Guarded Rebellion (The Baranov Legacy)

17. Lev

17

LEV

A s soon as I came, Eva squirmed to get up. I hadn’t even fully caught my breath yet, and she was moving to get off my lap.

“Wait,” I said, probably too quietly for her to hear me. I was stunned speechless, with shock still rippling through me that we’d actually had sex. That she’d actually asked me to fuck her after calling her a slut. That I’d given up my control to go for what I had been so steadfastly convincing myself I could never obtain.

Eva. She wasn’t supposed to be mine .

I’d claimed her virginity, and the notion that I had rocked me to my core.

I’d fucked her. Raw, gritty, dirty, and hard. And she loved it. She milked me good, squeezing my dick so tight. I never could’ve guessed that she had a kink for spankings.

“I just want to…” She squeaked, her alarm clear as she almost fell.

“Wait.”

I lunged forward to catch her before she’d fall. Crashing to the floor wasn’t necessary. Her haste to get off me and escape wasn’t either. Once I had her upright, I loosened the knot I’d tied in her coat sleeves. They gave me just enough slack to bind her, but now that she stood on shaky legs, her dress fell back into place and hid her thighs from my view. Her coat slipped off her arms, though, pooling on the carpet.

She didn’t make eye contact, letting her long brown hair curtain her face. Behind that veil, she could’ve been wincing or near tears again. She could’ve been smiling in triumph or slack-jawed with shock. I wouldn’t know, though, because she drew a deep breath and left.

I sat still, my dick wet and still hard as I watched her go. She didn’t slam the door to her room after she slipped inside it, but that wasn’t saying much. She talked back and fought me every chance she could, but she didn’t throw tantrums or resort to violent actions.

“Fuck.” The admission came out of me like a punch of air. I dragged my hands over my face and swallowed back a groan.

I fucked her when I knew damn well I had no right to even touch her. I claimed her virginity when I had no business to have it. She would be arranged with someone else. Not me. I was just a soldier, an orphan welcomed into their family. Eva marrying me wouldn’t amount to any increase of power for anyone.

Stuck where I was, unmoving on the couch, I listened to the water being turned on from her quarters. A shower made sense, but I couldn’t muster the energy to get up yet.

I shouldn’t have done that. Yet, as I thought back to how we’d both come so close to snapping, I had to recognize that she was just as much at fault. She hadn’t told me no. She hadn’t resisted me. She’d begged for it, physically and with words, giving me her saucy consent.

She shouldn’t have let me have her virginity.

She knew better. I did too, but dammit, one of us should’ve been strong enough to hold on to common sense.

I sat there for so long, analyzing how we’d let this happen. The water shut off, but she didn’t exit her room. Eventually, I got up and showered, but I returned to the couch to watch for her to come out and have to address this with me.

I waited. And waited. All night long, she stayed sequestered in her room. It was a blatant avoidance, but I couldn’t blame her. She had to be reeling just the same as I was, and I wasn’t surprised that she took the easy—if cowardly—way out of speaking about it.

Space wouldn’t hurt either of us. I remained on the couch, pensive but too obstinate not to feel guilty about this happening. I would not, ever in my life, admit an ounce of regret. She felt like heaven, a perfect mixture of stubborn and submissive. A delicate blend of boldness and vulnerability. And she’d trusted me to make her feel good. She chose me to take her for the first time. No one else. Not any other man.

In hindsight, I realized that I’d overreacted. Seeing someone else touching her had provoked me to experience a degree of possessiveness that I couldn’t control, and it was just Kismet that she was in sync, desiring me just as much.

My eyes drifted closed, and still, I didn’t move. Like a sentinel on the couch, I stayed put in case she’d step out of her room. All the while, as sleep crept closer, I wished that I could talk to her, that I could check on her now that the heat of the moment had passed. Now that the primal anger and lust had been vented out and acted on, I could attempt a more civil conversation.

I had no clue what I would tell her. Words wouldn’t string together. It hardly mattered if I could rehearse something to tell her. Because as I lost the willpower to stay awake, I was pulled into a restless sleep.

In the morning, I woke with a stiff neck from being on the sofa instead of a bed. The mattress was fine, but the pillows sucked. This couch was no better, though. I kept my eyes closed at the sound of Eva moving around in the kitchen. Freezing my body to stay in place, breathing as evenly as possible, I hoped she would act as though I wasn’t awake so I could catch more of whatever she was saying.

“I’m just glad that Lev came to get you,” Kelly said. Her voice came loud and clear, and I had never been happier for speakerphone capacities.

“Well, yeah. I knew when I snuck out that the odds were high he would,” Eva replied quietly. Despite her running water, presumably to make coffee, I heard every word she admitted.

“Once I saw him walking out with you, I knew you’d be safe,” Kelly said with a deep sigh of relief. “The second we got split up in that crowd, I panicked. I looked for you everywhere, but it was like you’d disappeared.”

“Yeah, I, um, got pushed aside,” Eva replied, glossing over the truth. I bet she didn’t want to tell her new friend just what she almost got pushed into suffering, too.

“But Lev found you. And just in time.” Kelly huffed a bitter laugh. “I’m so glad we made the stupid plan to go to that party when we did and not any later. I didn’t want to stay, and if we had, we might have found ourselves in an even worse spot.”

Eva had found herself in a bad position.

“What do you mean?” Eva asked.

“You haven’t heard?” Kelly replied, incredulous.

“Heard what? Come on, Kel. You know you’re the only person I really talk to here.”

“Yeah, but it’s all over the socials. Irina was attacked at that party.”

I was fully alert now, but I still kept my eyes closed to feign the image of sleep. From the sounds of what Eva was doing, near the sink in the kitchen, my back would be to her.

“Irina? Irina Petrov?”

“Yep. She was attacked at that frat party. One of her friends was raped, too.”

“Oh, fuck,” Eva whispered, concerned and unable to mask the emotion from leaking into her gasp.

“She was raped at that specific party?” Eva cleared her throat, clearly uneasy.

Fuck this. I sat up, not bothering to pretend that I hadn’t been eavesdropping and listening in. That I wasn’t asleep. Eva jumped as I stood and spun to face her so suddenly, but she didn’t try to hide. Her brow remained furrowed with worry as I walked closer.

She jabbed her finger on the screen to mute it. “What if that woman on the floor in that room is the one she’s talking about?”

I shrugged, not commenting on that worry. I had no clue who that naked, unconscious woman was. She likely had been raped, and I didn’t know if she was one of Irina Petrov’s friends. “My priority was getting you out of there,” I replied bluntly. But now, this news of Irina being at the same party and also being attacked, I had to make this my business. The daughter of our rivals being attacked was no passing matter. We could be framed. Or if this was a coordinated strike against another family, we would need to be alert and cautious as bystanders.

I unmuted the phone. “Is Irina all right?” I asked.

Eva frowned at me, perhaps peeved that I was hijacking on her call.

“Oh. Lev. Hi. Um. I think so. The posts and comments I saw this morning seem to imply she isn’t at the health clinic. So maybe her injuries were minor.”

“Eva will talk to you later.” I ended the call and faced her.

“Hey. You can’t just hang up like that. I wasn’t done talking to her.”

“You are now.” I crossed my arms. “Did you see Irina at that party?”

“No.” She didn’t cower, and I fucking loved it. She was bold and strong to stand up to me. I wasn’t sure any man could ever deserve a hard-willed woman like her. “Kelly and I just wanted to go and see what one of those parties were like.” Her expression fell, going deadpan. “You can cross it off as another experience I wanted to have under this ‘fallacy of independence’ you mentioned.”

“You weren’t there for long?” I asked again, ignoring her attitude.

“No. She came here, we evaded Marcus?—”

I pointed at her. “About that.”

“Yeah, yeah. I won’t do it again. As soon as I got to that party, I wanted to leave. Kel did too.”

I frowned. Interesting. She’d gone so far out of her way to sneak out, and then once she was out, she lost interest in this independence she'd insisted on? “Why?”

She shrugged, lowering her gaze. “I don’t know. It all seemed so stupid and petty. Everyone looked so young.”

“ You’re young.”

She arched a brow. “But legal enough for you to want me.”

I opened and closed my mouth, and she pounced on my hesitation to continue.

“The people at that party seemed so juvenile compared to the people I’ve always associated with. Powerful men. Individuals with power and dignity.”

And capable of violence.

“Maybe you can consider this a lesson, then.”

She huffed. “Oh, I think I’m still reeling from the last lesson you wanted to give me.”

I didn’t stop her as she walked past me. Watching her head back to her room, I sighed and wondered how sore her ass was from all those spankings.

“Maybe you can see that you don’t really belong here, Eva. That you’re not supposed to fit in with these ordinary, so-called juvenile college students. You already rise above them. You’ve already lived a life they are too soft to ever survive.”

She cringed, not replying. A knock sounded on the door, though, and the interruption distracted her from admitting I might be right or from arguing back.

Rurik let himself in. He glanced between me and Eva, caught off-guard as he volleyed his gaze back and forth. “Am I… interrupting something?”

I rubbed my hand over my face. Honestly, yeah. It felt like he was interrupting. Now that I’d had a taste of Eva, literally and figuratively, I didn’t want to share her with anyone for any reason.

God, I am so fucked. This possessiveness was getting out of control.

“No,” she replied.

He faced me. “We need to talk.”

Eva shook her head, stalking off to her room. “I’m going. I’m going.”

She knew better than to listen in to family business. Even though she was legitimately part of the family, she still knew her place.

She forgot her place last night. With me.

“You all right?” Rurik asked, jarring me from this zoned-out stare I had on her closed door.

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat and looked at him. “What’s going on?”

“I got a report that Irina Petrov?—”

I lifted my hand to cut him off. “We heard. Kelly called her and I listened in.”

He nodded. “And one of her acquaintances was raped at that frat party.”

“Again, we heard.”

His brows shot up high. “ We ? You and Eva are… together now?”

I glared at him. “Don’t play games with fucking semantics now. Anything else I need to know?”

“Yes. The man you found Eva with was a soldier affiliated with the Ilyin family.”

What the— I blinked, unable to contain the utter surprise that hit me with that news. “Are you sure?”

He bobbed his head up and down. “Yes. I had a couple of men sweep through the party after you took Eva home. I made sure Kelly left too. We found him, but he ran off before we could capture him.”

“So Irina and her friend must have gone to that party after you left?” If they’d done a sweep of the place, he would’ve noticed the Petrov daughter.

“Correct,” Rurik confirmed. “I didn’t see her there.”

“An Ilyin soldier?” This complicated it all. I was counting on the Petrov presence because Irina was a student there, but the Ilyins? What business did they have being at that college campus?

My first thought was that they were targeting Eva.

Or maybe they were there to go after Irina Petrov.

Either way, this didn’t sit right with me.

“Also…”

“Fuck.” I shot Rurik a tired look. “There’s more?”

“The Boss wants you to report home to check in with him. News of all of this has reached him.”

I sobered. “Even how I found Eva?” Only Rurik could have told him that part.

“No. He’s unaware that she was almost…”

I held my hand up, not wanting to even hear him say it. Especially with Eva stepping out of her room, her hair brushed and her looking more put together. I doubted she could be traumatized about what happened at that party after we’d changed the course of the night together here.

“But the Boss wants you to report in,” Rurik told me, sparing a glance at Eva. “I think he wants to get your opinions about everything happening around here.”

I stared at Eva, unwilling to let her out of my sight so soon. “You’re skipping class today.”

She crossed her arms. “Again?”

“Again. You’re coming back with me to check in.”

The closer I kept her with me, the less I’d worry about an unexpected threat reaching her in my absence.

At least, that was the lie I told myself. In reality, it was nothing more than a matter of wanting her present and within reach—no matter what.