1
MINA
The cutalong my left jaw throbs in time with the bass that leaks through the cab’s thin door. The stitches tug when I swallow. I taste antiseptic and copper. Vitaly said it would make me remember him.
I will remember—just not the way he wanted.
Anger steadies me better than the painkillers the clinic offered. I refused them. I want the ache. I want it bright enough, right now, to keep my spine straight as I step out into the night and face the black glass building that is Rope. The name is etched small in brass. No marquee. No line. Just a door and two men who see everything.
I am here to make Vitaly pay for what he did to me in a way he understands.
“Members only,” one guard says, the kind of man who doesn’t need to raise his voice. The other scans me.
“I’m here for the owner,” I tell them, even though my heart taps frantically against my ribs. “Roman Ekimov.”
The taller one lifts a brow. I take a black card from my purse and hold it steady. He turns it over, says something in Russian into a lapel mic I can’t see, then nods to the door. The lock releases with a soft sigh.
“Mind your manners,” he says.
Inside, the night becomes a living thing. Rope is a cathedral to kink. Red lines mark thresholds. Staff move like friendly ghosts. A couple laughs breathlessly as a knot is tested and admired. Conversations hum under the beat, low and private. It should feel sordid. It feels curated. It feels like rules keep this place on just this side of legal.
And then I seehim.
Roman Ekimov sits on a black throne that should be ridiculous and isn’t. The platform is not high, just enough to make a focal point. People dance in front of him like the ocean deciding what to do about a rock. He doesn’t preen. He doesn’t smile. He watches. Not hunting. Measuring.
Light catches silver at his temples and the precise line of his mouth. He is built to last longer than the night—thick muscles and restless energy looking for a target.
Vitaly had choice words about his father. Neglectful. Monstrous. Absent.
But I see a man in a tailored black button-down and matching trousers, posture easy with strength, hands relaxed on the carved arms of his chair as if he grew there. He looks like control given breath. Not the feckless man his son described.
I step to the dance floor’s edge. I do not dance. Bodies bend and glitter and sway, vying for his attention. I walk a straight line,the beat parting around me the way a current will bow around a stone. A few heads turn. Some smiles are invitations. I hardly notice them. The rope motif coils over ceiling beams, traced in shadow. The air smells like cedar and something warmer, like heat held in wood.
Five steps from his platform, I stop. My jaw stings. I lift my chin anyway. I look him dead in the eye and hold.
He sees me.
He does not drop his gaze to my mouth or my dress or the bandages on my skin. His eyes are dark and steady, and they stay with mine as if fastening a cable in place. The room thins to a line of attention drawn taut between us. The music keeps breathing. People keep moving. But the altitude changes.
He lifts two fingers—approach.
I step onto the platform. Close, he smells like leather and winter air. He looks even less patient and even more courteous. I don’t know what I expected—threat, certainly—but the thing I feel most is the relief of being seen.
“What business brings you to my chair?” he asks, voice low and textured, an invitation shaped like a test.
“The boys here are nothing,” I say, words careful around the sting. “I want a man, so I found you.”
Something like amusement moves at the corner of his mouth. It isn’t unkind. He glances at my eyes and nowhere else. “You don’t dance.”
“Not for attention I don’t want.”
“And what do you want?”
“You,” I say, and heat flares in my cheeks that has nothing to do with the tape. “Tonight.”
He tips his head a fraction. Approval comes as the softest exhale. He sets his glass aside. “Then you’ll have to let me know how careful to be.” His eyes dart to my jaw for less than a second.
I don’t look away. “Don’t be careful with me.”
