“Boris Medvedev.”
That her response was so immediate, so succinct, would have shocked him all on its own. But that name struck him like a hammer to the temple. It made him stumble back a step.
Medvedev. His personal handler, who’d been assigned to him when he’d been ten. Raiden had spent fourteen horrific years under that man’s sadistic eye and lash.
Medvedev had been punished, brutally, when he’d “lost” Raiden. All the handlers had been, when each of his Black Castle brothers had escaped. His brother Rafael had been agonized to know that, as he’d considered his handler, Richard, his mentor. Raiden, however, had been viciously glad that Medvedev had been the most punished and demoted. He owed that man a debt of pain and humiliation nothing could ever satisfy.
But Medvedev wasn’t only a sadist, he was an obsessive. It had been what had made Raiden’s escape the hardest. And while all their handlers had been sent in search of them, he bet it was Medvedev who’d kept looking after everyone had given up, needing to take his revenge. And most important, to reinstate himself. Though Medvedev had been another abductee of The Organization, he’d suffered from Stockholm syndrome and had integrated totally with his captors. The Organization, and his position within it, was everything to him.
But Raiden had thought even Medvedev had given up the search eventually. He’d underestimated his obsession. And his knowledge of him. His former handler knew him so well he’d suspected his new persona.
But suspicion wouldn’t have sufficed. Only solid proof would have been good enough to take to The Organization, that Raiden Kuroshiro, the heavily documented pillar of a global conglomerate like Black Castle Enterprises, was the operative who’d escaped them. Escaped him.
So five years ago Medvedev had hired her, no doubt the absolute best he could find, to bring him that proof. And she’d found it.
But since Medvedev hadn’t made a move since, it was proof she’d upheld her end of the bargain. But now that he knew Medvedev had been her recruiter, he couldn’t understand how she had.
He looked at her in renewed confusion. “Medvedev was obsessed with me. He must have watched your every step during those five months, must have demanded regular reports of your progress, and evidence that you were on the right track.”
Her eyes turned indigo. “I didn’t give him any.”
“And he kept financing the fictional life you led? For five months with no signs he might get his money’s worth? And it would have been longer if I hadn’t discovered you and you were forced to end the charade. Then when you struck your bargain with me, you told him I wasn’t the one he thought, and he didn’t suspect you’d decided it was more lucrative to work for yourself? Doesn’t sound like him.”
“I can be very convincing. As you very well know.”
With that, it seemed she considered the conversation closed, and she walked past him on her way out of the kitchen. He caught her back to him, slammed her for the second time tonight against his length.
As her breath left her in a gasp that flayed his chest and neck, his hands tightened on her flesh. “I’m not done here.”
Though she was much smaller now without those precarious heels and felt vulnerable in his grip, the entity that held his gaze was the most powerful presence he’d ever encountered.
Then she huskily said, “I am.”
“Maybe you are, Scarlett, or Hannah, or whatever your real name is. But we’re not done.”
In one explosive movement fueled by five years of betrayal and frustration, he lifted her up onto the island, yanked up the flowing skirt of her black dress, exposing honey tanned legs and thighs, wrenched them wide apart and slammed between them.
He held her eyes for one last tempestuous moment. They all but screamed at him, Do it!
And he did. He lunged, crushed her beneath him, crashed his lips on hers.
Her cry went down his throat as he poured his growls down hers, his lips branding hers, his teeth sinking in their plumpness, his tongue filling her mouth, over and over, invading her, draining her. Her heat and taste and surrender were a sledgehammer to his remaining shell of reason.
His hands glided all over her silkiness, mad with remembrance, sinking in her craved delights, seeking her every memorized trigger, until she writhed beneath him.
At her moan, he slid between her splayed legs down to her core. He nipped her intimate lips through her panties, making her cry out and convulse before he pulled them off with his teeth, his eyes never leaving hers. They’d always told him exactly how she’d felt, what she’d wanted. They’d been far more potent than any mind-altering drug. They still were, sending him clear out of his mind with lust.
She’d always been vocal, too, corroborating her eyes’ confessions and demands. Now she said nothing. Yet her body spoke for her, her back arching deeply, legs trembling out of control, core weeping with arousal. She was so ready for him. As she’d always been. He’d always wondered if it had been part of her uncanny ability in subterfuge, if she had a trick to achieve such powerful arousals and orgasms every single time.
But it had felt real then. And it still did. Now she felt as desperate as he was, her body shuddering, her breath fracturing, her skin radiating heat, her core pouring its plea for his possession, its maddening scent perfuming the room, filling his lungs.
He rose between her legs, freeing his rock-hard erection before pushing her
knees back against her body, opening her fully for him.
Holding the eyes that had turned into cobalt infernos, without any preliminaries he rammed into her, all his power and pent-up hunger and anger behind the thrust.
Her cry at his abrupt invasion was a red-hot spear in his brain. Like a glove, her slick tightness yielded to his power, sheathed him, searing him with her fever, until he thought she’d burn him to ashes.