Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 57296 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57296 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 286(@200wpm)___ 229(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
In the limo on my way back to Ivan’s city house, I bit my lip as I remembered it: the way his shoulder-length golden hair had framed those ice-blue eyes as he looked at me. The sudden impression I had had that my new owner hadn’t intended to speak so candidly to me. The sensation that seemed as much physical as emotional, welling up inside my chest, of danger.
Not from Ivan, but from my own needs and how frighteningly well my gorgeous, brutal, thoughtful master fulfilled them.
“I would never do,” Ivan had continued, “half of what Klimatov did—even to maintain my position. Sometimes…”
His voice had trailed off, and then the smile had turned for a moment into a look of sarcastic scorn, as if he had no choice but to scoff at the thought he had just had.
Sometimes what? the voice inside my head had shouted. I hadn’t seen it clearly then, but I could grasp the moment fully, looking back as I sat nude beneath my white overcoat, being driven back to the man I loved—the man who had sent me to another man’s house to have my bare backside whipped and my bottom filled with cock. I had desperately wanted confirmation of what I had suspected—no… hoped, really, to my dismay—might be true the moment I met my new master. That Ivan Antonov didn’t deserve to die for what an unrelated man had done to my family eighty years ago.
I had swallowed hard, there at the dinner table, the first of the many elegant meals his chef had served us since my arrival as the warlord’s new concubine. I had asked my question very softly.
“Sometimes what, Master?”
I couldn’t suppress a little sob, even remembering it in the limo: the way Ivan’s eyes had lit up with that dominant glow when he had heard me call him Master. For a moment, a real smile had played upon his lips, only to give way to the ironic curl of dismissal.
“Nothing, Heather,” he said, obviously regretting—if only slightly—that he had said so much. “Finish your dessert and then go to my bedroom and get undressed. You should clean your anus on the bidet, too. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
My face had blazed hot as I had obediently risen from the table. As I had walked to Ivan’s enormous master suite, the familiar screaming match had begun to unfold inside my head—between the independent, logical woman I had thought I was until the Pretorian Guard had ‘recruited’ me and the submissive, captive bed girl who meekly washed her sore little bottom-hole so that her master could have her again there.
At the same time, though, as if in counterpoint to that raging internal conflict, another idea had quietly taken hold. I had felt absolutely sure that I knew what Ivan had meant to say.
Sometimes he wished he could let go of the criminal organization he had inherited from the Klimatov family.
Ivan’s butler opened the door of the Antonov palace for me. Palace was the word the Russians always used for these enormous city houses, though it had taken me a while to get beyond my anglophone notions of what a palace should look like. Not that Ivan’s mansion lacked any luxury one might have found in Versailles or the tsars’ great residences; for comfort it probably exceeded those houses greatly.
Still, my master’s palace looked more like a big townhouse to me—but it seemed the modern warlords had decided to style themselves after the grand dukes and princes of old Russia. I often reflected that men like Ivan and Feodorov—even Boris Klimatov—probably only barely matched the cruel, violent aristocrats of old, at least as my grandmother had told of them in her thrilling, harrowing stories from the old country. Not the ones about how the Klimatov family had destroyed her family—those stories were only sad and scary. Nana had known better ones—more entertaining ones, anyway—about the tsars and their nobles, how they had lived and died, in constant feuding with one another.
Not unlike Ivan’s feud with the Traschkas, I thought as I bowed my head in front of Pyotr, the butler, the way Ivan required me to do. As his owned concubine, I occupied a place simultaneously at the top and at the bottom of the pecking order among the servants of the palace.
They saw me—and Pyotr in particular saw me, because his station called for him to be in near-constant attendance on Ivan—bending naked over the punishment horse with the marks of the birch displayed on my bottom. They even saw me with Ivan’s rigid cock thrust deep inside my mouth as I knelt before him in his study.
They also saw me clad in the most expensive couture, and served me the finest champagne and caviar. Pyotr, at Ivan’s command, had drawn the bath in which I had soaked, whimpering, my first night in the palace, after my master had forcefully—though only after carefully obtaining my consent, before thrusting his massive hardness home in my virgin sheath—made a woman of me.