Now he’s being unnecessarily vulgar because my brother knows he’s not going to win.
Dominik’s mouth tics, the smallest movement. “If she leaves with you,” he says, “you don’t use that word about me in front of her again.”
“Or what?” Archer sneers.
“Or I’ll teach you other words,” Dominik says.
All he asks if I choose to leave is that I try to remember him as the good man he longs to be. The man I saw in him. See in him.
The choice isn’t loud inside me. I expected a crash, a drum. It’s just a soft click, like a key turning in a lock that was always meant for it.
One step forward and the floor doesn’t tilt; it steadies.
I stop in front of Dominik, and I tip my face up. His pupils go dark. His chest swells with a breath he controls into quiet. My hands shake a little until I tell them not to. “I am choosing you,” I say. “I’m choosing to keep you both alive. Please don’t forget that when everything else gets ugly.”
Dominik’s jaw flexes once, something like pain punching through the flat line of his control. For the first time since he stepped into the room, his hand moves toward me and doesn’t stop. He touches the side of my neck with his knuckles as if I’m a match he means to strike.
Behind me, Archer makes a sound I don’t have a word for. It’s too raw to be anger, too sharp to be grief. The chain scrapes the table as he jerks.
“You’re killing me and choosing him,” he says. The accusation scrapes my spine and leaves a mark. He doesn’t get it; the gigantic sacrifice I’m making for him. He never has, not really.
Dominik hasn’t realized it, either. And I can’t bear to tell him. Not yet.
His fingers curve around the nape of my neck, just enough pressure to make my breath catch. The heat ripples out through me and everything else gets very quiet. I rise onto my toes before I can second-guess the part of me that’s been wanting to do this again like it’s more necessary to my body than oxygen. I press my mouth to his.
Dominik doesn’t make a noise. He doesn’t have to. The way his hand tightens, the way his other arm comes around my waist and pulls me against him like the world is about to tilt and he’s securing the most important parts, the way he opens his mouth on mine—slow, controlled, then not—that’s his sound. I taste heat and iron and something stubborn I could learn to live on. The kiss isn’t sweet. It’s not meant to be. It’s claiming and defiant and a little desperate, like signing my name in blood on a week-long contract that was already binding before I met him.
Archer shouts something behind us. The guards shift and then pretend they didn’t. My heart is doing stupid gymnastic things I would mock if I could think straight.
Dominik breaks the kiss first. His forehead rests against mine as he breathes in like he’s memorizing the taste of me. When he lifts his head, the softness that flickered before is gone again, locked behind whatever door he uses when he walks into rooms with men who think love is a weakness.
“Renat,” he says without raising his voice, and I realize the man has been in the hallway this whole time like a shadow. “No one in or out of the building without my eyes on them. Petrov stays on the side door until I say otherwise.”
“Yes, sir,” Petrov says.
Dominik kisses me again, briefly, like an apology.
“What the fuck?” Archer shouts. “You just going to leave me chained here so you can make out like teenagers? This is a fucking joke.”
Dominik turns to him. “You get to live because she decided,” he says. “I suggest you learn how to be quiet with gratitude. It’s a new skill for you, I know.”
“I’m dead anyway,” Archer hurls back. “That’s whatherchoice means. Maybe you’ll let me run. Maybe you’ll give me a car and money to make her think I have a chance. Your brother will still demand my blood. And yours if you let me go.”
Dominik says, “Don’t flatter yourself that you can make him forget either. Likeshecan make him forget it.” He looks at me again. The angle of his head shifts, and he’s suddenly all calculation, a map unfolding, reassessing.
Before he can figure out my plan, I tell him, “I want a minute alone with him. With the door open and men in the hall who can see. I want to say goodbye.”
Dominik’s eyes hold mine, and the decision he makes runs like a quiet click through the room. “You get two,” he says. “Petrov, the door stays open. If he breathes wrong, I come back with my gun in my hand.”
Petrov nods and steps to the side to leave a line of sight. Archer is vibrating with fury and fear, which always registered as the same thing in him. I walk back to him, and the chain trembles because his hands are shaking.
“You’re really going to do this,” he says, trying for calm but sounding shattered. “You’re going to send me out with a bullet in my head and go hold that man’s hand like it means something other than his signature on a death warrant.”
“I’m doing this for the person who won’t ever use me as a shield, not just for you,” I say. Deep down, I know that’s the only reason Archer wanted me to run with him. He thought that if I was by his side, he may not meet his end, that the Bratva wouldn’t be as quick to shoot to kill. “I’m going to stop being a hostage to your mistakes.”
“He’ll use you,” he says. “Men like that don’t know how to love. They selfishly manipulate people like they’re nothing.”
I reach for Archer through the cuffs and when I put my hands on his shoulders, he shudders. “I’ll survive because that’s how you’ve always treated me.”
