A man lounges on a leather couch, head resting against its cushioned back, buttons of his crisp black shirt undone.

In the center of the room, three scantily dressed women sway their bodies sensuously to the soft tunes of the live cello and piano being played in the background.

A bedroom door soon clicks open and a young woman emerges out, draped in nothing but a cashmere throw that seems to be hastily gathered around her frame, and sinks herself beside the man on the sofa, loose-limbed and thoroughly undone.

"Lord Nazyalensky is attempting hard to gain your favour, Pakhan."

Azriel blinks opens his dark eyes at the offhanded statement, rolls his neck in a slow, languid motion. 

"You wound me, Igor." He drawls, a tch sound in his throat, voice rough, words aimed at his most loyal shadow who stands against the large glass panel of the lounge with his back facing him.

His eyes flicker towards the nameless woman laid by his side once, his expression one of detached indifference.

Without any warning, he wraps a palm around her hair roughly, fingers twisting in her locks as he drags her up and hauls her into his lap, uncaring of how the cashmere throw slips off her body and pools in his lap, revealing the naked skin beneath.

Instead, he leans back against the sofa and regards the man who’d spoken over the woman's shoulder, his attention never truly settling on her.

"You think—" Azriel murmurs, his hand gliding lazily along the valley between her breasts, the featherlight touch drawing a broken breath from the woman’s lips, "...that worthless shlyukha like these..." 

His other hand tightens in her hair, forcing her head back until the elegant line of her throat is bared to him. Long fingers settle around her neck in an unhurried grip, not painful, but absolute.

"...can buy someone my favour?"

The question is posed softly, like a blade wrapped in silk. 

But the man named Igor simply snorts, lips curving in a too sharp smile as he turns to stare at Azriel unashamedly, one eyebrow raised. "I was not talking about the woman," he states plainly. 

Azriel smirks at the reply and beneath his hand the woman moans, high and desperate, her eyes clouding with lust, a wet mess as if he'd not just fucked her minutes ago.

zhadnyy shlyukha

( greedy whore)

He carelessly pushes her off him and leans towards the table to pour himself a glass of his favoured gold whiskey, drinking a mouthful from it and he lets it burn down his throat, before he finally turns his eyes towards Igor, only to find the older man's gaze settled on the woman who had risen from the couch and was now busily running her hand up and down Azriel's bare chest.

"You know you're allowed to indulge yourself once I'm finished with them, Igor," Azriel says, head tilting, dark humour swirling in his eyes. "Only your gods know how many years have passed since you've had a good fuck!"

"I would have to respectfully decline, Pakhan." Igor grunts, glaring warningly at Cyril and Samson, the other two of his tenevoys currently present in the lounge, both of whom had barked out a soft laugh at Azriel's words. 

Azriel simply shrugs, hiding his sharp grin behind another mouthful of whiskey, finding it as humorous as always to know that he could ruffle the usually stoic man's feathers.

He settles himself more comfortably against the couch, his eyes flickering towards the glass walls that allow him an unobstructed view of the party going on in the ballroom, can see the guests dancing and mingling, ecstatic as they celebrate the newly minted alliance between the Kozlov and Nazyalensky families, a fruitful union that hangs on a promise to be signed off in blood, a binding of two lives.

Azriel's lips curl in disgust, humor fading.

"Pakhan."

His eyes once again snap towards Igor, who leans against the glass panel, hands crossed over his chest.

"Yuri Nazyalensky arrived on multiple separate occasions requesting the honour of an audience with you.”

"And why did he think his requests would be of any value to me?" Azriel drawls

His query makes Igor's lips twitch, the jagged scar on his left cheek lifting as he smiles. "Because he believes that the favor you bestow on Sergie would extend to him as well, now that he is getting his daughter married in the Kozlov family."

"I cannot be blamed if the man is an ignorant fool far too busy warming his cock to realize the truth even when it spits him in his fucking eyes," Azriel replies easily, but the flicker of his irritation flares up like a flame in his eyes. 

Igor must surely know how close he is to testing his patience, for he bows his head deferentially, a ghost of a chuckle on his lips. "Pakhan," he says, pushing away from the glass wall—

And it is then Azriel’s world fucking tilts. 

No. 

The axis balancing his world does not merely tilt, but it shatters into smithereens, into nothingness as he lays eyes on her for the first time.

A slip of a girl tucked away in a corner.

A kukla. A nimfa.

In those first few moments when he sees her, Azriel hears nothing except the rushing of blood, nothing but the pounding thump-bump of his heart filling up his eardrums.

The girl is small, barely over 5"3' if he had to guess, dressed in a pink gown, her blonde hair seemingly shining under the light.

She is turned in profile and speaking to two girls Azriel doesn't recognize or care about, pressing a dainty hand to her mouth, presumably to stop the laughter from slipping past her lips, but even from the distance he catches the sight of the dimple in her cheek, the lift of her pink lips before she hides it from his eyes; he looks at her as if she’s the only thing left in the world he can truly see, her surroundings a blur to his eyes, a haze that does not go away no matter how many times he blinks. 

She seems young, around eighteen or nineteen compared to his thirty years, but he looks at her and he wants. 

A yearning like never before growls in the pit of his stomach, gluttony on his tongue.

"—your presence for the commencement of the ceremony, Pakhan. The congregation from both sides have assembled and are patiently waiting for your arrival." 

The words fall on Azriel's ears, but he cares not for them, dark eyes staring unblinkingly, unwaveringly at the girl, heart thundering violently against his ribs. 

He watches her with avid eyes, watches her as her two companions leave her side and she tucks herself even further away from the crowd, pink lips turning down in a small pout, hands wringing nervously.

like a little rabbit left unattended amongst a pack of wild animals

The thought makes a ravenous grin split his face.

(In the background, his tenevoys turn stiff, alarm in their eyes.)

But his amusement spills into fury in an instant when he sees the little thing begin to walk through the crowd attracting the attention of several men who turn their heads at the sight of her, eyes following her while she walks with her head bowed, sweetly, gallingly unaware.

The possessiveness coursing through his veins is immediate.

Raw.

Savage.

Utterly beyond his control.

It settles somewhere deep within his bones, as though some dormant part of his soul has finally awakened after years of waiting.

Azriel's jaw clenches, hands itching for violence as he thinks about cracking heads open against the floor, his leather shoes shining with blood as he stomps on mangled faces until eyes pop out of skull, eyes that dared to fucking look—

A press of lips against his ear jolts him out of the thrall, causing him to blink, snatching away the beautiful vision of his kukla from him.

A curtain of dark hair soon falls before his eyes and they flicker towards the shlyukha who’d climbed up his lap and was now straddling him.

"You appear tense, my lord,” she whispers, her hands massaging his shoulders in a practiced caress. "Perhaps, we should move to a more private setting?" 

She grinds against him suggestively, pushes her breast against him, a soft smile on her face. Coy. Perfectly rehearsed.

She reaches for him again, tilting her face towards his, desperate.

The action fills Azriel with a murderous kind of irritation.

He turns his head at the last possible moment and instead of his mouth, her lips brush the sharp line of his jaw.

A collective, sharp intake of breath sounds around the lounge.

Igor hisses, furious. "You dare —"

Azriel raises a single hand.

Nothing more.

His shadow falls silent at once.

Only then does Azriel look at the woman. Really look at her.

Whatever confidence (madness) had brightened her features moments ago begins to falter beneath the piercing weight of his stare. Desire giving way to uncertainty. Uncertainty to fear

Then he smiles. A cold, beautiful thing.

(The kind of smile that precedes catastrophe.)

His fingers slide into her hair with deceptive gentleness, combing through the dark strands until she instinctively melts beneath the touch, mistaking cruelty for affection.

The illusion lasts all of a heartbeat.

His grip closes. Rough. Too rough.

Her head is wrenched back with ruthless precision, a pained cry escaping her lips as her throat is bared to the room.

"You presume far too much," Azriel says quietly.

His voice never rises.

It doesn't have to.

"Your lips were only meant to suck my cock," he murmurs, gaze sweeping over her with detached disdain, nerves alight with impatience. "I should take your tongue out for this offense."

He's not lying. And the woman knows it too, for she shakes her head desperately, ugly tears beginning to run down her face as she spews out nonsensical apologies.

Azriel pushes out a sharp breath, his lip twisting in a snarl, and releases her as abruptly as he had seized her.

Without his support, the woman crumples inelegantly onto the polished floor at his feet, as she hastily tries to gather the cashmere around herself and bows until her forehead nearly touches the ground.

Azriel pays her no heed, his eyes drifting past the trembling woman as though she no longer exists, returning impatiently to his kukla, only to find her gone.

He immediately pushes off the couch and walks towards the glass walls, fingers curled around a glass of whisky as he searches for her in the crowd, a little thing she is, not difficult for her to slip between the throngs of people, but try as he might, he does not find her anywhere.

Azriel knows his guards are exchanging curious glances behind his back, unsettled by his behaviour.

But as always, it is only Igor who dares to voice their thoughts as he clears his throat and questions, "Are you searching for someone, Pakhan?"

He does not answer. 

He simply tips the last mouthful of the drink in his mouth, before he turns and begins to walk towards the exit, waving his palm dismissively at the guards both inside and outside the lounge who attempt to follow after him.

He would find the nimfa himself.

.

.

.

.

He does not expect to run into her in a dark hallway.

She really is a little thing, he thinks. A slip of a girl.

She runs head first into his chest, and he immediately pulls her trembling body close, looks at her, spun white-gold in the dim light

His stomach growls at the sight of her in his arms, the touch stirring something beneath his skin that he thought long dead, like a gnawing, bottomless need —

Her head remains lowered, hair covering most of  her face, and Azriel moves his hand to cradle her neck, raises her head with a feather-light touch, fearful that the girl was nothing but a mirage that would disappear if he were to press his body into hers like he longs to do.

Her eyes remain rebelliously shut, body tight, and Azriel feels cheated, thinks of shaking her, but stops when he feels her hummingbird heart beat against his, her soft curves fitting so perfectly against his body.

His heart continues to pound in his ears, loud and fucking alive.

Azriel does not mean to speak, but the words roll off his tongue. 

"What are you?"

He question, low and deep with disbelief and near enthralment, his heart filling with a near possessive need to cage the girl in his arms, peel her eyes open, and make her look, look at what she has done to him on mere sight alone.

So lost he is that he doesn't expect the push when it comes, could never have believed that the little girl would have the strength to make him stumble and fall.

(She really is a nymph, he would later think, for there could be no other explanation. A fucking magical nymph.)

Him. 

Azriel Ilyas Romanov, the King of the fucking Bratva, the Pakhan, laid flat on his butt by a little kukla.

The fucking nerve!

He laughs and laughs. There is exhilaration like never before that runs through his veins. He feels alive for the first time in years. Inexplicable, wonderful, comforting warmth stirring beneath his skin.

(He doesn't chase her. Knows that he could but he doesn't. Doesn't need to. For where in the world could she run that he wouldn't be able to find her?)

His shadows find him in the dark hallway, laid out on the floor and laughing like a madman.

"Pakhan!"

Igor and Samson fall to their knees, worried and furious, while the others form a protective circle around him, eyes seeking a nonexistent attacker.

"What happened? Did someone attack you? Are you injured? My lord, please answer!"

Azriel simply points towards his chest. It feels like his heart is about to explode in his rib cage. Every beat wrong. 

Too fast. Too violent. Too alive.

He pushes himself to his feet, can feel the traces of her on his body as he strides back into the lounge; traces that start to curdle into something foul as soon as he enters and the shlyukha turn their gaze towards him, desperate, hopeful for scraps of his attention. 

Attention they have no right to covet. Not anymore.

Azriel’s eyes flash. 

Slowly he reaches for the bottle of whiskey placed on the table, his fingers closing around its neck and with one sharp swing, the liquor cascades over the couch, soaking into the cushion and dripping on the floor where the woman still kneels.

"Pakhan..."

The hesitant call barely reaches him.

He doesn't hear it. Doesn’t care to.

The bitterness in the air suffocates him. It clings to him like rot. Like a vice tightening around his throat, aching with a sense of profound loss.

His hand slips into the pocket of his trousers, and a lighter appears between his fingers. 

Click.

Around the room, faces blanch.

But no one moves. None foolish enough to stop him.

Azriel lets the lighter fall.

For a heartbeat, nothing happens.

Then the whiskey catches in a rush of orange and gold.

And the room erupts into chaos.

The bartender jumps over the bar. The dancers scream. The musicians abandon their instruments as they all stumble over one another in their frantic scramble for the exit.

The nameless woman kneeling on the ground doesn't even stop for the throw as she crawls after the others butt naked, terror eclipsing every ounce of her nonexistent modesty as she disappears through the doors with nothing but her fear to cover her.

Azriel never glances at any of them.

He simply walks to the towering glass wall overlooking the ballroom below, the blaze crackling the sofa behind him and slowly beginning to spread across the lounge, cleansing the air, burning away all the traces of him that he was before her.

His eyes sweep across the sea of glittering gowns and tailored black suits.

Searching.

(Hunting.)

His pulse pounds louder with every passing second.

Nothing.

She is gone. Gone.

Something inside him tears asunder.

(It’s his fault, he knows. 

He let her go. Let her slip away from him.

Didn’t he?)

"Do you wish to mark... your presence now, my lord?" He hears Igor question, hesitation in his normally controlled voice.

Azriel knows that his servants await his presence for the ceremony, heads bowed and eyes lowered and yet, he cannot bring himself to walk into a room with the short encounter playing behind his eyes, the memory of the touch lingering on his skin like a fucking itch.

"No."

He turns to face his loyal and shakes his head, once, eyes dark and flared with thrill and covetousness. 

In response, Igor's face turns stone cold, unsettled.

It makes Azriel's lips curl.

.

.

.

He leaves the party, his shadows following him silently.

.

.

.

The next day he sits in his office at the New York branch of Aznov Enterprises, documents with deals worth billions strewn across his table, the Kozlov and Nazyalensky patriarchs at his doorstep to grovel and beg forgiveness for an unknown slight they think they have committed, but he cares not for any of it, his eyes glued to the pictures of the girl taken from the security camera, spread out on his desk

"Who are you?" he whispers for what feels like an umpteenth time, fingers tracing the curve of her smile as she sits across a brown haired girl in a small cafe. 

Pavlov stands behind him silently, head bowed in submission. 

And just when Azriel feels too overcome with impatience, a knock sounds on the door before Igor walks in, bowing his head in greeting, a pendrive in his hand.

Azriel immediately dismisses his guards. Wants to be alone for this. Wants to be alone when he first reads out her name, savouring it.

.

.

.

He reads the data twice, thrice, enough times to memorize each word that describes her life. 

Two details stand out glaringly.

Her age and the fact that she has no family name.

The girl does not come from a place where  immeasurable wealth and power are handed over as a birthright in the child’s cradle, but from a below humble shelter home in Oklahoma. An orphan with no family, not even a distant one to call her own.

Alone. All fucking alone.

Azriel knows it would be so easy to have her at his side. He could steal her away at any moment and there would be no one to try and stop him.

So easy, so easy —

But she's fucking seventeen yet. A little girl. 

Only on paper, a dark voice in his head whispers as his eyes begin to read between the lines, at the careful blanks and spaces where certainty should have existed. 

Again and again.

Until he huffs and turns away from the screen, feeling restless.

The muscle in his jaw ticks, the girl behind his eyelids. 

He knows he’s a monster and yet… not monstrous enough to want to go after a little girl, shouldn't want to, but there's this fucking itch beneath his skin, a thrum in his blood, covetousness raging like a fucking inferno in his heart whenever his eyes flicker back to her picture; his eyes tracing her face, her neck, thinks about pressing his mark against her skin, in her body and her soul, marking her up as his.

For a moment Azriel wonders if he should forget about her entirely, but the mere idea itself makes him wrathful, his hands curling tighter over the glass pyramid on his desk that he hurls over a cabinet that shatters loudly at the impact, causing his guards to come running inside, eyes alert, ready to shoot at ghosts

(but the ghost is a girl hundreds of miles away, a little thing that has him enticed by sight, a mere touch, a girl that he craves and yet can't have )

"Out!" he roars.

Their eyes widen and they hurriedly back off.

Azriel turns his eyes towards her picture, the hungry, empty place inside of himself going quiet when he sees the smile on her face, wonders how it would feel against his lips.

He's not a kind of a monster to go after a little thing like her. 

He’s not. 

He's not. 

But fuck, if he isn’t a selfish man.

"Igor?"

He does not need to raise his voice for his most loyal guard to walk in, face devoid of all emotions except the wariness in his eyes that he’s not quite able to hide from Azriel.

"Pakhan." He bows respectfully.

"Have you ever been to Oklahoma?"

Igor's eyes widen.

Azriel smiles, cold and beautiful.

"I'll see you soon... Ana Winters," he whispers, her name falling like suckled honey from his lips, idly wondering if the rest of her would be as sweet as the taste of her name.

He smiles brighter, ravenous for a taste."Very soon."

.

.

.

Hundreds of miles away, Ana gasps awake.

*********

zhadnyy shlyukha- greedy whore

tenevoys - shadow ( Romanov elite guards)

kukla- doll

nimfa- nymph