Kingmakers, Graduation

21. Sabrina

21

SAbrINA

A fter another hour or two of discussion of raw materials and the best place to set up a lab, Adrik leans back in his seat, arm slung around my shoulders.

“How about another drink? So much work … must be time to play.”

His large hand massages my shoulder, warm and heavy and pleasant.

Even in this room of strangers and criminals—the kind of people who would slip a knife between your ribs for an insultingly low sum of money—I feel comfortable, even safe.

Anything seems possible with Adrik. I’m full of wild energy and outrageous plans. I wish we could start this minute.

His hand dips lower, his fingers grazing the top of my breast. His arm is heavy around my shoulders, possessive. If I didn’t like it, I’d shake it off. But it never feels wrong for Adrik to put a claim on me. Actually, it’s flattering. With all the expensive escorts in the room, he’d only be human if his eyes wandered. Adrik only has eyes for me. His attention is addictive—the more I get, the more I want.

I lean against him, letting my own hand slide up his thigh over his jeans. Feeling the thickness and firmness of his thigh, how it radiates heat through the denim.

I look into his face. He’s outrageously handsome—the kind of good looks that are even better up close. His skin is smooth and clear and brown, stretched tight over the sharp edge of his jaw. The shape of his lips makes me weak and melting.

“Two hours is a lot of work?” I tease.

“It’s work keeping my hands off you long enough to have a conversation.” He grabs a handful of my hair and pulls my head back, kissing me so deeply that I taste the vodka still burning in his throat.

My hand rides higher up his thigh. I can feel the swell of his cock pulling at his jeans. I press against the tight denim with my pinky, tugging it against his cock. Adrik lets out a groan, pulling my hair to the left, turning my head so he can nuzzle against my neck.

I run my fingers lightly over his cock, just enough pressure for him to feel it through his jeans …

His heavy breath against my ear reminds me of an animal in a cave. A bear, a dragon even. Something you really shouldn’t wake.

He puts his hand over mine, pressing my palm hard against his raging cock.

“You really are a bad girl …”

“I thought you were going to Soho?” a sharp voice interjects .

Jasper and Vlad drop down in the seats across from ours.

Vlad has swapped his Affliction t-shirt for one with the Chili Peppers’ red star on the front. I hope it’s ‘cause I hurt his feelings.

The moment we make eye contact, he’s already glaring at me. I’m glaring right back, annoyed at the interruption.

Adrik makes room for them at the table, saying, “I’ll get another round.”

The three of us sit in silence, pretending to be comfortable while we wait for his return.

Jasper is paler than ever in the dim light, his skeletal tattoos shifting eerily through the fog of cigar smoke drifting around his lean frame. He lights up a cigarette with no filter, inhaling slowly, letting the curls of smoke leak out his nostrils.

“Can I have one of those?”

Benjamin Franklin said the best way to make a friend is to ask for a favor.

Jasper stares at me silently, then hold out his silver cigarette case.

I take a roll-up and let him light it.

Jaspers flicks up the lid of his zippo and creates a flame, all in one movement like a magician.

“Thanks,” I say, puffing lightly.

He’s mixed weed in the tobacco. The smoke singes my sinuses, sending a heady warmth through my brain.

“Settling in?” Jasper asks .

He’s smarter than Vlad, smart enough not to show his animosity openly. But we both know the score. Jasper is Adrik’s right-hand man. We’re in direct competition for his attention.

Smiling, I say, “I already feel right at home.”

“Oh yeah?” Jasper’s upper lip curls, showing a glint of incisor. “Moscow is just like the suburbs of Chicago?”

“Sure.” I shrug. “People are the same everywhere. The vodka’s a little nicer.”

I raise my glass to him, half-friendly, half-mocking, and take a drink.

Then, because it’s not always my intention to be a dick, I ask him, “Where’s home for you?”

It’s the wrong question. Jasper’s eyes narrow, his lips almost disappearing.

“This is it,” he hisses. “I don’t have another life waiting for me when I’m tired of playing gangster.”

I consider quipping, So there’s no Mrs. Skeletor? but I keep a lid on it, instead saying to Vlad, “How ‘bout you, big boy? You an orphan too?”

“No,” Vlad grunts. “My mother is alive. My father was killed trying to bring Ivan Petrov home.”

Fuuuuuck me. When will I learn to do the tiniest bit of research before opening my mouth?

“Sorry,” I say.

“Why? You didn’t know him. ”

Aggression radiates out of the two of them, dull and heated from Vlad, sharp and cold from Jasper.

I’m not getting anywhere with chit-chat. It might be time for some old-fashioned flattery.

“Leo told me about the boxing tournament at Kingmakers,” I say to Jasper. “He said you almost won the whole thing. That you might have taken down Dean if you didn’t have to fight Silas first.”

Jasper has his roll-up tucked in the corner of his mouth, keeping his hands free so he can crack his knuckles swiftly and systematically. He runs down the fingers one by one, each pop as crisp as if his hands really were made of nothing but bone. When he’s finished, he pinches the spliff between his thumb and index finger and lets out a vast cloud of smoke, through which his eyes glint, pale and green—an amphibian in murky water.

“I’d like to fight him again,” he says.

That’s how I’d feel, too—I’d want another chance.

Grinning, I say, “Should we go find him? He lives here, doesn’t he?”

Jasper shakes his head. “Dean went back to Kingmakers one more year—to teach.”

“Professor Yenin?” I raise an eyebrow. “I wonder if he knows he’s gonna have to answer questions and maybe say hello to people once in a while.”

Jasper gives a ghost of a smile, crushing his roll-up into the ashtray with his bare thumb. “I doubt that’s in his contract.”

Adrik returns with four shots and four foaming mugs of beer, thumping them down on the table .

“Time to get serious.”

The three guys hold their shots over the steins, counting down: Tri, Dva, Odin! I drop my own shot into the foam and we chug the mess down, warm and frothing because Russians, like Europeans, haven’t committed to chilling their beer.

Jasper finishes first, Adrik next, then me. The three of us pound the table with our fists, bellowing at Vlad as he sputters and spills, trying to get the last of it down the hatch.

“ Mocha, blyat ,” he grouses.

It doesn’t taste great, but the liquor sends a wave of warmth surging through my body, aided by Jasper’s spliff.

Adrik motions to the bartender for another round.

I know what he’s doing—and it just might work. Vlad is already relaxing in his chair, his big legs sprawled out in front of him, his face flushed and mellow.

“You ever see them live?” I ask, nodding to his t-shirt.

“Once—in Berlin.”

“My dad saw them play at Slane Castle.”

“Oh yeah?” he leans forward, resting his beefy elbows on the table. “Some people say that was their best show.”

“Are you one of those people?”

“No. I think it was Montreal in ’06.”

“How do you know?”

“ ’Cause I’ve watched every show they ever played on YouTube. ”

Vlad has a slow and simple way of speaking, but I’m realizing he’s not an idiot. Or at least, not all the time. We get in a mostly good-natured argument over whether you can judge a live show from a recording, while Adrik quizzes Jasper about his new bike.

“How’s the KTM?” Adrik asks Jasper.

“Something’s rattling when I accelerate too hard.”

“Chief look at it?”

“Yeah—he can’t figure it out either.”

“You gonna take it in?”

“I guess.”

Adrik glances at me.

I could offer to fix it. But I don’t know if I want to extend a favor to Jasper just yet. I stay silent, and Adrik doesn’t suggest it for me.

The club is filling up, all the tables stuffed now, as well as every seat along the bar. I’ve been keeping an eye on Neve Markov’s party in case Ilsa happens to join them. I haven’t told Ilsa that I’m in Moscow—I haven’t told anyone yet, besides my parents.

A cluster of girls are dancing, slow and lazy, in the small space without tables that functions as a dance floor. I would guess they’re escorts, judging from the skin-tight mini-dresses barely covering their asscheeks. They’re all so young and pretty that if I saw them in a club in LA, I would think they were models or actresses. But that’s how it is here, as far as I can tell—too many stunning women everywhere you look, a common commodity, cheap as vodka.

Vlad watches the girls furtively .

The second round arrives. Vlad groans, but we bully him into chugging it down. By the time he’s wiping the foam off his lip, he’s tipsy enough to argue that the Chili Peppers just might be the greatest rock band of all time.

“When you count up … all the years they’ve been going … and all the hits they’ve had … not to mention … how fuckin’ rad Anthony Kiedis is … it’s indisputable …”

“Why’d you get him going on that?” Jasper says. “Now he’ll never shut up.”

Even Jasper is showing the effects of two boilermakers. The faintest tinge of pink has come into his pale cheeks, and he sounds amused instead of irritated as he tells Vlad that Anthony Kiedis doesn’t hold a candle to Freddie Mercury, “Or Billie Joe Armstrong, for that matter …”

Sensing his moment, Adrik says to Jasper, “Sabrina had an idea for a new product.”

Jasper hesitates. “Is that right?”

Under the table I hear a snick as he flicks his zippo open.

“Yeah,” Adrik says. “A party pill.”

“Molly already exists,” Vlad says.

“Leave it to a Russian to drink vodka out of a bottle and call it a cocktail,” I say. “This will be a hybrid drug—already mixed for you. One pill, with a time-delay release.”

Jasper’s eyes sweep over my face. Under the table, the zippo snaps shut again .

“One pill?” Vlad scoffs. “Why sell one when you can sell a whole bottle?”

“Because,” I say, speaking clear and direct across the table, “everybody sells the same coke, the same molly, the same weed. This will be a custom experience. Exclusive to us.”

Jasper’s jaw shifts as if he’s biting the inside of his mouth. He doesn’t like that I’m already saying “ us. ” He doesn’t want there to be an us.

“Who’s gonna make it?”

“Me,” I say. “And maybe Hakim.”

Jasper perceives in a glance that Adrik is already on board with the idea, enthusiastic even. So he doesn’t argue, though I’m sure he’d like to.

He shrugs, saying, “We can try it. We can sell it in the strip clubs.”

“No.” I shake my head. “It’s a premium offering. We need to sell it in the Soho Rooms, in all the fanciest clubs. We brand it and stamp it—sell it to the models and the trust fund babies. If they want it, then everyone will want it.”

This is Jasper’s chance to try to make me look stupid.

In the tone of an adult forced to explain physics to a toddler, he says. “Yuri Koslov sells in Soho. We can’t just waltz in and peddle our product anywhere we want. We have agreements in the strip clubs, not in the nightclubs.”

“Then we need new agreements,” I say.

Jasper throws Adrik a look. It means, Get your bitch on a leash .

Adrik ignores the look, considering the issue at hand, not the squabble.

At last he says, “We’ll start in the strip clubs.”

Jasper smirks.

“In the private rooms, to the premium clients,” Adrik says. “If it’s popular, we’ll expand from there.”

“It will be popular—” I start, but Adrik holds up his hand to cut me off.

“Make it and test it first. Then we can talk about where to sell it.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jasper says, superior and satisfied.

He thinks he came out the winner in our first skirmish. And he’s half-right.

I’m boiling with irritation, tossing down the remains of my tepid beer. I’m always going to be outvoted if it’s me versus Adrik and the rest of the Wolfpack.

I push my chair away from the table.

“Where are you going?” Adrik asks.

“To dance,” I say, stalking off through the thick fog of smoke.

I pass the table where the immensely fat Chechen boss is smoking from a three-foot brass hookah, a pair of gorgeous girls draped on either side of him, each puffing from their own slender pipe. The girls’ eyes are glazed, their heads lolling against the don’s beefy arms. As Elbrus lets out a chain of swirling smoke rings, I think how much he resembles the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, the two dazed girls befuddled butterflies flopped against him in their brightly patterned dresses .

I join the cluster of escorts dancing to the music pouring out of a stack of old speakers.

The girls make room for me at once, floating and resettling like a school of fish around a whale. They can see that I’m useful, either as a source of funds or as a way to draw business.

I bring more eyes their way. Elbrus is watching us, as well as Adrik’s frenemy Krystiyan Kovalenko, and several other tables of gangsters who have yet to choose their female entertainment for the evening.

The eyes burning on my back hottest of all are Adrik’s. I feel him watching while I twine in and out of the girls, sandwiched between them, sliding against their bodies.

I throw him a glance over my shoulder before sliding up behind the prettiest girl of all, her hair cut in blunt bangs and a bob, her lips a crimson bow.

I’ve been here a day and I’m already getting tired of men—so much ego and so much insecurity in one hairy package. I want to be around smooth skin and soft voices. I want to be with the species who knows that when a great song is playing, there’s no fucking way you should be sitting in a chair.

My annoyance with Jasper leaks away as I sway with the beat, my hands on the other girl’s hips, her ass pressed against me. Her perfume is light and sweet, it makes me feel like I’m floating.

I’ve got a temper. It flares up fast and hot, but without fuel to keep it going, it burns out soon e nough.

Already I’m willing to forgive Adrik for taking Jasper’s side, and even Jasper for turning it into a conflict in the first place.

I give Adrik another look, half a smile this time. He’s still watching me, while Jasper tries to pull him into conversation. I could lure him over here, show Jasper that he’s gonna have to become a whole lot more interesting if he wants to keep Adrik’s attention. Really rub it in his face.

But I remember my mother’s favorite saying: You’ll catch more bees with honey than with vinegar …

I’ve got a whole lot of honey right here.

I ask the girls, “ Kto-nibud' iz vas govorit po-angliyski?” Any of you speak English? I downloaded Rosetta Stone , but so far I’ve only memorized a dozen Russian sentences, and I doubt I’d understand the answers.

“I speak a little,” the girl with the bob says.

“Me too,” her blonde friend chirps up.

I spend a few songs chatting them up, asking where they live and what they like to do. The brunette is a student at Moscow State University, the blonde lives in Balashikha with her mother. Their names are Polina and Olga.

“You come here often?” I ask them.

Polina shrugs. “Most weekends. The mafiozi tip well. I try to avoid the kachki though—they’re too rough. The Slavs want to pay for pussy and then ask for anal.”

“What are kachki ?”

Adrik used that word as well. I thought it was the name of their group, but Polina says it like a descriptor .

Olga explains. “It means something like … pump up the muscles.”

“Oh,” I laugh. “Makes sense.”

I’ve still got about $800 in American bills. I slip the cash to Polina, saying, “Why don’t you come sit with us? My friends are behaved. Better than the kachki at least.” I nod toward the table where Adrik, Jasper, and Vlad lounge in their seats, throwing periodic glances in our direction while pretending not to.

“Not bad looking,” Olga says, giving them a once-over. “I don’t know about Gospodin Skelet. ” She wrinkles her nose at Jasper’s tattoos.

Polina says. “I kind of like him.”

“And you’ll keep liking him.” I grin. “As long as he doesn’t talk.”

I lead the girls back to the table, squishing in more chairs and ordering a fresh round of drinks. Soon we’re passing shots around the circle, and another of Jasper’s roll-ups.

Olga is red-faced and giggling, clinging to Vlad’s arm, asking him to flex so she can try crushing his bicep with both hands.

“ Oni kak kamni!” she giggles. It’s like a rock!

“Try like this …” Polina says to Jasper.

She takes a long inhale off the roll-up and then slowly exhales an inch from his mouth, so he can breathe in the smoke all over again, straight from her lungs.

“Gets you twice as high,” she murmurs, her red painted lips brushing against his mouth, her hand on his thigh.

Adrik pulls me onto his lap, murmuring into my ear, “You didn’t bring anyone back for yourself … ”

His fingers grip my hips. His cock presses against my ass.

I shift on his lap, draping my arm around his neck and tickling the side of his face with my fingernails.

“I’m being generous,” I say. “Sharing with your friends …”

I’m a Greek bearing gifts—the girls are the Trojan horse.

Even Jasper can’t resist. Soon we’re all laughing and drunk, Olga likewise sitting on Vlad’s lap, Polina hanging on Jasper’s shoulders.

We leave the bikes parked outside the club, sharing two cabs back to the Den.

Vlad throws Olga over his shoulder and carries her down to his room because she’s too tipsy to navigate the stairs in her stilettos. Jasper and Polina have already disappeared.

Adrik rips my shirt off before we’ve even made it down the hallway. I kick off one shoe and then the other, but the leather pants defeat me. I’m hot and sweaty, they’re sticking to my skin.

Adrik throws me down on the bed, peeling me like a banana, stripping off the pants and flinging them across the room. He does the same with my underwear, jumping on me and shoving my legs apart, burying his face between my thighs. He licks my pussy like he’s starving, his mouth warm and wet from drinking.

I’m too impatient for oral, I try to get up and kiss him again, but he shoves me down, thrusting his tongue in me, lapping at my clit like an animal.

“You love doing that,” I say, in a tone of wonder.

“It’s my favorite thing.”

“Your literal favorite? Over all the other things we do? ”

I don’t believe that for a second, but Adrik insists: “I’d rather eat your pussy than anything else. You taste like candy. When you’re about to cum you taste even better.”

“What’s your favorite way to do it?”

“When you ride my face.”

“You want me to do that now?”

“Can I film it?”

I’ve never let anyone film me having sex. I’ve never even sent a nude. It feels like giving a piece of myself away, something I can’t get back again.

Adrik would love that video. He’d probably watch it a hundred times.

He’s opened his whole life to me—his family, his house, his closest relationships. I want to give him something in return.

I prop his phone on the bookshelf, facing the bed. Then I press record.

Adrik lays back against his pillow.

I kneel on the pillow, my knees on either side of his face. Settling down on his mouth feels right. His chin is clean-shaven, his lips soft. Adrik is strong, I don’t have to worry about crushing him.

I rock my hips, sliding my pussy across his tongue. It feels slick and exquisitely warm. I can sink down on him, getting as much pressure as I want.

He latches onto my pussy, sucking gently on my clit. I lean forward, gripping the top of the headboard in both hands. It’s just the right height that I can hold it for leverage. I’m drunk enough to need it .

I ride his face lightly at first, then harder.

He reaches up, caressing my breasts in both hands.

His hands are big and warm. Powerful, too. The way they touch me is like nothing I’ve known. He can close his hand over my entire breast, squeezing and massaging. When he pulls at my nipples it feels like I’m caught in some kind of machine, something bigger and stronger than myself. I’m locked in place on his face, gripping the headboard, his hands roaming over me. Everywhere he touches me sends warmth and pleasure pulsing through me in irresistible waves. I’m on top but he’s in control. He’s making me feel everything he wants.

I start to cum, and once I start I can’t stop. I’m clinging to the headboard like it’s flotsam and I’m tossed around in a storm. I’m cumming and cumming all over his face, not tidy, not ladylike. Grinding on him like a hellion, making a mess.

When I flop down on the bed, the whole mattress feels like its rocking, like it’s a raft on the waves. My head won’t clear.

Adrik sits up, wiping his mouth on his arm.

“See? It’s fun.”

I laugh. “Yeah, if you like water-boarding.”

“Send me to Guantanamo,” he says, kissing his way down my body again.

“No, no.” I shove him off. “It’s my turn.”

Adrik lays back once more, me on my stomach between his thighs. His cock stands up thick and straight, the head mostly uncovered because he’s aggressively hard right now. He’s the first guy I’ve ever been w ith who isn’t circumcised. I like the extra skin—it’s soft and clean, providing a little extra friction when he’s inside me.

I slide my hand down his shaft, retracting the last bit of foreskin. The head of his cock is slick and naked, slightly purplish, and so warm that I can feel the heat before I close my mouth around it.

I love sucking cock when I’m drunk. My mouth gets sloppy and wet, and everything tastes twice as good. My throat is so relaxed that I can take him deep right from the start, without warming up. His cock slides in so far that it’s almost alarming. It glides all the way in like I’m a fucking sword-swallower, like I’m the Houdini of dicks, making this thing disappear and bringing it right back again.

I look up at Adrik. His eyes are rolling back, he might be having a seizure.

I grin and keep going.

I run my tongue up and down his shaft. I suck on his balls, which are smooth and tight and clean-shaven. I fit them both in my mouth, working his cock with my hand, making him groan like he’s being tortured.

I tease him for a minute, swirling my tongue around the head, lapping at the underside, at that sensitive little notch where the head meets the shaft.

Adrik clutches at the bed, ripping up handfuls of sheet. When he can’t stand it anymore he grabs my head in both hands, thrusting his cock deep into my mouth.

I give him what he wants, bobbing my head up and down, using my mouth and hands in tandem. I’m sucking this cock like it’s my full-time job, like my Christmas bonus depends on it .

After a minute he can’t hold on anymore. He lets out a roar, thrusting upward one last time, his cock jammed deep in my throat. I feel it twitching, but it’s too far down for me to taste the cum flooding out. I pull back just a little so I can feel it pulse right on the flat of my tongue. His cum is slick and slippery. It fills my mouth, coating my tongue.

Before I can finish swallowing, he pulls me up and kisses me deeply.

“You filthy little whore,” he growls. “I can taste my cum in your mouth.”

I’ve never let a man call me names before. With Adrik, it’s a compliment. He wants me slutty. He wants me misbehaved. He wants the baddest bad girl, it’s why he picked me in the first place.

Adrik can see that I’m thinking. When he’s halfway in his right mind again, he asks, “You like when I call you a slut?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? Because I’m dominating you?”

“No,” I laugh. “Because you understand me.”

I love sex, I always have. I’m not ashamed. Anyone who wants to be with me has to accept that part of me along with everything else.

“I don’t know if I could be monogamous,” I say to Adrik. “I didn’t bring a girl home—but I might another night.”

“Bring one home every night,” Adrik says. “I don’t care.”

“It doesn’t make you jealous?”

Adrik has rolled off the bed to grab hand towels for both of us. He tosses me one, using the other to wipe down his body. He stands in the do orway, sweat gleaming on his body like a sculpture freshly cast in bronze. His cock swings heavy against his thigh. He’s naked, powerful, unashamed. Taking a break for the moment but knowing he’s going to fuck me again.

He fixes me with that blazing stare, pale and electric in his tanned face.

“I don’t care who you fuck. I want your love and your loyalty, Sabrina—can you give that to me?”

It’s the first time either of us has said the word “love” out loud.

I’ve never said that word to anyone.

It makes me shiver, naked and exposed on the bed.

At the same time, I feel heat in my chest. The inferno that’s been burning there for months, impossible to smother, impossible to control.

It’s the reason I came here, even though it’s dangerous, even though it’s insane. I came here without any friends or family, without even knowing the language. For Adrik. Because I can’t stand to be without him.

“Yes,” I say quietly. “I love you. You and nobody else.”

The surprise and delight that sweeps his face is enough to make me laugh. He didn’t think I would say it.

He throws aside the towel, leaping on me, the mattress groaning beneath our weight. He crushes me against his body, kissing me hard. I can feel his heart hammering against my bare chest.

“You love me?” he says. “Because I fucking love you. I love you, Sabrina. ”

“Since when?”

“The whole time. I didn’t say it before because I didn’t want to scare you off.”

Elation bursts out of me as laughter. Adrik isn’t offended—he understands what I’m feeling.

“You really love me too?” I say.

He looks in my eyes, serious. “I’m way past love. I’m obsessed.”

I tell him the thing I didn’t think I’d admit.

“It scares me. I feel desperate and crazy—way past normal. I feel like I was already on the edge, and then I met you and I jumped right off the cliff.”

“I know.”

He’s gripping me so hard that his fingers sink into my shoulders, and still I want more. When he’s only holding me I want him to kiss me, and when he’s kissing me I want to be fucked. It’s never enough, I can’t get full of him.

He says, “I’m used to being in control. With you … I’d trade anything for another minute.”

We’re kissing again, wild and hungry, eating each other alive. I’m filled with hot, soaring happiness. We finally said it out loud and it feels so good to admit it.

This is real. The realest thing I’ve ever known.

If we’re crazy, then we’re crazy together.