Nikolai
I saw her before she saw me.
She moved through the crowd like she was immune to consequence—chin up, hips swaying, eyes cunning beneath that winged liner and a mouth painted the color of spilled wine. There was a little skip in her step, subtle but unmistakable—the high of victory. The satisfaction of knowing something the rest of the room didn’t.
She was proud of herself.
And fuck, she should have been.
She’d played the game, and she played it well. Tilted the odds, manipulated perception, and rigged the outcome just enough to walk away with a win. She didn’t break anything. Didn’t cheat. Not exactly. She bent the room around her, took something carved out of blood and sweat and turned it into a game of whispers and illusion.
And now she was getting paid.
I watched from the shadows near the far wall, half-concealed by the frame of the loading dock, arms crossed over my chest, heart thudding slow and steady like I was still in the ring.
Her smile when she slid her betting slip across the table almost knocked the air right out of me.
It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t polite. It was self-satisfied. Just a little more smug than it should have been.
It was the smile of a girl who thought she was smarter than everyone else in the room. Tonight, she just might have been right.
She took the cash—a thick envelope of bills—and tucked it into the inside of her jacket with the kind of ease that told me she’d done this before. Maybe not here. Maybe not in my world. But somewhere. Somewhere behind closed doors and shuttered eyes and those private little corners of the city where good girls didn’t go.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it? She wasn’t a good girl. Not even close. She was a bad girl wrapped in leather and lace, and I wasn’t even pretending to be mad about it.
I should have been, though. She manipulated my circuit. Toyed with my numbers. Played people who would slit throats for half the payout she just made.
But I wasn’t angry. Not really. Because the truth?
I was fucking proud of her.
Not that I’d ever say it out loud, but there was something dangerous about watching a woman move like she owned the place when I knew damn well she didn’t. The part of me that ruled this world—the cold, ruthless part that commanded rooms and broke bones and kept order by sheer force of will—was already imagining what it would take to bring her to heel.
Not to crush her, not to break her, but to tame her. To punish her.
Because underneath all that confidence, beneath the recklessness and the smart mouth and the cocky grin, she was still a little girl playing with big bad wolves. Eventually, I knew, someone was going to bite.
My jaw clenched as I watched her turn away from the table, envelope tucked into her jacket, that same little smirk still tugging at her mouth.
I watched her walk. Watched the way the crowd parted around her like they knew better than to touch her. Like they could feel she didn’t belong to them, with them. They were right. She didn’t, but she was going to belong to someone, and that someone would be me. The longer I looked at her—at the way she carried herself, at the fire in her eyes, at the pride in her little win—the more certain I was that she was already mine.
She didn’t know it yet, but she would soon, and—eventually—she’d learn to be happy about it.
Even if I had to put her over my knee and redden that fine little ass first to make her learn her place. I grinned. My gut told me, though, she’d need a hell of a lot more than that, and I was just the man to give it to her.
Truth be told?
I was looking forward to it.
