#nitko

"Blin!" he spat. You didn't need the translation to feel its sting. (Damn it/Crap)

He pressed in, Kevlar brushing against your temple, cold against your skin; while his other hand rose to the nape of your neck - fingers trembling for an instant, then clamping down, yanking you flush against him. You could feel his pulse under your cheek, a thrumming you couldn't escape.

"Don't… run again, malyshka," he rasped in rough English, each word heavy with command and something akin to longing. (baby)

Another curse, "Pochemu menya eto volnuyet?" rolled out, guttural and unwanted, a whisper more to himself than to you. Then the dam broke. His breath was hot and ragged, drawing you into his single reality. His grip on your hair was vice-tight, possession incarnate. (Why do I care?)

"Say you understand," he demanded.

"I understand," you whispered, your voice small, rough and trembling.

A growl rumbled from him - half frustration, half victory. Outside, thunder roared; inside, only his heat remained. The raw press of his body, the harsh rasp of his breath. His fingers clenched tighter, tilting your face. "I've… held back for too long. Not anymore. I'm taking you. Right here. Right now. You're mine, malyshka. Only mine."

"I understand," you repeated, your heart hammering so loud it drowned out everything but him. His grip tightened so hard your skull spun. "No more holding back. No more waiting. I'll make you feel every damn part of it. You will not escape. Not from me. Not from now."

His chest crushed yours, fingers tangled in your hair with relentless intent. Every tremor in his body pulsed against you - all need, all claim, all hunger. And slowly, predatorily, he leaned in further. One hand trailed down your soaked back, fingertips splaying like claws over your jacket, testing you, marking you. His other stayed locked at your nape, thumb brushing your jaw, forcing your face upward.

"Zdes," he growled, voice jagged as broken concrete. "Here. No one else. Only me. You feel me… da? Ponimayesh?" (Here, Understand?)

You nodded, your breath shallow, heart oddly bound to his.

He exhaled sharply, his knuckles whitening. In that moment, the world shrank to his weight on yours, the coarse rasp of his breath, the undeniable truth of his claim.

And then - inevitably - the rest unfurled.

Leather and breath and metal - his heat, his weight, his will. She tried to speak, lost the intention in the bruising press of his mouth, the mask's rough edge where a bullet nicked him slicing her lip until the taste of copper mixed with rainwater and adrenaline. He drank it in, the hunger inside him corrosive, elemental, something that had been starved below the discipline of steel and orders for years. Possibly forever. He couldn't remember. Didn't matter now anyway.

"Dai mne," he ground out, smearing the syllables into her jaw, her neck, wherever skin was bare and vulnerable. The words tumbled into meaninglessness, but the intent carved itself into her bones, under her ribs to make a home. He wanted more than her compliance, more than obedience - he wanted proof, evidence, the certainty that she would not vanish when his glove released. (Give me.)

Her head spun, caught in the storm of his need. He tasted of smoke, of old vodka, of the sharp tang of salt from sweat and fear. Strange, that the world seemed to peel apart and all she could see was him. This broken man in the spotlight. She clawed at his vest, catching on the torn fasteners and half-ripped MOLLE webbing, yanking until the whole mess peeled away, thunking to the floor with the weight of a dead animal. He didn't help. He just crowded her deeper into the cinderblock wall, both elbows braced on either side of her head, caging her in, chest to chest and thigh to thigh. He grunted, a rough, frustrated sound that buzzed at the base of her skull.

She squeezed her eyes shut and braced for pain, but instead there was a shock of cold air where his hand fisted under her shirt and yanked it up, baring her ribs, her breasts, her scars. He jerked the ruined mask from his face, then bit down - not gentle, never that - on the edge of her collarbone, hard enough that the heat of it traveled, electric, straight to the pit of her stomach. She tried to lean away, but there was no escape. Not from him, not from this.

He was watching her - no, more than that, inside her skin, pacing the perimeter of every nerve ending, every synapse. The hand around the back of her neck was the control point, all other movements organized, relentless, inevitable. She thought he might snap her in half, that if she resisted the pressure would simply continue until there was nothing left but a silhouette branded in bruises against the wall. She didn't want to resist, to fight, not really. But if she had, he'd already mapped out every exit, every trick, before her mind could even articulate its first protest. She wanted this just as bad as he, just wished for a better first time.

The room was small, spartan, three cots against one wall and a folding table with a half-empty bottle of antiseptic on it. He shoved her toward the table until her thighs caught and she bent back over its edge. The belt at her waist snagged and then his hands were on it, ripping it loose in one practiced motion, the buckle clattering against something metal on the floor. He hitched her up by the thighs, spreading her as he set her down on the edge of that warped table - nothing elegant, just a rough heave, the weight of her collapsing into his hips. Ugly fluorescent light buzzed overhead, and in it she saw the rawness in his face, the splay of bruises and scars and burns darkening along his jaw, the way his pupils had nearly swallowed any color from his eyes.

He stripped gloves, tore open his own belt one-handed, not bothering with buttons, just yanking down until skin was on skin. Her knee cracked against the side of the table and she didn't whimper, didn't protest. Only watched, utterly transfixed as he lined up and pressed into her, the first hard thrust punching the air out of her lungs and sending white lightning up her spine. "N-Nikto!"

He fucked her like it was an argument, like she was the only proof left that he'd survived the last hour. Railing into her as rain hammered the windows, each push driving her harder into oblivion. At some point, he lost the thread of language altogether. Only the flat of her under his palm, the pulse in her throat thrumming faster than the chaos outside, the tangle of limbs and desperation. On the table, she scrabbled for purchase as he pounded into her, her nails gouging the cheap laminate. Her head lolled, hair clinging to her cheeks, eyes glassy and unfocused. She wasn't making much of a sound. Not a scream, not a sob; only that shallow, gasping inhale, as if she was silently eating the pain and the pleasure with equal hunger. Devouring the moment with righteous greed.

Then his own control slipped once more. The neat cadence of his thrusts dissolved into near-violence, a series of shattering blows, each one harder, deeper, until the table legs stuttered across the tile with a screech. He saw her jaw hitch, the cords in her throat standing out white and taut; she was close, closer than he'd planned, but there was no going back now because he was just as close.

He grabbed her chin and forced her to meet his eyes - the same eyes made from pure Siberian ice, all ragged and heavy with want. He wanted her to see him. Not as a mask, but as a man, as something with a pulse and blood hammering through ruined knuckles, starved and desperate to matter to the singular radius of her proximity. He spat words at her, Russian, panting, syllables half-choked on the wet air. "Blyat... malyshka.." (fuck... baby)

She didn't understand them, but the cadence -the tone, the way he shook her with each thrust - she understood everything he meant. She reached a hand out and clawed at his wrist, not to fight, just to anchor herself, to keep from flying apart entirely.

"Look," he barked, nudging her focus with his thumb at her jaw. "You look. Zdes, you see? I fuck you, you see." She saw. She saw the arc of spray from his hair as it flicked wet from his brow, the outline of muscle under his soaked shirt, the stark divide of light across the cut of his cheekbone. She saw the line of blood at the corner of his mouth, the wildness there. The saturation of need.

He was relentless. The collision of her body with the edge of the table numbed the backs of her legs, but the rest of her - a hot, shaky ache that gathered pace, the pressure both outside and in. She tried to bite back sound, but it rose anyway: a rough, keening scrape that barely resembled her own voice. He matched it with an answering groan, one that vibrated through her teeth.

He bent low, mouth dragging across the panic of her pulse, then he was biting her again, shoulder this time, the hold of his jaw promising a bruise by morning. He clamped her tighter, and she felt the tremor run through his arms, the slight stutter that meant he was as close to unraveling as she was.

She expected the end to be savage, and it was - he pinned her with the force of his need, the gasping wreck of his control hammering into her like a sentence. Then that last brutal tremor hit, and she felt him shudder, the heat and weight spilling into her waiting womb. He braced himself over her, his body rammed forward, one hand moving to flatten her cheek to the table. His breath fanned down her neck in short, sharp pulses. Neither of them moved for some indeterminate span - half a dozen seconds? A minute? The concept of time had eroded into sweat and rain and the ringing in her ears.

And she became aware, eventually, of the spreading wet beneath her, the dull ache in her hip where it pressed the edge of the battered table, the clinging chill of her own sweat cooling in the draft from the broken window. Her palms stung as she loosened her grip on the table, felt a splinter dislodge from under one fingernail.

He didn't release her yet, not right away. But he panted against the nape of her neck, the weight of him a living exoskeleton, an armor made out of sinew and ruined discipline and whatever darkness kept men like him alive. Then he made a sound - a low, trilled consonant, almost a laugh but sour, unspooling at the end. She could picture his face, the not-quite-shame, the way his gaze defaulted to the knife's edge of threat because any other expression felt like a failure of operational security, of softness that would ruin him. She'd seen him bludgeon an enemy with less force than he'd just used to fuck her and she braced for the recoil, some kind of snarl or retreat, but instead he just hung there, his breath a warm fugue dragging at the skin behind her ear.

She didn't know how to name the thing that held them there, except it had the taste of rust and rainwater and the backwash of violence, of possession and claim. He could demand a thousand surrenders from her body and it would still not be enough; she knew it already, knew it before she could breathe again.

When he finally peeled himself off her, pulling himself out, the cold rushed in all at once: a sick shock along her back, overexposed skin prickling. He didn't go far. Instead he pressed his palm to the center of her spine, holding her in place as if to say: don't get clever, don't run, don't even think about it. His hand slid across her sweaty back, tracing a path between her shoulder blades, the calluses on his fingers catching on her skin. She shivered, unable to tell if it was from cold or from the aftershocks still rippling through her body.

He moved around the table, keeping one hand on her as if she might bolt. His eyes were dark pools, unreadable in the dim light. Without warning, he grabbed her jaw again, tilting her face up to his. The movement wasn't gentle, but it wasn't cruel either - just decisive, like everything else about him.

"Never run like that again, malyshka. I will keep you now. Safe, full, and mine."