When Dominik starts to kiss me again, I feel so guilty for thinking about his brother that I stop him with my rambling. “He might come back to try to change my mind,” I say, guilt and dread tangling in my throat. “When you’re gone.”
“He won’t be alone with you again,” Dominik says. “Not while I breathe.”
I know that’s a promise he can’t realistically keep—not with his brother—but I like hearing it anyway.
As if he’s thinking the same thing, he pulls his hand out from under my shirt and steps back an inch. Apparently, he’s decided to be honorable when it would be so easy not to be. The inch hurts.
“Did you eat?” he asks, and even though I know it’s a distraction, the gentleness feels like a more intimate kiss.
“Yes.”
“Then lie down and rest.” He tilts his head, cataloguing me again, but it isn’t like his brother’s look. It feels like being chosen, not priced. “You look like you haven’t slept in a year, hellcat.”
“Feels like it too.” I force a breath in, then out, and find the ground with my feet again. “Will you rest?”
He smiles without showing teeth, the quiet, dangerous version of it that only happens when the world narrows down to the two of us. “No.” His gaze flicks to the door and back. “But I’ll stay close.”
“In the chair?” I ask.
“In the chair, eventually,” he agrees. “I’ll be nearby if even a shadow moves wrong.”
“I know you will be,” I say, and there’s truth in it and something else that sounds like a vow.
“I should speak to the guards.” He moves toward the door and then stops. He returns one step, maybe two, lifts his hand, and fits his palm over my chest. It’s not a grope this time. It’s a claim and a promise, all at once. My heart thunders into that hand.
“You’re not a bargaining chip,” he says, voice roughened by something I don’t know how to handle yet. “Not for him. Not for me. Not even for yourself.”
“What am I then?” I ask, because if I don’t, I’ll never sleep again.
Dominik’s eyes hold mine until the city outside forgets to blink. “Mine,” he says. The word should feel like a cage. It doesn’t. It feels like somebody finally closing a door against the storm and letting me breathe.
Before I can answer, his phone buzzes. He steps away, thumb sliding, mouth flattening as he listens to a voice I can’t hear and understands a risk I can’t see. “Good,” he says finally. “Hold position. No noise.”
“Viktor or Petrov?” I guess when he ends the call.
“Viktor,” he confirms. “And the clock.” The way he says it tells me something just shifted on the invisible countdown between him and his brother. He glances toward the hallway. “Go rest. I’ll be here when you wake.”
“Your room or mine?” I know the answer; I just want to hear him say it.
“Mine,” he replies without leaving any room for argument.
The guards return to the inside of the penthouse, ghosts with earpieces. They pretend not to watch as I cross to the hall. I stop in the doorway and look back because I’m weak and because I finally give myself permission to be. Dominik looks like a man about to get violent against time to make it behave for him. He looks like a man who would snap his brother’s neck for me and then carry my guilt too, if I asked him to. He looks like a man I should never want, should never put in that position. I promise myself that I won’t do that, even if I’m beginning to suspect it’s a lie.
“Dom,” I say because I can.
He tips his head, that quarter-smile ghosting his mouth. “Alina.”
My name in his voice is a sin and a blessing. I tuck it into the place in me I’m not willing to examine yet. I step into his room and close the door, the soft click the first sound all day that doesn’t frighten me. It isn’t prison bars shutting. It’s a line being drawn.
I lie down on top of the covers, close my eyes, and listen for the scrape of the chair that finally comes, for the quiet curse when his wound reminds him he’s human, for the sigh when hedecides to give the night a little piece of himself anyway—sleep he pretends he doesn’t need.
When sleep finally finds me, it trips over his name.
I come to slowly, waking with a hand on my shoulder, a thumb stroking carefully. He treats me like I’m fragile, even when I’m not, and I love it anyway. The light outside is different. It’s a shade grayer, matching the mood Gavriil left behind. Dominik is a silhouette, but even as a shadow, he feels safer than anything else in this city.
“I’m heading out,dikaya koshka,” he says softly, because information is our love language. “We’re going to get the rest of the guns.”
A cold pulse snaps through me.
