Chapter 50 VICTOR'S BEDROOM, WEAPONISED

Chapter 50 VICTOR'S BEDROOM, WEAPONISED
Kira spent the better part of the afternoon constructing what she needed for that evening, the same careful calculation she now brought to everything in this house. She chose the dark red dress from the back of the wardrobe, the one that caught the light in a way she knew Victor liked, and she rehearsed the questions in her head while she dressed, deciding exactly how much warmth would sound believable, exactly where the innocent curiosity needed to sit in her voice so that it wouldn't sound like an interrogation.
She knocked on his door just after ten, and the approval that moved across his face when he opened it was immediate.
"Kira." He stepped back to let her in, his eyes roaming over the dress with open appreciation. "You didn't need an invitation."
"I wanted to see you," she said, and let the words land soft and simple, exactly the register he'd come to expect from her since the night in the red dress had first taught him she'd finally learned her place.
He was rougher that night than usual, a current of possessiveness that ran deeper than his usual dominance. He pulled her against him the moment the door closed, claiming her mouth hard and murmuring dirty words of open lust. When he finally walked her toward the bed, his hands were less patient than they'd been in weeks, gripping instead of caressing, and pulling instead of guiding.
"You're mine," he told her, again and again, pressing the words into her skin between kisses, along her throat, and against her collarbone where Elena's pendant still rested. "No one else is ever going to have this. Do you understand me? You were made for this."
"Yes," she breathed, and meant nothing by it, simply letting her body respond the way years of reading rooms full of dangerous men had taught her to respond, arching into his hands, gasping at the right moments, and giving him every signal he needed to believe that he had earned every reaction he was pulling from her.
He pinned her face down on the bed, the mattress dipping hard under the force of his weight. One hand locked around the back of her neck, while the other bruised into her hip as he yanked her ass higher. The head of his cock nudged against her entrance, already slick from how roughly he’d prepared her, and then he pushed into her in one relentless thrust.
Kira’s breath left her instantly without her meaning to. He didn’t give her time to adjust. He fucked her in deep, punishing strokes, hips snapping forward so the impact jolted through her whole body. His grip on her hip tightened until she knew there would be fingerprints tomorrow. Every few thrusts he leaned down, mouth against the side of her throat, voice dropping into that low, rough growl.
“You belong to me. No one else. Never anyone else.”
She felt the words vibrate against her skin. Felt the restless, almost frantic energy driving him…something more than just simple lust. And still, that clear cold corner of her mind stayed separate. Watching and waiting. 
He reached under her and found her clit with two rough fingers and circled hard. Pleasure spiked within her, and she clenched around him without meaning to. He growled approval and kept working her, matching the rhythm of his thrusts until she was right at the edge, body tightening, breath catching…
He stopped.
Pulled his hand away and slowed his hips to deep, grinding rolls that kept her full but gave her nothing strong enough to tip over.
“Not yet,” he said against her ear. “You’ll come when I say so.”
He edged her like that three more times. Built her up with hard thrusts and deliberate pressure on her clit until she was shaking, thighs trembling, the sheets clenched in her fists…then denied her. Each time his voice stayed low and absolute, repeating the same claim between gritted teeth. That she was his. That no one else would ever have her like this. That he could keep her right here, desperate and open and denied, for as long as he wanted.
Kira’s body was soaked with sweat and the evidence of how thoroughly he was using her. Her mind, though, stayed that half step removed even as she moaned his name, observing the restless edge in him.
When he finally let her have it, it was only because he was close himself. He drove into her harder, fingers working her clit with ruthless accuracy, and the orgasm built and burst through her in powerful, helpless waves. She came around his cock with a broken sound, clenching hard while he groaned with pleasure.
He followed almost immediately…burying himself completely with a shuddering groan against her throat, hips stuttering as he emptied his load into her. 
He collapsed half over her afterward with his arm across her waist, pinning her in place even in the aftermath. His cock stayed inside her as it softened, a lingering claim he didn't want to lose.
Kira waited, counting the minutes in the rhythm of his breath until his body had gone fully soft and unguarded beside her, and then she shifted and rested her head against his chest.
"Victor," she said quietly, tracing one finger along his forearm.
"Mm."
"Can I ask you something? About Elena." She kept her voice light and curious, making sure she sounded like a daughter simply wondering about a mother she'd barely known rather than a woman closing in on a truth she suspected was monstrous. "Was she sick for very long? Before it happened?"
Victor's chest went still beneath her cheek for a second, the smallest possible pause, gone almost before she could be certain she'd felt it at all. Then his hand resumed its slow stroke along her back, and his voice, when it came, was gentle.
"Her final months were complicated, my dear."
"Complicated how?"
He was quiet for a moment, and Kira kept her breathing slow, giving him nothing to react to, and letting the silence stretch until he filled it on his own terms.
"She'd started accessing things she shouldn't have been," Victor said finally. "Areas of the business that had nothing to do with her and she had no reason and no authorization to be looking into. I told her, more than once, that it wasn't good for her. The stress of it." His hand paused briefly at her back. "It contributed to her decline, in the end. Dr. Voss was invaluable during that period. I don't know what I would have done without him managing things as carefully as he did."
Kira listened to the way he said it, and it sounded to her like a carefully crafted reply that had been told over and over again.
"That must have been so hard for you," she murmured. "Watching her go through that. I'm glad you had someone like Dr. Voss to help."
"He was very capable," Victor replied.
Kira traced her finger slowly along the muscle of his forearm, feeling the tension still coiled just beneath the surface, and thought about the wardrobe cupboard three floors above them, the family portrait with its violent absence where her mother's head should have been, the red X slashed across the empty space like a target drawn by a hand that hadn't been steady when it made the mark. She thought about the memo folded into the pages of a library book and hidden now behind a loose stone in the garden wall, the words containment protocol and sensitive exposure sitting cold and clinical over what she now understood might have been nothing less than the slow unmaking of a woman who had started looking too closely at her own husband's business.
Accessing things she shouldn't have been. Files that had nothing to do with her.
She wondered, lying here with her head against his chest and his hand still moving lazily along her spine, exactly what Elena had found. She wondered whether her mother had discovered the same reassignment document Rex's contact had pulled from an unsealed registry, the quiet theft of her own accounts carried out on paper while she was still alive to feel it happen. She wondered whether Elena had gone looking for the truth the same way she was going looking for it now, moving carefully through locked drawers and hidden cupboards, believing herself to be clever enough to stay one step ahead of a man who never allowed anyone to stay ahead of him for long.
Finally, she wondered whether Elena's illness had been half as natural as Victor's smooth story made it sound.
"I'm glad you're telling me this," Kira said softly, pressing a slow kiss to his chest. "I want to understand her. Even if it's hard to hear."
"You're a good girl," Victor murmured, his hand finally stilling against her back as sleep began to take him. "Asking the right questions, unlike her toward the end. Always digging where she shouldn't."
Kira lay very still against him, listening to his breathing and said nothing at all, because there was nothing safe left to say, and because she had already gotten exactly what she'd come for.
She stayed there long after he was asleep, her eyes open in the dark, and her mind moving carefully through everything he'd just handed her without ever realizing what he'd given away… Dr. Voss. Accessing things she shouldn't have been. 
Kira closed her eyes, Victor's arm heavy and possessive across her waist, and began, carefully, to fit the last few pieces into place.