“Enough that I never tried again.” The elevator arrives. But she doesn’t step through the door. She looks up at me, the look on her face hardened. “I learned my place.”
The implications of her words wreak havoc inside me. Fuck logic and rationale—I want to walk right back out into the night. I want to find Cillian Driscoll. I want to make him relive every fear, every wound, every tear he’s caused. And then I want to fucking end him.
“He will never touch you again,” I bite out, and it comes out as a promise.
I don’t take it back.
“—I know.”
Janella steps into the elevator, and something in her eyes pulls me in after her. I pull the fob out of my jacket pocket and press the button to the penthouse floor.
“Do you?” I ask her. “Or are you still humoring me?”
There’s that grim, sad smile on her lips again. “Does it matter, Iosif?”
“Yes,” I hiss, staring at her.
Her passivity is intolerable to me, for more reasons than I can count.
She turns away from me and totters ahead as fast as her heels will allow. My stride keeps up fine. I’m not letting her get away so easily.
I seize her and whip her around by her arm. Déjà-vu washes over me.
It doesn’t feel real that we played this game in this same hallway only hours ago. A lifetime has passed since.
“Stop running away from me every time I see the real you.”
Janella looks up at me, and her eyes are darker than I’ve ever seen them.
“Stop catching me.”
I smile down at her, cocking a brow. “Someone has to, doll.”
It comes out sounding like a line. Most times in my life, it would’ve been one. With Janella, I mean it. And I fucking like it, the way that someone is me. I don’t have to think about it to know this.
I think of the men in my family—the way Trifon stares at Yulia like she’s the answer to a question he never thought to ask. How Val’s entire body orients to wherever Gela is in a room, like a compass finding north. Only weeks ago, I’d been sure they were idiots entrenched in the honeymoon phase. Our world is one full of knives; what use is there of reeling someone soft into it?
Now, look at me. Look at me, looking at her, looking back at me.
Look at us standing in the same hallway where I crowded her against the wall. Where I told her I could make her beg.
“Iosif,” she whispers to me now.
It sounds like a question.
I’ve never felt guilty for any pleasure I partake in, much to many’s distaste. I am no stranger to desire. It floods me now.
I don’t know who moves first. Maybe it’s fucking gravity.Who fucking cares?I drop the forgotten, mostly full cup of ice cream. My hands are in her hair. Her hands bundle fistfuls of my shirt.
Her breath is sweet.
My head lowers to hers.
“I can’t—” she gasps and stumbles backward.
We’re too close to her door.
She slams it shut before I can move an inch.
