkness we’re about to unleash, when he begins to thrust again, teeth digging into the claim he already made on my body.

The steam is a gauzy veil, still clinging to the edges of the mirror and the marble tiles. My pulse is steadying, but the heat inside me hasn’t gone. Not after the way he took me like he’d been waiting his whole life for me to let him in.

I think of all the times he could have fucked me and all the times I basically begged for it.

But he waited for tonight.

Why?

No use pretending I don’t know. It’s because he needs me. Or thinks he does.

As much as I need him.

Anguish pulses in the place that just trembled from pleasure. This is sick, dirty, and wrong.

It’s also the cleanest thing in my entire life: the only thing that’s ever fit.

I wrap a towel around my waist. Roman exits the shower behind me, takes my shoulders in his hands. I still shudder because my reserves of need and pleasure are not yet spent. I think I could spend a lifetime with this man inside me and still need more of it in heaven.

Oh, Giselle, you know you’re not going to heaven. Not anymore.

“Starting tonight,” he says, voice low, reverent, temporarily snapping me out of my spiral. “We paint this city red with the blood of men who deserve no mercy.”

The conviction in his tone is a kind of seduction in itself. It sends a ripple through my chest, but I push it down. Cross my arms. The towel slips a little, but I don’t adjust it. We look at ourselves in the mirror.

“There’s risks involved when you decide to be someone’s own personal Judgement Day,” I say, steady, even though my heart is knocking against my ribs. “What happens if you make a mistake?”

His brow lifts slightly. The corner of his mouth twitches.

“I won’t,” he says. “Not with you beside me.”

And there it is again. That same faith. That blinding, impossible trust.

It pricks like a needle too close to the bone.

I look down. Water and cum trail down my legs and puddle at my feet. All I can feel is the weight of what he doesn’t know. The mistake he’s already made. The one wearing a towel and pretending she hasn’t already started lying to him.

You should tell him . You have to. He’ll find out, eventually. Better to do it now, when there’s time to fix it, and not when Russo’s banging down the door to get you out.

But I don’t.

“How do I tell?” I ask, voice quiet, sharp. “How do I know when the line between justice and revenge disappears?”

He turns to me, slow and deliberate, his gaze a blue storm. “You think I don’t know that line? You think I haven’t bled on both sides of it?”

I stare at my reflection in the foggy glass and see someone else looking back. Not the girl I was when I started this. Not the cop. Not even the sister.

“Why do you act like trust is simple?” I ask, breath hitching at my own words.

The question I’m really asking: are you sure you want to trust me?

“Because it is,” he says. “Because I see you. I know what you’re capable of. You didn’t flinch tonight. You didn’t hesitate.”

“Don’t confuse instinct with belief.”

He steps closer, crowding the air between us. “You think I haven’t made peace with who I am? I’ve been the monster under the bed, but I’ve also been the blade in a girl’s hand when no one else would help her fight back.”

My throat tightens.

“And me?” I whisper. “You really think I can…?”

His fingers lift to my chin, tilting my face up.

“I trust you,” he says. “With my life.”

My heart breaks a little. Which doesn’t make sense. I’ve given him my body, and my mind, but not my heart.

Never that.

But he says it like his trust is a gift. Like I haven’t already started dismantling everything he’s building.

Like he doesn’t know I’m the one thing he shouldn’t trust.