He stares down at the street, hands in his pockets. “You’re not wrong to be afraid of me.”
The honesty in that sentence chills me.
“I could have killed you the night you hid behind that dumpster,” he adds. “I didn’t.”
I grip my pen tighter. “Why?”
He glances back over his shoulder. “You already know why. You’re observant enough to figure it out.”
I hate that he is right. I hate that the answer terrifies me more than the question.
The reason he did not kill me is the same reason he is sitting here now, drinking my coffee and studying my reactions.
I interest him.
I pull him.
That, more than the Sharov name, more than any cartel or alley or gunshot, might be the most dangerous part of all.
***
Curiosity creeps in before I can stop it.
Fear should be enough to drown everything else out, but it doesn’t. My brain does what it always does: it starts to observe. To catalog. To make sense of the thing that scares me.
When Simon’s men rotate shifts outside my door, they always glance inside once. Just once. Their eyes flick to him immediately after. They don’t linger on me. They don’t ask questions. They don’t take up space they haven’t been given. Every decision waits on him, even if it’s unspoken.
He doesn’t bark orders. He doesn’t need to. A look, a nod, the slightest shift of his hand, and they adjust, move, disappear. It’s a hierarchy built on unquestioned authority, and he sits at the center of it like gravity.
The more I notice, the clearer it gets: they don’t just work for him. They orbit him.
Somehow, right now, so do I.
Whenever there’s a sound from the hallway or the street below—a shout, a car horn, footsteps too close to the door—he positions himself between me and the noise. Not obviously, nottheatrically. He just happens to be closer. He just happens to shift his stance. He just happens to angle his body so I’m behind him.
If someone bursts through the door, they’d see him first. They’d hit him first.
It doesn’t erase what he’s done. It doesn’t make the blood in that alley vanish. But it forces me to see layers I never expected to find in a man like him.
Violent. Dangerous. Ruthless. Protective.
The contradictions do weird things to my heartbeat.
I catch myself staring more than once. When he’s near the window, framed in dull afternoon light. When he leans over the table to reach his coffee. When he shrugs out of his jacket and the fabric pulls tight across his shoulders. I catalog his physicality the way I would any subject—broad, solid, controlled—but it’s not purely clinical.
Attraction hits me in small, unfair bursts.
The first time is when he steps close to take a call, his voice dropping low and rough. He’s speaking Russian—sharp consonants, clipped phrases—but the sound of it slides over my skin and settles somewhere low in my stomach. I hate that. I hate that my body reacts to the tone of a man who pulled me off a sidewalk and into a van.
The second time is when he stands behind my chair, close enough that I feel warmth radiate off him. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t even lean down. He just stands there, watching whatever’s on my laptop screen, and every nerve in my back lights up like I’m plugged into something.
The third time is when he looks at me like I’m the only thing in the room.
Just me. The intensity of it pins me in place. It strips the air from my lungs. It terrifies me in a way bullets never have.
I hate myself for feeling any of it.
Every time it happens, I mentally slap myself back into line. This man orchestrates death. He commands fear. People disappear in the shadow of his family name. Clara vanished after she messed with his cousin. I saw him stand over a body in an alley like it was a minor inconvenience.
