I get in the driver's side and pull away from the curb, leaving Kazimir and the others to handle the cleanup. In the rearview mirror, I see Mara looking back at the gallery, watching it disappear behind us. Her face is pale and expressionless, but I can see the understanding in her eyes. The realization that everything has changed, that the line between her world and mine has been erased completely.
She's killed a man, been marked as mine by my enemies, stepped into a world where normal rules don't apply. There's no going back to her apartment, her routine, her safe and predictable life. She's in my world now. Completely.
And I'll protect her from everyone—including the consequences of my own obsession.
17
MARA
The car ride is silent except for the sound of Manhattan traffic filtering through the windows.
I stare at my hands in my lap. They’re covered in blood; sticky and cold and wrong. I keep turning my hands over, looking at my palms, thinking over and over again that these hands killed someone.
I killed a man. I’ve used my hands to read and paint and examine art, to create and appraise beauty, to do paperwork and brush my teeth and make myself food and touch others with love and desire and…
And I killed someone with them.
I'm still shaking. I can't stop shaking.
Ilya hasn't said anything since we got in the car. He's driving with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the center console close to me but not touching. Like he wants to reach for me but is stopping himself for some reason.
He’s taking me somewhere. Back to his home? I should be screaming, fighting, trying to escape. But I'm too numb. Too much in shock. My brain can't process anything beyond the immediate: the leather seat beneath me, the city lights slidingpast the windows, the blood under my fingernails that has dried to a crust. I killed someone. It repeats over and over in my head, the fact that he would have killed me—or at the very least taken me to someone who would have used me or hurt me or done horrible things—doing nothing to assuage my guilt.
I blink as Ilya slows and pulls into a parking garage beneath a building in Tribeca. It’s a luxury high-rise, the kind with a doorman and private elevators and a penthouse. I recognize it immediately.
My stomach drops, a sick feeling of realization washing over me. I know this building.
It's directly across from mine.
I look up at it as Ilya turns into the garage, and I can see it clearly even in the dark. The building I've looked at time after time from my own apartment. It was just a part of my view until now, just another building in a sea of them. Now it’s something else.
He's been watching me from here.
The thought comes slowly, like my brain is mired in fog. He's been in this building, looking across at my apartment. He's had a perfect view of my windows, my life, everything I do when I think I'm alone.
That's how he always knew. When I was home, when I was sleeping, what I was doing. He didn't need to break in every time. He could just watch.
It’s how he knows my routine. When I run. The coffee shop I go to. How I look when I…
I know the look on your face when you come.
The violation of it should make me sick. But I'm too empty, too hollowed out by shock to feel anything except a distant sense of inevitability.
Ilya's hand is on my elbow, guiding me out of the car, and I realize we’re in the garage and he’s opened my door. I let him.I don't have the energy to resist, and where would I go anyway? Back to my apartment that he can see from his windows? Back to my life that's been contaminated by violence and death? Back to a place where one of his enemies can come for me to use me against him, and not even the police can help me?
He takes me through a back exit to a private elevator, and I watch him slide the key in with that same sense of hollow inevitability. Of course he has this kind of money. I have no doubt we’re going to the penthouse. That I’m about to be swept into a world of such utter luxury that anyone with half a brain would wonder why I would possibly want to flee from it.
The doors to the elevator open and we step inside. It's just the two of us in the small space, and I can feel him looking at me, but I can't look back. I stare at the floor, at my shoes that have blood on them, reflecting back the reality of what my life has become.
The elevator rises smoothly and silently, pleasant piano music filling the space. I count the floors in my head, a distraction from thinking about anything else. We're going high. Very high.
When the doors open, they open directly in front of the penthouse. Ilya unlocks the door and guides me inside with his hand on the small of my back.
I step inside and the space unfolds before me. I can’t begin to guess at the square footage. The interior is warm woods and soft textiles, rich earth tones and creams that I would bet money Ilya had no hand in choosing. The entire lower floor is open-plan and pristine, as if no one lives here at all, as clean as a hotel. The art on the walls is museum-quality—I recognize a Monet, a Basquiat, pieces that would cost millions.
Everything is perfect, and curated to project wealth and power and taste. Just not Ilya’s.
And there, through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the east side, I can see my building.
