The Sizzling Hero Bundle

Dangerous Vows
Chapter One
Marika

I sit alone at my vanity, wondering when I’ll hear the knock at my door.

We don’t have all that much time. I have a dinner tonight—family dinner, once a week now that I live alone at the mansion I once shared with my father and brother. Now, my brother, Nikolai Vasilev, lives with his wife on their estate—I still live here. 

To be honest, I like the solitude. It’s a little strange—this house felt too big even when it was only the three of us—but it fits my mood these days. I can wander around most of it without so much as even running into a staff member or security, who do their best to stay out of my way. 

No one knows how to handle it when the Bratva princess comes back battered and broken. 

No one except Adrik.

There have been so many days in the last few months since Narokov’s threat was neutralized and my brother disappeared into married bliss with Lilliana, where I’ve wondered how I would ever piece back together who I was—who I am now. It feels, honestly, as if it’s been longer than months.

Maybe that’s why I feel the way I do about him. I’d never been alone in my life, and then suddenly, I was, more often than not. Once a week or so, I see my brother and his wife—usually together, sometimes apart—when they’re not enjoying the new estate they purchased after their honeymoon, eager to fill it with the family they’ve already started creating. And in the days in between, there’s Adrik.

He’s the reason I haven’t finished getting ready yet. No point in putting on makeup when I know he’s going to kiss it right off.

Even though I expect it, the knock at the door makes me jump a little. That’s something that’s stuck after the events at the compound where Ivan Narokov made his stand. I jump at things now. Shadows, knocks, strange noises. I knew Adrik was coming, and it still startled me.

I tug my silk robe a little closer around me, and get up to answer the door.

Adrik is standing just outside of it, tall and handsome and blond, a man who was once just another of my family’s security and now has become so much more to me. An anchor, I think, sometimes, during days when I felt like I might float away. He saved me when I couldn’t have done much to save myself.

“Marika.” His deep, accented voice ripples over my skin. “May I come in?”

I nod wordlessly, stepping to one side to let him in. He steps into my bedroom, closing the door behind him, and it still surprises me a little to see him here. It still feels forbidden, taboo. It is.

Bodyguards do not sleep with Bratva heiresses. They don’t take their virginity and become their lovers. But that’s exactly what’s happened with Adrik and I.

“Are you alright?” He steps forward, touching my face, his fingers skimming over my cheek. His thumb grazes over my cheekbone, and where I was chilly a moment ago, I feel my skin warm beneath his touch. “I know today was difficult for you.”

I went to visit my father’s grave today. I woke up alone this morning, dressing in all black and asking for a car. Adrik insisted on accompanying me. It’s been rainy and wet for a week now, the end of winter turning into the first damp chills of spring. I stood out in the wet cold for a long time, under my umbrella, staring down at the gray stone numbly until Adrik finally came out and urged me back to the car, solicitously convincing me to go back home. 

I told him he could come up and see me later. I haven’t left my room since.

I nod, still trying to find my voice, glancing over at the rumpled sheets of my bed. I’ve never had a secret like Adrik before. For a little over a month, I’ve kept it. And I don’t know what I’m meant to do.

“Do you want me to go?” His fingers are still gently touching my face. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Marika.”

“No,” I say softly. “I don’t want you to go.”

He smiles faintly. “That’s what you said to me downstairs, remember? When I came and sat with you, and we—”

I swallow hard. “I remember.” 

“I will always be thrilled I asked to stay on your security detail,” he says, that faint smile still on his lips. “Otherwise, this—” he brushes his thumb downwards, over my lower lip, “this would never have happened.”

Of course, it wouldn’t have. Adrik and I are something that shouldn’t have happened. I should have told him no. I should tell him no every time he comes to my bed. But I can’t.

I want him too much.

“Sometimes I think it only happened because you were lonely,” he says softly, drawing me into his arms. I turn my head, laying my cheek against his chest, breathing in the faint, warm scent of male skin and a hint of cologne, the laundry detergent used to wash his uniform. His arms are broad and strong, and I feel safe in them. I have felt safe in them ever since he picked me up off of the concrete floor in that compound, beaten half to death, and carried me to safety.

“I was lonely,” I whisper. “But that’s not the only reason why.”

Nikolai left strict instructions for me not to leave the mansion unless I was heavily guarded, while he went on his belated honeymoon with Lilliana. I didn’t begrudge them that—they needed their space to heal and reconnect, too. I had been left with my security—one of which was Adrik—at the mansion.

At some point, as I came out of the fugue I’d been in, I remembered that he had saved me. I wanted to thank him. So I had offered him a drink.

“It should have been in a proper bed,” he says, a slight laugh behind his words as he kisses the top of my head, turning me slowly towards the rumpled sheets still left from my afternoon nap. “I’ve tried to make up for that, since.”

“You’ve done a good job.” I turn in his arms, looking up at him. “I think I like how it was, the first time.”

“You’re a Bratva princess.” His hands smooth downwards, over my back, down to my waist. His fingers are rough against the silk, catching on it a little. “You shouldn’t have lost your virginity on a vintage sofa.”

The memory comes back, as sharp and piercing as the moment of pain when he’d first slipped inside of me, and with the same burst of heart-racing desire at the reminder of just how it had all happened. 

Adrik telling me that he was on duty, that he shouldn’t have a drink. Me insisting, telling him that he saved my life, and I only wanted to thank him. Flirting, maybe, in the way of someone who doesn’t really know how to flirt. 

It would be hard not to flirt with Adrik. He’s gorgeous—six foot three inches of muscled, tattooed perfection, always dressed in fatigues meant to be loose but pulled taut over muscled thighs and an immaculate ass, and a tight black t-shirt. Even without meaning to, he’s made to be flirted with.

I don’t even entirely remember how we ended up the way we did. I remember that he asked me how I was doing, if I was healing well. I had said yes, that my injuries were getting better. It was all very formal. I turned my head, reaching for my glass, and suddenly felt his hand on my face. There had still been a bruise there, healing, on my jaw.

“Do you think it would have happened,” I whisper, “if you hadn’t touched me like that?”

He knows what I’m talking about. I see it from the wry twist of his mouth. “I shouldn’t have,” he says quietly. “It was out of line. But—” he hesitates, brushing his fingers over my lips again. “I can’t say I regret that I did.”

“You could kiss me like that again,” I whisper, tilting my chin up, and I see the smile on his mouth as he bends to kiss me. I feel it against my lips as his press against mine.

He was my first kiss. My very first, sitting on a chintz sofa in the informal living room, the taste of vodka lingering on both of our mouths. His fingers that had grazed below the bruise on my jaw found a place to rest on my waist, his other hand coming up to touch the unhurt side of my face, and I had discovered what it was like to be kissed by someone I chose, and kissed in return.

It was unexpected and better than I could have ever imagined, having spent my whole life believing that the only intimacy I would ever experience would be within a marriage arranged and brokered without my input. 

I had known I shouldn’t allow it. I still had value to my family. My innocence still had value. Even a kiss was too much.

But as Adrik said, I had been so lonely. I had experienced so much pain—ached for a gentle touch. To feel pleasure instead of hurt. Adrik’s mouth was full and soft and warm, the kiss eager and careful all at once. I could feel that the desire in it had been there for a long time, maybe even before my kidnapping, before my rescue. I thought of him watching me over months and years, wanting me, pining for me from afar. It was all so romantic that I let myself be swept up in it without even really knowing if it was all true.

Nikolai had been somewhere far away, and no one would find out. I was still a virgin—my kidnappers hadn’t taken that from me—but they had hurt me, shamed me, and stripped so much else away. Adrik’s hands, I had felt, could piece that back together. He could give me something that no one else could. 

And he still was.

His mouth moves over mine, strong and sure, without hesitation. I sometimes wonder, afterward, how he seems to have no fear with me. What he’s doing could cost him his life. I can’t imagine that a night with me, a week, or the month that we’ve spent doing this, is worth what would happen to him if Nikolai found out. And yet—

He doesn’t seem to care.

“Marika—” He breathes my name against my lips, his hands finding the silk tie of my robe. I’m nude underneath, and when the silk falls away, I hear his groan of pleasure, his hands touching bare skin. They’re broad and rough, gripping my delicate waist. I love how he makes me feel—fragile and protected all at once, as he lifts me onto the bed, him still fully clothed, and me bare as the silk flutters to the floor.

“You liked it when I did this to you.” He slips one hand between my thighs, parting my folds for a thick finger, sliding over my already aching clit. “When I touched you like this—”

“Yes—” I’m already breathless. My gaze flicks downwards, seeing the thick ridge of his cock, pressing against the fly of his fatigues. I can feel the slick shape of the buttons beneath my fingers before I even touch him. How it feels to try to quickly get them open, slipping my hand inside to find the hot, hard shape of his cock. I know the sound he’ll make when my palm brushes against him for the first time since he came into the room.

There are a dozen or more small intimacies that I know about him now that I shouldn’t—and the same for him with me.

He bends down, turning me so that my ass is at the edge of the bed, kneeling down so that his mouth is level with the apex of my thighs. “I did this to you, remember? Kneeling in front of the couch to eat your sweet pussy for the first time—”

I suck in a breath as his lips graze over my inner thigh, sliding higher. “I wouldn’t have been able to take you if you hadn’t,” I whisper, the words breaking in between each one, my voice cracking with desire as his mouth moves closer to where I need it the most. “You were too big. And I—”

“I was the first.” There’s a raw desire in his voice when he says it, his lips brushing directly between my thighs. “The first to taste you. The first to fuck you. The first to do this—”

His tongue presses between my folds, sliding hotly over my clit, and my head falls back against the blankets. There’s no more talking, no more teasing. There’s only his mouth pressed between my thighs, the hot, wet, sweet pleasure of it, his tongue sliding and rolling over my clit as he holds my legs apart and I press into his hands, wanting more. It feels so good—I could never have imagined that anything would feel so good.

I feel his fingers slide against my entrance, teasing me. I arch into his touch, impatient, and I feel the vibration of his laugh against my skin.

“You want it,” he murmurs. “I gave you one taste, and you’re insatiable.”

“Adrik—” I moan, hips bucking against his mouth as I reach down, running my hands over the short crop of his blond hair. “Stop teasing me.”

“Oh, this isn’t teasing, princess.”

He pulls his mouth away from me as he says it, and suddenly he’s leaning over me, his fingers nimbly undoing the buttons at the front of his pants as he frees his cock. He’s hard and thick, filling his own palm as he strokes his hand over the throbbing length, and suddenly I feel the hot, swollen head pushed against my clit.

“This is teasing,” he murmurs, and leans down to kiss me again.

I gasp as he rubs himself against me, the slick mixture of his pre-cum and my arousal mingling together to create a delicious, hot friction between the head of his cock and my clit, and I know I’m going to come. Every time I start to twitch and shudder, he pulls away, dragging the head of his cock lower to circle my entrance before sliding up again, until I can feel how swollen and sensitive my clit is, aching to come. I buck helplessly under him, glaring up at his satisfied expression.

“Please,” I whisper, and he laughs, low and lustful, kissing me again.

“The Bratva princess, begging her bodyguard to make her come.”

“Adrik, I swear—”

He laughs again at that, but when he pushes the swollen head of his cock against me again, more of his slick pre-cum dripping onto my flesh, he doesn’t pull away—and I feel my body tighten, the orgasm unfurling somewhere deep within me before my nails dig into his shoulders and my head tips back on a wordless cry, his body pressed against mine as he kisses me hard. I arch against him, grinding out my orgasm against the slick length of his cock.

I’m still coming when I feel him push inside of me, his hands on my waist, my hips, as his mouth slants over mine. I gasp, tightening around him, and I feel his groan against my lips as he lifts me up, turning me on the bed so that he’s atop me, my head against the pillows.

I want him undressed, skin against skin. I strip away his shirt as he thrusts into me, fingers raking over all that broad, bare muscle, pushing his pants down his hips so I can enjoy as much of him as I can pressed against me, skin slick with sweat. It was cold in here before, but now it’s all heat—Adrik and me, and I feel as if I can’t get enough of it.

“Come for me one more time,” he breathes in my ear. “I’m so close—one more, before I have to pull out.”

I want to tell him not to. I want to come while he fills me, to feel the hot rush of it, feel him throbbing inside of me, as deeply as he can go while we come together. But I know better. Even in the rush of lust, I know that it would be a bad idea to let him finish inside of me.

We should be using protection. The fact that we aren’t is bad enough.

He thrusts inside of me once more, hard, and just the knowledge that he’s holding back his own orgasm to let me come again is enough to send me over the edge. I wrap myself around him, legs tangled with his and fingers clinging to his shoulders as I clench and shudder around him. I hear the soul-tearing groan that comes out of his mouth as he pulls free of me, his hand jerking over his slick length as he aims it at my stomach and spills a rush of pearlescent fluid over my skin.

I’m still breathing hard as he collapses next to me, his fatigues around his thighs, his hand still loosely wrapped around his cock.

I don’t want to tell him to leave. But I see the clock ticking away next to the bed, and I know that if he doesn’t go soon, I’ll be late getting ready for dinner. And if Lilliana or Nikolai were, for some reason, to come up and check on me and find me here—

“I have to get ready.” I turn and look at him regretfully. “Nikolai is coming over—”

“Shit.” He sits up, his fair skin still flushed. “I should go.”

I nod, swallowing hard. I never know what to do after this. The lust is the easy part. Wanting him is easy. Knowing what to do with the feelings afterward is so much harder.

Especially when I don’t know what kind of future we can have.

“I’m sorry.” I bite my lower lip, feeling my heart ache in my chest. “I know this is complicated—”

“It’s alright, kotenok.” He kisses my forehead, brushing my now-tangled hair away from my face. “I’ll go.”

I watch him gather his clothes, and I would enjoy the sight of him buttoning up his pants and pulling his shirt back on, the flex of his muscles beneath the fabric, more if I didn’t feel such a tangle of confusion. 

Am I falling in love with him?

It feels like it, sometimes. The things he says to me, the way he makes my heart race and my stomach knot, the way I feel cared for and safe when he’s close—so much of it feels like the beginnings of love. And yet—

I’ve never been free to choose who I love. I don’t know if that’s changed.

My brother is the pakhan now. He doesn’t believe in all of the old ways, but some of them are harder to shake than others. The value that I could have as a means to strengthen the now-weakened Bratva he’s taken over is one of them.

When Adrik is gone, I get up and shower. I go to the closet after, my hair blow-dried in a soft, straight fall down my shoulders, and look through the clothes hanging there. There’s no real need to dress up for dinner, but our father always insisted on it, and it’s one of the traditions that Nikolai has kept for the family dinners we have now. I glance over at the rumpled bed—with Adrik’s sweat and cologne washed off of me, it’s the only sign left that he was ever here.

How exactly do you think this is going to end? I ask myself as I take a pair of slim black slacks and a cream-colored cashmere sweater out of the closet. Not with a happily-ever-after for you and Adrik, most likely.

Nikolai himself has seen the trials that come with an arranged marriage, how close he came to a union of endless contention or, at best, a tentative truce. But that doesn’t mean that he’ll be convinced that I should be allowed to make my own marriage—least of all with my bodyguard. At best, I might hope to be allowed some input into my own fate.

Sighing, I sit down at my vanity once again—twenty minutes until Nikolai and Lilliana arrive for dinner. Adrik stayed longer than he should have—but even now, I have a hard time wishing it had been anything else.

The time that he spends in here with me, in our own private space away from everyone and everything else, is my only escape. It’s the only time that I feel that there’s even the slightest chance that I might get to have something that is mine, and mine alone—for no other reason than that I simply want it.

After everything that’s happened, it’s hard for me to not believe that I deserve it, in some small way. I had so much of myself taken away when I was kidnapped. When I’m with Adrik, I feel like myself again. Like my body, my choices, belong to me.

I know that in this world I was born into, that is rarely the case—and it might not always be the case for me.

But do I love him? I don’t know the answer to that. And all I can hope for is time—time for us to find out, before I have to decide whether or not to take the risk of telling my brother and upending both my life and Adrik’s forever. The risk of what might happen to him if Nikolai is as furious as I think he would be. 

It’s not something to take lightly. And it’s not something I can decide minutes before a family dinner.

Closing my makeup case, I check my lipstick, and stand up.

Earlier, I was Adrik’s lover. Now I have to go back to being Marika Vasilev—Bratva daughter, sister—and heiress.

—

Nikolai and Lilliana arrive right on time, and I let them in, leading the three of us to the informal dining room—having dinner in the formal room, at a table that could seat an entire dinner party’s worth of guests and then some, feels a little too ridiculous.

“How is the new estate?” I ask them as the first course of dinner is served. I’d spent a lot of time planning the menu—something to occupy my time—and there’s a salad studded with cranberries and goat cheese and a pumpkin-crab bisque for the first course. 

“We’re rattling around in there a little,” Lilliana says with a smile, reaching for the pitcher of sparkling water instead of the wine Nikolai and I are drinking. “But we’ll fill it up soon enough.” She pats her still-flat belly with a smile at her husband. “Although it might always feel a little too big. I would have been happy with something smaller, but you know—”

“Can’t have the pakhan of the Bratva living in a two-story brownstone,” Nikolai says with a smirk. “You’ll be glad for that space when we start having dinner parties.”

“What makes you think I’ll be excited to have dinner parties?” Lilliana asks teasingly, and I watch their banter, glad to see them teasing each other playfully, without the acid bite that there used to be to it. They’ve both come a long way since the rocky start of their arrangement.

“You’ve got to be getting lonely here,” Nikolai says, glancing at me as we finish the first course and one of the staff members brings the second. “This place is too big for one person.”

“It’s not one person.” I feel my stomach tighten a little at the tone of his voice—it sounds like he’s leading up to something, and I’m not sure that I’m going to like it. “It’s me, an endless amount of security, and the staff besides.”

“That’s still lonely.” Nikolai dips one of the shrimp served on the chilled plate into a small crystal bowl of cocktail sauce. “But I think that might change soon, Marika, if you’re open to hearing what I have to say.”

I know well enough that I don’t really have the option. Nikolai is my brother, and he loves me dearly; I know that. But I can hear the tone in his voice—the pakhan’s tone—it’s one I’m not accustomed to. I don’t like the sound of it, and I do my best to keep calm as I answer.

“I think you’re going to tell me one way or another,” I tell him simply. “So you may as well.”

I don’t miss the glance Lilliana gives Nikolai, and it makes me wonder how much he’s told her of whatever it is that he’s about to say. There was a time when he never would have shared any sort of information that might be held in confidence with a woman, not even his wife, but things are different now. Nikolai is different, softened by what he’s found with Lilliana. I’d hoped that newfound softness might extend to my own situation, but I have a creeping sense of unease that that’s not the case.

His next words confirm it.

“Theo McNeil is looking for a wife,” Nikolai says bluntly. “He’s gone on too long without an heir, and from what I’ve heard, the other Kings are starting to pressure him about it. Most of them have heirs, and they don’t want a civil war breaking out if he were to die without someone to take over for him.”

I frown. “He’s not that old, is he? Not on death’s doorstep, anyway.”

Nikolai chuckles. “No. Forty-three, I believe. But he needs to find a bride first, wed her, produce an heir, and let that heir get old enough to comfortably take over in the circumstance of his passing—and that’s a lot of things to happen when a man in our line of work can find himself on the wrong end of a bullet at any time. They’re taking all that into consideration. We don’t always get the pleasure of growing old.”

Those words aren’t unfamiliar to me, but they hit harder now, in the wake of my father’s death and my own brush with mortality. I swallow hard, holding my brother’s gaze as I ask the question that I feel fairly certain I already know the answer to. 

“What does that have to do with me?” 

Nikolai’s expression was guarded as he looked at me. “Theo’s organization is the only one more powerful than the Vasilev Bratva,” he says finally. “The Kings have resources beyond what we do, coming in not only from their home organization in Dublin, but plenty of other places as well. Theo has turned his attention to our territory, and I have it on good authority that he’s considering moving in on us. Trying to take our contacts, our territory, our business.”

“That would start a war.” I stare at Nikolai. “That—”

He nods. “And if he’s considering it, it means he feels fairly certain he can do so and win. That puts all of us in danger and everything our family has built.”

“So you’re going to try to make an alliance with him.” It’s not even really a question. It’s how this always goes. An alliance needs to be made, and the innocent, unmarried daughter is how it’s brokered—or, in this case, the innocent, unmarried sister. I’m no longer innocent, but Nikolai doesn’t know that.

For the briefest moment, I consider telling him—shouting it out over a rack of lamb and roasted potatoes, just to see the expression on his face. I’m not a virgin. Adrik fucked me on the couch in the living room. Yes, the informal one. You can see the bloodstain if you like; I never did manage to get it all the way out. 

I really do think about it, just for a second. But I can’t. Not only because of the punishment that would undoubtedly be visited on Adrik if I did, but because, after everything, I can’t bear to see the look of disappointment on my brother’s face. He’s the only family I have left—the only blood family—and the idea of him seeing all his plans wither because of my foolishness feels like too much to bear. He’s my big brother, and he’s never been disappointed in me in all my life. I hate the idea that he would be, now. 

“Yes.” Nikolai still has that guarded expression on his face, as if he’s waiting for my reaction. “I think you know how that will be arranged, Marika.”

Lilliana is very quiet across from him. I wonder if they had this discussion before, if she tried to talk him out of it, or if she understands the way things are now. If she’s come around to the way that the Families do things, now that she’s chosen to accept her place in it—if she’ll be as accepting one day when it might be her own daughter handed over to broker a business arrangement.

Love has a funny way of making people see things very differently than they used to.

“With a marriage.” My voice sounds flat and distant, like I’m hearing it down a hallway. “Between Theo and I.”

Nikolai lets out a breath, as if he were expecting a tantrum from me, and nods. “That’s exactly it. But, Marika—” he pauses, considering his next words. “It won’t be forever.”

“What do you mean?” I look at him confusedly, and he glances at Lilliana before returning his gaze to me.

“This is an arrangement that has an end date,” he says. “I’m planting you as his wife, Marika. You will go through with it in reality, of course—the wedding, the consummation, all of it. But I intend to have you find information that will enable me to put an end to Theo and his branch of the Kings before they can do the same to us.”

I stare at him. “You want to use me as a spy?” The possibilities feel different now. I still don’t want to marry Theo McNeil, or go to bed with him, or pretend to be his happy wife—but this isn’t the same as saying til death do us part and meaning it. This is something else.

“I want you to be careful,” Nikolai says firmly. “But essentially, yes. I want you to find whatever you can—get him to talk to you, any means you can devise of finding out what’s going on that I can’t access. You will be able to get closer to him than I or anyone else possibly could, especially if he thinks you’re happy with him and you please him.”

I see Lilliana wrinkle her nose at his phrasing, but she says nothing.

“Once he’s taken down and his organization disbanded, you’ll be a widow,” Nikolai continues. “I’ll write the deed to the mansion over to you. You can do as you like after that—marry or not marry at all, sell the house or keep it, whatever you choose.”

I look at him for a long moment, unsure what to say. “This is a dangerous plan,” I say finally, picking at a loose thread on the seam of my pants. What will Adrik think? It shouldn’t even be a consideration—it shouldn’t matter. But I think, for a moment, of his hands and mouth on me, the eager passion every time he takes me to bed, and I wonder if he’ll be willing to stand idly by while I marry someone else, even for a little while.

But I haven’t made him any promises, and I’m not even sure if there’s a future for us. That’s not a choice I’ve made. It’s not one I’m ready to make any time soon.

This is a choice I have to make now—if I even have one.

“What if I say no?” I ask Nikolai softly, and he sighs. 

“I’m not going to force you, Marika. I’m not Lilliana’s father, or ours. I am going to give you a choice in this. But I think you know the choice that I want you to make.”

I do, of course. And I also know that I don’t really have one. My purpose has always been to marry for the advancement of our family, and that hasn’t changed just because our father is gone. I was a fool to think that it might have. 

I don’t think there’s a single future where I don’t end up married to someone to benefit our family’s future. At least with Theo, there’s a purpose to it beyond just warming the bed of some crime organization’s heir and providing him with children. I can keep our family from being hurt by this man. And then—

There’s a possibility of a future with Adrik. It feels far away—almost impossible to think of right now. I don’t know if Nikolai would allow it, even after I’ve done what he wants. But there’s a chance—a chance, at least, for me to find out if that’s what I want. Space for me to make a choice without being rushed into it. It seems better than the other options that I can see unfolding in front of me, if I tell Nikolai no this time.

“Alright,” I tell him quietly, the food in front of me forgotten. “I’ll do it.”