He looked away from me, obviously seeing everything he needed to. “You’d better make the trade.” Aggravation lit in my chest, but I kept my voice indifferent. “I don’t tell you how to do your fancy desk job, so don’t tell me how to do mine.” I was surprised Alexei had conceded so quickly. And I didn’t like being surprised. Though something else—something visceral, violent—swept through me at the thought of giving Mila up before I got what I wanted from her. I had a better idea: Prolong Alexei’s suffering by holding onto his precious daughter for a while. If this was like-for-like, Pd send her mutilated body back to him. But I didn’t want to mar her skin. I wanted her naked underneath me, her nails in my back, while I saw how many times I could make her come. The need raged inside me, hot and unrelenting. I was sure once I had it, this obsession would subside. Then I could have my cake and eat it too. “She has a hickey on the inside of her thigh,” Kristian mentioned casually. My gaze could kill a lesser man. I should have rolled Mila into a nun’s habit instead of leaving her naked, though even if I had, my brother would still come away with provoking observations. I was now regretting his open invitation. “Normal people have normal hobbies,” I said. “Why don’t you find one that doesn’t include dissecting everyone around you?” A smile played in his eyes. “You’re twice as fucked up as I am.” “The fact you find the idea of me going down on a woman more concerning than her being my prisoner tells a different story.” “T just find the former a bit out of character. And interesting.” “You find infomercials interesting, so forgive me if your curiosity about my sex life doesn’t hold much weight.” I could count how many times I’d given oral on one hand. All of those encounters happened when I was a young, horny teenager; when I couldn’t stop myself from eating the pussy spread out in front of me. But once I’d gotten familiar with it, the desire waned beneath the cold, childhood memory of seeing the sexual act through a cracked closet door—including my mother’s day job as a whore and the sick perversions she and her clients forced upon my brother. I could only blame almost going down on Mila on