Epilogue

EPILOGUE

Ivan

" V anya. Vanya. Vanya ."

Ivan pressed his nose harder into Nix's hair, inhaling his smoky scent. "Yes, my incubus?"

"You're going to ruin my panties."

Ivan chuckled darkly, crooking his fingers in a way that made Nix keen. "We both know you can conjure another pair. So hush. Take what I'm giving you."

"Mm," Nix moaned, writhing against the push of Ivan's fingers. "So bossy."

Ivan pressed in a third, smirking at Nix's gasp. His demon was already sopping wet, and he was making a mess of the town car's leather seat, never mind his fucking panties. Ivan would have liked to have him on his lap, to make good use of that eager writhing, but he had a meeting to get to, and he couldn't have Nix's slick all over his pants for it. The bond gave him certain advantages, but Ivan conjuring his own clothes wasn't one of them.

"Touch yourself," he ordered instead .

Nix immediately grabbed at his erection, cupping it over his panties and thumbing the leaking tip desperately.

He looked gorgeous like this, his head thrown back against the leather interior, his long, elegant neck on display, and his eyes shut tight, almost as if he was in pain.

Ivan crooked his fingers again, and Nix's eyes flew open. "I'm close," he whined. He turned his head, purple eyes beseeching. "Kiss me?"

Ivan captured his mouth, licking into it desperately and biting at his plush lips. His own erection was straining against his zipper, a delicious, painful ache.

He felt it when Nix came, his inner muscles clamping down on Ivan's fingers, his moan spilled directly into Ivan's mouth as his body trembled in his seat.

Fucking gorgeous.

"Now you," Nix panted.

"We don't have time," Ivan told him regretfully, withdrawing his fingers.

It wasn't nearly as long of a drive as Ivan would have liked, and he knew they were nearing their destination.

But Nix was already reaching for his zipper. "Oh, darling," he purred. "You underestimate me."

He freed Ivan's erection easily, leaning over his lap and laughing softly when Ivan wound his ponytail around his fist, his protestations already forgotten.

"Don't make a mess," Ivan ordered.

"Wouldn't dream of it," Nix murmured, lapping at Ivan's precum.

Ivan hissed at the tease, and Nix laughed again, swallowing him down in the next instant. His mouth was burning hot as always, and Ivan cursed, tugging sharply at his hair.

Nix popped off, licking at his lips and peering at Ivan through his lashes. "Just like that, Vanya. Be vicious with me, hm? "

Fuck. He always knew what buttons to push.

Ivan fucked up into his mouth, using his grip on Nix's hair to guide him just like he wanted. He was as brutal as Nix had requested, thrusting hard into Nix's throat with no thought to his need to breathe.

Mainly because Nix didn't need to.

Normally Nix was messy with his blow jobs—spit and precum bathing Ivan's lap by the end of it—but he was being obediently neat this time, suctioning his lips as tightly against Ivan's cock as he was able to with the violent rocking of Ivan's hips.

"Perfect," Ivan muttered, eyes rolling into the back of his head. "Fucking perfect."

He found his release just as they pulled into their destination, and Nix swallowed every drop greedily. Ivan panted in the aftermath, trying to collect his wayward brain cells. Luckily Oleg knew better than to open the door or lower the partition before they'd signaled they were ready.

Ivan's driver had learned that lesson the hard way.

Ivan released his tight grip on Nix's hair, stroking the strands as Nix busied himself licking Ivan's softening cock clean. He tucked Ivan back in almost daintily before zipping him back up with a fond pat.

He looked Ivan over skeptically afterward. "It'll do," he said after a moment. "Your lips are bruised from kissing, but nothing to be done about that."

Ivan scoffed. As if Nix could talk. He looked wrecked—his red hair in disarray, his lips puffy, and his eyes red.

And his panties were soaked, just as he'd worried they would be.

It was a good thing he wasn't the one with a meeting.

"You demanded a kiss," Ivan reminded him.

Nix sniffed haughtily. "I asked politely. Besides—" He gave a sly grin. "You're the one who attacked me in the first place. "

Yeah fucking right. Nix had been a pest from the moment they'd gotten into the car. Dancing his fingers up Ivan's thigh, pressing his lithe body against him as he nuzzled into his neck. Ivan stuffing his fingers inside him had been the only way to get him to sit still.

Unashamed by his lie, Nix began pushing strands of his hair back into place, tightening his ponytail. "No sense playing the blame game," he said with a smirk that said he knew exactly where the blame lay. "You look mostly respectable, I promise. Are you still nervous?"

Ivan narrowed his eyes. "I was never nervous."

But perhaps he'd been…unsettled. He wouldn't put it past Nix plotting the whole seduction as a means of distraction. He was perceptive that way.

"You shouldn't be. There's nothing he can do to you." Nix snapped his fingers, and his soaked underwear was replaced with a clean pair. "And if all goes well, you can fuck me on the way home in celebration."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then you can fuck me on the way home in consolation."

Ivan laughed as he smoothed down his shirt. Of course. It wouldn't be the first time Nix had ridden him in the cramped back seat. He could be remarkably creative in tight spaces.

Ivan's laughter had a soft smile tugging at Nix's lips. "You sure you don't want me to come with you?"

"I'm sure," Ivan told him, knocking on the partition. Five seconds later and Oleg was at the door, opening it for him.

Ivan pressed a final, filthy kiss to Nix's mouth before exiting the car. "Don't flirt too hard with Oleg while I'm away. I'd hate to have to kill my loyal driver."

"No promises!" Nix called after him.

The office the assistant led Ivan into was smaller than Ivan's but tastefully decorated, with a certain warmth his had always lacked.

Anton Petrov didn't rise to greet Ivan, but he didn't look overly hostile at his arrival either.

He nodded at Ivan as he entered, pushing aside the papers he'd been glancing over at his desk. He was a relatively attractive older man, somewhere in his late fifties, with plenty of gray running through his dark-blond hair. "Ivan Kozlov. I admit I was surprised when you requested a meeting."

As he would be. Anton was the head of a rival Mafia family Ivan's crew brushed up against every now and then. They were relatively small potatoes, neither a threat nor a formidable ally, and Ivan had always ignored them as such.

Until now.

"Is that why you agreed to meet me?" Ivan asked as he took a seat. "Curiosity?"

Anton's lips curled into a small, secret smile. "Curiosity is one word for it. I've heard a lot of interesting rumors about your organization lately."

Ivan was sure he had. In the last year, his group had been surrounded by nothing but rumors. The frantic cries about monsters under his yolk had calmed somewhat in these last months, but whispers surrounding his family still abounded.

As they were meant to.

"I came here for something more concrete than rumors."

Anton hummed thoughtfully. "Your property at the docks."

"Just so."

Ivan had begun, ever so slowly, to rid himself of those aspects of his business that were less than legal, or at least the ones that were overtly so. The biggest hurdle by far was the control his family held over the docks. Quite a few other families relied on someone to look the other way for their less legitimate shipments, and they wouldn't take kindly to a change of ownership that wasn't…amenable to such things.

Someone had to be willing to take over. Someone already enmeshed in their world. And somehow, Ivan had found himself promising Sascha it would be someone who'd put a foot down when it came to shipments of people.

Enter Anton Petrov.

"It would be quite an extensive investment for us," Anton mused, as if it was his first time considering it and not something he'd surely gone over already with his accountant. "Not all of us have your ready funds."

"I'm well aware."

"But the returns…" Anton rubbed at the short beard on his chin, raising his brows at Ivan. "Why are you giving it up?"

There were a hundred ways Ivan could answer. A number of ways he should answer. Every one of them left him with a certain tightness in his chest, vestiges of panic left over from his father's many years of instruction.

In the end, he went with the simplest. "I'm getting out."

Anton's eyes widened in surprise even as he nodded. "Good for you."

And that was it. Ivan kept his shock to himself, but it was a battle. He'd been expecting some degree of pushback. Anton was closer to Ivan's father in age, the younger end of an older generation.

Shouldn't he be telling Ivan the only way out was death? Warn him that he was being cowardly and foolish and he'd end up with a bullet in his back?

Anton seemed to read something on Ivan's face. He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands over his stomach. "I've got a son," he said easily. "He's going to Stanford next year." He cocked a brow. "It's always a good thing when we can make a better life for our kids, isn't it? Give them choices we never had. That's supposed to be the point of all this bullshit."

Ivan took a moment to process the subtext. The idea that no one was actually required to pass on a blood-soaked inheritance to their unwilling sons. The fact that not all mobsters were like Ivan's father.

It had never been a Mafia thing. It had always been an asshole thing.

The confirmation didn't hurt as much as it could have. As much as it might have even a year ago.

They discussed business after that, agreeing to a meeting in the near future to sign all the necessary paperwork. It could be managed digitally, of course, but some things were still best left old school.

It was less than an hour before Ivan was back at his town car, opening the back door in a bit of a daze. Nix was leaned halfway over the partition, saying something that made Oleg laugh—a feat Ivan hadn't been aware was possible until Nix had entered his life.

Ivan slid in beside him, tugging Nix onto his lap and burying his head in his neck.

Nix was pliant, amenable to his manhandling. "That bad?"

"No," Ivan answered, his voice muffled against Nix's skin. "It went very well."

Nix hummed, the sound reverberating under Ivan's ear against his throat. "Back to the office, then?"

"No." Ivan raised his head. "Oleg, take us home."

Oleg grunted his agreement, raising the partition without being asked and pulling onto the street.

Nix began stroking Ivan's hair, his touch soft and perfect. "You don't have to give up the docks if you don't want to, darling. I don't mind."

"I'm aware."

It was a truth that had been burned into Ivan's very soul—that Nix accepted all parts of him, even those jagged, bitter bits anyone else would throw out. Nix wouldn't mind if Ivan kept his bloody empire. He didn't care if Ivan went legitimate, either, as long as he didn't cut into their time together by working sixty hours a week.

Nix had been truthful in his claims—he was good for Ivan's organization. He knew all the men's names, remembered their families, their likes and dislikes, what made them rage or made them laugh. He made them all feel seen by him and, by extension, Ivan.

Thanks to him, Ivan could keep things dirty and still feel in control, if he wanted to.

But going legitimate wasn't for Nix. It wasn't even for Ivan's brothers, as much as it pleased Sascha that he was doing so. It was for Ivan. A final way to say "fuck you" to every single one of his father's teachings. A way to set himself free from shackles he hadn't even realized had been binding him.

Shackles Nix had seen for exactly what they were, from the very first moment they'd met.

Ivan leaned over Nix to knock on the partition. "Oleg. The package."

Oleg lowered the barrier and handed him the slim box. Ivan passed it onto Nix without a word.

"What's this?" Nix asked even as he opened it with eager fingers, gasping in delight at the jeweled necklace inside. It was a short chain embedded with diamonds and amethysts, a match to the ring on his finger.

"Happy anniversary, demon."

Ivan grinned at the expression on Nix's face. It wasn't often he caught him by surprise. "I summoned you a year ago," he explained.

Nix's brow furrowed. "I didn't—"

Of course he hadn't. Nix had spent centuries in the Void. His concept of time was different from any human's. Ivan had never expected him to keep track of some random date, even if it held a certain holy significance to Ivan himself.

"Don't worry." He leered at his demon exaggeratedly, gratified when it knocked the rueful look off Nix's face. "I'll be taking my gift from you in the way I like best."

"Oh?" Nix cocked a brow, shifting on Ivan's lap, practically purring at the bulge he rubbed against. He held up the necklace with a sly smile. "Put it on for me?"

Ivan took the necklace and clasped it around Nix's neck. It was short enough that it resembled a collar, and Ivan's cock hardened further at the sight, the same jolt of possessive satisfaction going through him as when he saw the ring on Nix's finger.

Mine , he thought. My demon. My incubus.

Nix stroked the pretty bit of jewelry. "This is very sentimental of you, Vanya."

"I'm afraid you've ruined me that way."

It was clear from the look in Nix's eyes that he knew exactly what Ivan meant as he kissed Ivan with rare, hesitant sweetness.

Because Nix hadn't ruined Ivan, as they both knew. He'd saved him. His life, most likely, and his soul, most definitely, all in one fell swoop. He'd dragged Ivan back from a precipice he hadn't even known he was standing on, and Ivan owed him everything for it.

It was highly possible Ivan didn't deserve good things in life. However shitty his father may have been, Ivan's past didn't excuse the evil he'd done, or the way he'd hurt the people closest to him. Surely there was a spot in hell with his name on it.

But he'd been given Nix anyway, and Ivan would thank whatever gods or devils had sent him every day for the rest of his very long life.

His demon. His soul. His perfect match.

The end.

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