She says nothing and I don’t move. We’re still so close, the air between us charged with everything we’re not saying and everything we almost just did.
“Dimitri?” Her voice is small and uncertain.
“Yeah?”
“Will you—” She stops and licks her lips and I track every movement of her tongue. “Will you stay?”
There’s a pause as she waits for my response. The correct answer is to tell her no, that I need to leave. That I can’t be this close to her and maintain these much needed walls.
But she looks so vulnerable and I want so badly to comfort her.
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “I’ll stay.”
Relief floods her features, and she shifts over, making room for me in the bed. I lie down beside her, and immediately she moves closer. Her head finds that space against my shoulder like it was made to fit there and she presses her body against mine.
My arm comes around her automatically, pulling her against my chest. She makes a small sound of contentment, her hand splaying over my heart, and I know she can feel how fast it’s beating.
“Thank you,” she murmurs against my shirt. “For yesterday. For swerving when you did.”
My arm tightens around her, my other hand finding her hair, fingers threading through the silky strands. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I can feel her looking up at me in the dark. “You can’t control everything.”
“Watch me.” My fingers move through her hair in slow, soothing strokes. "I can and I will.”
She snorts something intelligible but she settles against me, her breathing gradually evening out. But I can feel the tension still in her body, the way she’s holding herself slightly rigid like she’s afraid to fully relax.
“Sleep,” I murmur against her hair. “I’ve got you.”
That seems to be what she needs to hear, because she melts into me then, all that tension draining away. Her hand fists in my shirt, holding on, and I can feel the moment her breathing deepens into something closer to sleep.
And I lie there in the darkness, with Vera in my arms, my fingers tangled in her hair, breathing in the scent of vanilla and flowers and I realize something.
We almost kissed.
Another few seconds, another inch closer, and I would have crossed that line. I would have kissed her, tasted her, shown her with my mouth what I can’t seem to say with words.
And she would have let me. I saw it in her eyes, felt it in the way she leaned in, in the way her hand tightened in my hair like she was pulling me closer.
The truth is written in the way I’m holding her now, how my fingers won’t stop moving through her hair. In the way my heart is still racing beneath her palm and how being close to her feels like both salvation and damnation.
I’m drowning in this. In her. And I don’t know how to stop.
I don’t know if I even want to.
So I just hold her, memorizing the weight of her against me, the sound of her breathing, the way she fits perfectly in my arms.
And I lie awake long after she’s fallen asleep, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing.
15
VERA
Something is wrong.
That’s the first thought I have when I wake up the next morning. The house is quiet.Tooquiet. The usual sounds of staff moving through the hallways, of Mrs. Kozlov barking orders in Russian, of footsteps and voices and life—all of it is gone.
Because Dimitri sent them away.
